Bruce Wagner: Searching for the Sacred in Hollywood

Although he was born in Wisconsin in 1954, Bruce Wagner grew up in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, the context he would later replicate in his books and screenplays. After dropping out of school, he became a limousine driver, like Robert Pattinson's character in Maps to the Stars (2014), which he wrote for David Cronenberg 's film. And he began to write. By the mid-1980s, his services were in high demand in Hollywood, and under the wing of director and producer Wes Craven, he was responsible for part of the Nightmare on Elm Street saga and other productions that he doesn't like to review. For Wagner, who believes that in his stories of violent and perverse characters, the sacred is often lost sight of, the language of cinema diminishes the power of prose. He has written fifteen novels, of which The Marvelous Universe is the first to arrive in Argentine bookstores.

– The Marvelous Universe is your first novel published in the Southern Cone. What does it mean that this is the introductory novel to your work for readers in this region?

I have a tremendous affection for that part of the world: its literature and its people. I had a long relationship with Carlos Castaneda, which further instilled those passions. Furthermore, with 15 novels written, The Marvelous Universe is the only one that contains elements of magical realism, although all of my work is a variant of magical realism, as it explores the illusions implicit in being human and walking the earth for the brief time we do. The book was canceled due to its “problematic content,” so the Spanish version will give readers a chance to see the novel in the context of censorship culture: a movement that emerged to suppress art, language, and writers.

–You're considered "the Hollywood writer of your generation." Does your work form a coherent corpus, or do you see it as something divergent?

–I believe my work aspires to the transcendent. That aspect of my work—the sacred—is sometimes overlooked due to the morbidity and crudeness of narratives. It's much easier to get entangled in the sordid or almost pornographic aspects of the world than in the sacred. Many have read Dante's Inferno, but no one bothers to read Paradise.

–In addition to writing novels, you've written film and TV scripts. What came first?

–I always considered myself a prose writer, even from the age of 11 or 12. David Cronenberg told me I was far more influenced by books than by film. I started writing screenplays by chance and to make money. I was a “Hollywood employee” for years and eventually began exploring prose writing as an antidote to the poison that was killing me. Influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories about an alcoholic, failed screenwriter— The Pat Hobby Stories —I wrote Force Majeure , a collection of four stories that eventually became my first novel. Collaboration with others is the nature of writing for film. Fiction is the antithesis of that, and because of the very specific use of language, which is my greatest passion, I naturally gravitated toward that, rather than the amorphous and mostly irrelevant use of language in the film medium.

–Where do you get the information and observations to create your characters, who have a great deal of realism despite the strange and grotesque plots?

–I have a good ear for everyday language and a good eye for the small, identifiable words and mundane details that precede operatic tragedy.

–In Marvelous Universe, there's a connection between fame and transformation. Why do they appear together?

Fame is one of the ultimate illusions. It's a mythical distortion of the primal need to be seen, heard, and acknowledged. The idea of transformation, in its purity, is the antithesis of that: one seeks to transcend the shackles of the body, the everyday world, and, arguably, the prison of ego and identity. Defined in this way, the idea of transformation and learning are sacred. It's a way to reconcile ourselves with our mortality, when society often presents it as anathema, ugly, and disturbing. It's a way to reconcile ourselves with death itself. But human beings are perverse and constantly seek ways to defy or escape death.

–In The Marvelous Universe , illness is a form of transcendence, and at the same time, it has a certain power of sexual attraction. What place do you think illness occupies in the world today? Why does it play an important role in your stories?

–I dedicate myself to illuminating our greatest fears, because those fears are culturally inherited. It's always the Day of the Dead, just as it's always the Day of the Living. I don't see the difference. Illness is a portal that allows us to access different and essential ways of seeing. Illness, in that sense, is like dreaming while we sleep. It's like art. It's like sex. Illness permeates, instructs, informs. And it often kills. Illness, like art and sex, reminds us of our small place in the cosmos.

–Trixanna's character is the victim of an X-Men-derived hallucination. Here, President Milei is often portrayed as Wolverine. How do you think the insertion of modern fantasy stories into the current collective consciousness is affecting this?

–Trixanna suffers from schizophrenia, something society seems to have embraced openly. There's something clinically known as "ChatGPT psychosis," which affects those who become too familiar with AI. Intimacy with AI is on an exponentially upward arc; at the end of the rainbow, there will be something that's neither good nor bad, but it won't resemble a pot of gold. AI is becoming part of the collective unconscious. Blockbuster movies that reflect the myth are a secondary theme, a distraction, a reflection, but without significance.

–Endgame reflects the current climate of cancel culture. Why did you think it was important to explore the topic through fiction? What did you observe during these years of self-induced purges in Hollywood?

–These purges continue. Again: it's an aspect of humanity that caught my attention. That Marvelous Universe was canceled by “sensitive readers” wasn't even ironic. I wanted to write something about what I call Cancellation Pavilion; something that reflected the complexities involved. Cancel culture was a wonderful synthesis of an ancient historical tendency toward the perversion of those who guard the gates of art, and even more so: those who use the word fascism with indifference and seek its elimination (something impossible because it has the same gravity in human DNA as the sacred) become passionate defenders of tyranny and massacre, both metaphorical and literal.

–What effect did that experience have on you, and on the writing of the last book ( Endgame )?

–The book was finished and published online for free, and its cancellation didn't involve any writing or rewriting. Ironically, it's the only novel of mine that will never go out of print. In fact, there are already many editions, and I don't receive any money for its publication, by my own choice.

–The novel combines a somewhat nihilistic outlook with a search for transcendence. That leads me to ask about your beliefs. Do you believe there's a possible order in the world, or do you practice active pessimism?

–I don't consider myself a cynic at all. I also seek transcendence. I don't have beliefs, because the perversion of being human is to build a cage with those beliefs and invite others into it, or to believe that one is outside it, looking in. My reflections on this are explored in The Met Gala and in Tales of Saints and Seekers: Two Novellas .

The Marvelous Universe . Origin Stories, Bruce Wagner. Walden Publishing, 504 pages.