The Mars Room
Genre: Drama
Director: Desiree Akhavan
Writer: Rosie JoLove & Rachel Hallett Hardcastle
Based on the novel by Rachel Kushner
Cast: Olivia Cooke, Scoot McNairy, Sterling K. Brown, Dane DeHaan, Adria Arjona, Brian Michael Smith, Isabela Merced, Brianna Hildebrand, Zazie Beetz, Pom Klementieff, Laverne Cox, O-T Fagbenle
Plot: Romy Leslie Hall (Olivia Cooke) is one of 60 prisoners transported in the dead of night from the county jail to Stanville Prison. On the way, Romy notices some of the younger prisoners, including a girl who looked about eight months pregnant. When a prisoner rudely barks at the pregnant girl to shut up, Conan (Brian Michael Smith), a butch, transgender man, comes to the girl’s defense. Romy has “learned already not to cry” in the county jail for two and a half years.
On the bus, Romy sat next to Laura Lipp (Brianna Hildebrand), a talkative inmate who, we learn, was convicted of killing her own child. As Lipp rambled and shared details of her biography, Romy reflected on her own recent past and her San Francisco upbringing. She thought about her young son, Jackson, who lived with Romy’s mother since her arrest. Romy recalled a painful experience working as an escort. As a result, she decided to stick to her work “as a lap dancer” at the Mars Room, a seedy club on Market Street in San Francisco. While many of her co-workers cultivated regular customers for financial security, Romy preferred anonymity, even though she ended up regularly anyway. A man named Kurt Kennedy (Dane DeHaan), whom she called “Creep Kennedy.” was the impetus for leaving San Francisco for Los Angeles.
She generally reflected back on San Francisco, considering the city “cursed” and a “sad suckville of a place.” She reminisced on her drug-fueled youth there. She remembered the first time she tried heroin and a time she was lured to the hotel room of a strange man at the age of 11 for sex after he promised her money for a taxi. She recalled that even after she left San Francisco, “the curse of the city followed” her.
As the bus passed the town of Castaic, Romy recalled her time there with Jimmy Darling (O-T Fagbenle), a film professor she had a relationship with before her arrest. Jimmy thought Romy was smart and once asked her why she didn’t go to college. Romy remembers how she spent years working at the Mars Room, getting high, and reading library books. Despite her interest in literature, she still felt an absolute nihilism due to her upbringing, an inability to “join the straight world, get a regular job or believe in the future”...
Romy recalled her childhood infatuation with a girl named Eva, a neighborhood tough. Romy met her after Eva won a fight with Tyra, one of Romy’s childhood friends. Romy recalled her and Eva’s drug-fueled encounters with strange characters in their neighborhood. She wondered what happened to Eva and the people they knew in that distant time and place.
The scene details how Gordon Hauser (Scoot McNairy), an English instructor, came to hold a teaching position at Stanville. Once optimistic about the power of books and literature to impact individual lives, Hauser was also frustrated with his career. After he dropped out of a Ph.D. program at U.C. Berkeley, Hauser went to work teaching English at Northern California Women’s Facility near Berkeley. Even though he was obsessed with Dostoevsky’s writing, Hauser had planned to write his thesis on Thoreau before failing his oral exams and dropping out of graduate school. At NCWF, Hauser became infatuated with an inmate, who reports him to prison authorities.
Still, on the bus to Stanville, Romy recalls the trial’s details that led to her imprisonment. She remembered how her mother was present in the courtroom. She also remembered witnessing another trial before hers began. The defendant, Johnson, was charged with a home invasion, and Romy realized, had been administered an involuntary dose of Thorazine to sedate him in transit before his trial began. The drug led him to be nearly incoherent on the witness stand. Romy also recalled how she had refused to plead guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence, perhaps foolishly. Before her trial began, Romy’s confident that her crime’s perceived severity would be mitigated by Kennedy’s thorough obsession with Romy and his history of harassing her. Instead, we learn that Kennedy was both a veteran of the Vietnam War and disabled, having suffered a work-related injury. Romy blamed her incompetent public defender for failing to enter Kennedy’s illegal and unsavory behavior into evidence. The scene ends with a jury finding Romy guilty. She was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, plus six years for child endangerment because her son was present during the killing.
