Film exchange row was on Fourteenth Street in New York City, and with the reels under my arm, that’s where I headed. First I called on Empire Film Exchange. . . . The exchange was