Romy and her fellow inmates arrived at Stanville. They were stripped, invasively searched, and forced to shower and don prison garb. As the guards read a series of rules to the new inmates, the pregnant teen from the bus ride started going into labor. Romy, Conan, and a prisoner named Fernandez rushed to help her violate the guards’ orders. They were quarantined in small individual cells as punishment. We later learn that the teenager named Button Sanchez (Isabela Merced) had the baby without medical assistance in the prison’s receiving area.
After relocating from Northern California to Stanville, Gordon Hauser found a one-room cabin to rent in the mountains above Stanville, in the western Sierra foothills. Hauser’s friend from his graduate program, Alex, as a joke, gave Hauser a copy of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto before he leaves Berkeley. Kaczynski, a storied domestic terrorist, known as the Unabomber, had briefly taught mathematics at U.C. Berkeley and famously lived in wooded isolation following his time there. In the week between moving into his cabin and start work at Stanville, Hauser read the manifesto at night.
Romy was held in Administrative Segregation, apart from the rest of the prison population, with Sammy Fernandez (Adria Arjona), after trying to assist Sanchez. The two enjoyed “pruno,” wine fermented with crude materials from the prison commissary, courtesy of Betty LaFrance (Pom Klementieff), a death-row inmate.
Betty recalled how she ended up on death row after killing her former husband and paid Doc (Sterling K. Brown), a corrupt cop with whom she had a relationship, to help clean up the crime. Betty tells them about Angel Marie Janicki, a Stanville inmate who nearly escaped the prison, using wire cutters to get through the fence in a blind spot between guard towers. Janicki’s near-success led to an electric fence being added around the chain-link fence.
While still in Ad. Seg., Romy started taking GED test-prep courses with Gordon Hauser. When Hauser realized that Romy was brighter than most of his other students and had a genuine passion for literature, he offered to buy her books. Fernandez told Romy that Hauser looked like “a serious VIC” short for “victim:” a prison outsider from whom inmates can extract favor and privileges. The scene ends when one of the guards tells Romy that her mother had died in a car crash; fearing for Jackson, her son, she lost control of herself and was pinned down by the guards.
Doc, the corrupt police officer Betty LaFrance named as her co-conspirator in murdering her husband. Doc, alone in a cell he usually shares, attempted to masturbate while simultaneously recalling certain instances of his illegal transgressions while serving as a detective in the L.A.P.D. He referred to such activity as “capering,” even though the reader learns, this behavior included murder, theft, and drug abuse. Doc’s isolated in a block in New Folsom prison, which, Doc explained, was a special unit designed for particular prisoners who are targets of abuse in general prison populations. Doc kept his cell extremely clean. He recalled trying to hit Betty LaFrance, who got him busted and sent to Folsom and their early infatuation. He had received a crude death threat in the mail, which Doc suspected was somehow sent to him by Betty.
Doc also remembered being abused by his foster father, Vic. Doc recalled physical beatings and sexual violations and remembered that part of his decision to become a cop was to wield power over men like Vic. He also remembered how Vic was maniacally clean and tidy. One of the people Doc remembered killing with impunity as an L.A. police detective was a man he had apprehended shortly after he raped his own son.
Sammy Fernandez, who shared a cell with Romy before Romy was told of her mother’s death, narrates in the first person. Alone in the Ad. Seg. Cell, Fernandez still communicated with Betty LaFrance through the air vent. One day, Betty told Fernandez that she put a hit out on Doc and planned to kill him. Betty also asked Fernandez if she knew that the U.S. was at war in Iraq. It is 2003, the early days of the U.S. invasion.
Fernandez recalled her time working as a prostitute at the Snooty Fox, a motel in L.A., where, according to Betty, Doc frequented his days as a corrupt detective. Fernandez remembered meeting Rodney, a crack dealer with who she started a relationship. She remembered she was with Rodney on a drug delivery that became a sting operation when she was arrested. But, she knew she would be picked up for something eventually; she talked about how she knew even when she was free that she’d eventually end up in prison.
The scene resumes with Romy, who was unable to stop crying in the prison’s suicide watch. She reported not being suicidal, even though she was despondent, less about her mother’s death than the uncertainty it meant for her son Jackson. She remembered Jackson’s details, haircut, the way he felt to touch, and, alone in suicide watch, she missed him unbearably. Romy’s “counselor,” the prison official responsible for her mental health, named Jones, checked in on her but refused to tell her anything and chides her about the choices she made insult fully.
Three months after being told her mother died, Romy returned to the general prison population. She shared a cell with Conan, Laura Lipp, Button Sanchez, and a woman named Teardrop (Zazie Beetz), the cell’s resident rule-maker. Teardrop initially tried to reject Romy from the room, but Conan intervened on her behalf, which allowed her to stay. In the place were three other women, who go unnamed but Romy calls “nondescript,” women with short sentences just trying to serve time and stay out of trouble. Button Sanchez also kept a pet rabbit in their cell.
Romy contacted her lawyer, who told her he would try to look into Jackson’s whereabouts but offered no promises. Romy decided to get a prison job and got assigned to the woodshop and Conan and Fernandez. Romy shared a workbench with a physically imposing white supremacist in the woodshop, who she called “The Norse.” The woodshop manufactured courtroom furnishings and accouterments. From Sammy, Romy learns that Janicki procured her wire cutters from a prison staff member infatuated with her. A short time later, Romy ran into Hauser and belatedly accepted his earlier offer to get her books to read, including Jesus’s Son by Dennis Johnson and Factotum by Charles Bukowski discussed. The scene ends as Romy reflected on the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, where she met Jimmy Darling, her one-time boyfriend, before prison. She also remembered another Jimmy, Jimmy the Beard, who used to be the doorman at the Mars Room. Romy recalled and gave her address in L.A. to Kurt Kennedy.
The next scene opens with Gordon, in his second year at Stanville, who detailed his commute as he descended from the foothills around the prison to his teaching duties at the prison. He recalled meeting Romy for the first time in his GED class and being attracted to her. One evening after class, Romy lingered as the other prisoners left and asked him to inquire about Jackson on her behalf. This request brought to mind other small favors he had done for other incarcerated women. Still, he was wary of being too deeply involved with Romy’s personal life. He took the paper she offered with Jackson’s information but offered no promises.
Doc remembers responding to a break-in at a pawn shop in L.A. and finding the suspect in his car still at the scene. After a brief conversation, Doc shot him in the face and hid the pillowcase full of jewelry and weapons lifted from the pawnshop before his backup arrived. Still trying to masturbate, he remembered his vacation cabin in Three Rivers, where he used to take women for weekends of drugs and sex. He was surprised by the return of his cellmate, who whacked him on the head and tried to strangle him with a thin wire.
Romy recalled her brief period of freedom from Kurt Kennedy when she fled San Francisco for L.A. She remembered pleasant days with Jimmy Darling, who had also relocated south for a Valencia teaching job. Jimmy lived in an old airstream trailer on a dilapidated ranch that belonged to a painter. Romy sublet a room near Echo Park Lake from a friend who worked as a stripper for a gentleman’s club in Alaska. She lived next to a large Mexican family who informally adopted Jackson when Romy wasn’t around. She recalled a string of harmful incidents that she witnessed in L.A.: how a plumber named Victor became infatuated with her and died in a car crash. She remembered how a neighbor of hers, named Conrad, overdosed and died and how a different, nameless neighbor demanded a ride from Romy to the hospital after an accident with a power saw. She also recalled meeting a scary-looking veteran, dressed in black, who menaces her at a bus stop when her car was repaired. Romy remembers the day she spent with Jackson and Jimmy Darling. she returned to her apartment to find Kurt Kennedy on her porch waiting for her.
Gordon spent a week of vacation time back in Berkeley with Alex, where the two talked about the Iraq war. He went to a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco that Romy had told him about. When he got back to Stanville, his class was canceled due to thick fog. He decided to make the inquiries Romy requested about Jackson; the scene ends before he reported his findings.
Doc woke up, handcuffed to a hospital bed. He was told that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and had been in a medically induced coma for eight weeks. As he answered the doctor’s perfunctory questions, he revealed that his real name is Richard L. Richards. Laying in bed, he thought mostly about old country music stars and remembered how his foster dad had been a devotee of the Grand Ole Opry TV show. After he was transferred from the nursing unit to New Folsom, he ended up in an isolated cell next to a transgender inmate named Serenity (Laverne Cox), a biological man who identified as a female. She told Doc about her self-performed “prison cell surgery,” that removed her male genitalia, from which she nearly died. And she told Doc about her legal petition to get reclassified as female so she could be transferred to a women’s prison. The scene ended when Serenity achieved her reclassification and said goodbye to Doc.
After three and a half years, Romy gets an unexpected visit from her public defender, referred to as “Johnson’s lawyer.” She tells the lawyer that she had to get out of prison and grown increasingly despondent. After the lawyer left, Romy admitted that she had started to live for Hauser’s GED classes. Sammy Fernandez suggested that Romy ask him to adopt Jackson, an idea Romy initially found absurd.
Serenity’s housed in isolated protective custody for her own safety. One day in Romy’s cell, Laura Lipp informs that Serenity Smith is incarcerated in Stanville prison. This news is divisive among the inmates: most are against Serenity’s presence in prison; Conan’s small faction comes to her support. Things also grew divisive in Romy’s cell when Teardrop boiled and ate Button Sanchez’s pet rabbit. Sanchez grows despondent when Romy tries to cheer her up.
Sanchez tells her the story of how she was forced to give up her baby for adoption since she didn’t know anyone who had a working car that could get to Stanville. She remembered how a man who gave her medical care after giving birth had a bandana with American flags covering his head.
Later in the scene, Romy and her cellmates threw a party in their cell, having made punch by saving their prescription meds (they pretended to swallow the pills but managed to hide them in the roof of their mouths with a dollop of peanut butter) and mixing them together in iced tea from the prison commissary. Laura Lipp, drunk on the punch, went on a rant about God and His absence from the prison. After the party, slightly intoxicated, Romy climbed into bed with Conan, intimate together before being interrupted by a guard.
The next day, Romy runs into Hauser, who told her that he had found out that Romy’s parental rights had been terminated. Aghast, Romy took comfort in Conan, who told her a story about when he and his brother were lost, and strangers took them in.
Doc remembered when Richard Nixon had appeared on the Grand Ole Opry show in 1974, shortly after he resigned the presidency in disgrace. Doc recalled how Nixon extolled country music as uniquely American and played the piano for famous country stars of the day.
Hauser confessed to a new addiction he had developed: using the Internet to search for the names and histories of the women he taught at Stanville. He learned Button Sanchez had killed a foreign college student with a baseball bat with two male peers in a robbery gone awry. He realized that this was done because “the student was not a person to them.” He thought about the stark difference between how affluent young people and impoverished young people socialize in modern America. Later, Romy told him that she was getting into making jewelry and asked him to smuggle her a pair of wire cutters, which he eventually did. Around this time, he decided to quit Stanville and go back to school to get a Master’s degree in social work. The scene ends with his cabin packed.
Another excerpt from the Kaczynski diary, which detailed his attempt to graduate from destroying property to killing a person, reported placing wires on the highway near his cabin to decapitate motorcyclists.
Four years have elapsed since Romy arrived in Stanville, and Sammy Fernandez was paroled. Serenity Smith was still in protective custody, and the debate about her presence in Stanville still raged. Romy had resolved to influence Hauser to adopt Jackson and fantasized about marrying Hauser to facilitate this goal. She tried to give Hauser a Jackson photo, which Hauser refused, telling Romy he couldn’t be involved in her personal life. Before she left, she mentioned to Romy how two male inmates at Susanville prison once got past an electric fence by wedging it with a broom handle. Romy felt she’d hit a dead end. One day in the yard, she dug a hole near one of the guard towers on the border of the prison yard, where she hid the wire cutters Gordon had smuggled her, along with a dowel she had made in the woodshop.
Later, Serenity Smith finally got “mainlined” to the general prison population. When she went out in the yard one day, a riot started; the Norse, Laura Lipp, and others attacked her. No one went prone when the alarms began; the prison was in chaos. Romy sensed an opportunity, dug out her wire cutters and dowel, and succeeded in making it through both layers of the fence with no one noticing. She ran.
Hauser remembers the story of an escaped convict named Bo Crawford, who had made news years ago, the small Bay Area town where Hauser had grown up. Crawford eluded capture for ten days and became something of a local hero. However, a woman in nearby Crockett, CA, eventually spotted him and called the authorities, ending his bid for freedom.
In a perspective shift, we follow Kurt Kennedy, the man Romy killed. Kennedy awoke on a flight from Mexico with a bad hangover. He had been on vacation, back to San Francisco, where he worked as a process server. He argued with a flight attendant who had taken away his cocktail. At the same time, he slept (he had already drunk two bottles of wine before falling asleep, and the attendant could tell he was drunk). For the remainder of the flight, Kennedy read a book called Chickenhawk about the Vietnam War and daydreamed about Vanessa. The latter worked as a stripper at the Mars Room. It later becomes clear that Vanessa was Romy’s stage name when she worked as a stripper.
The next day Kennedy went to the Mars Room, expecting the woman he called Vanessa to be working. She wasn’t there; a manager told Kennedy that she’d quit. Kennedy recalled Vanessa first and felt a real connection between them that she wasn’t just using him for money. He started going to the Mars Room regularly. On worker’s compensation, he was bored after a motorcycle accident trying to serve a legal document to address San Francisco’s projects. Kennedy thought neighborhood kids were at fault. They had deliberately poured motor oil on the street, which caused his motorcycle to skid. He was told his knee might not fully recover and that he would always require at least one cane to walk.
Romy escaped from Stanville, ran through nearby orchards. She used the mountains around the prison to navigate and headed eastward. She realized that she was bleeding, that there was a long gash in her thigh, presumably from the barbed wire fence she had cut through. She waited in a partially hidden irrigation ditch until nightfall. She walked all night through orchards, keeping off the roads.
The following day, she started passing rural houses. One had a clothesline, from which she procured pants and a shirt and was able to ditch her prison clothes. Next, she found a park in a small town and slept there until dusk. Finally, she found a gas station, where she approached a solitary man with a pickup truck and asked for a ride to the top of the nearby mountain. The man agreed and, once settled into the car, suggested he might be interested in sex. When he stopped the car and got out to relieve himself, Romy slid into the driver’s seat and took off, leaving him behind.
We recount how Kennedy started to follow Vanessa after she finished her shifts at the Mars Room. He claimed it was, initially, out of concern for her safety. But it developed into a full-blown obsession: he went through her trash and called her endlessly on days she didn’t report to the Mars Room.
After he got back from Mexico, Kennedy went to her apartment. He didn’t have any luck tracking her down until one day, Jimmy the Beard, the doorman at the Mars Room, gave Kennedy Romy’s address in Los Angeles as a joke. Kennedy rode his motorcycle there in a single trip; he stopped only for gas.
Kennedy fell asleep. He arrived and sat on the porch of the address he’d been given. When he awoke, Romy was there with her child and told him to leave. He tried to grab his cane, and as he reached for it, Romy grabbed something heavy, a tire iron. She hit him with it repeatedly as Kennedy implored her to stop.
Romy got to the top of the mountain in the stolen truck. She worried cops would have blocked the road behind her, so she left the car and continued moving on foot. She found a huge, hollow tree, where she realized she wasn’t feeling well; she thought she might have a fever or infection. A short time later, at dusk, lights crisscrossed the forest: the police had found her. She ran “toward them, toward the light.” Romy thought of Jackson, of how she couldn’t have saved him from this, relieved that he was safe from these police officers, wherever he was.
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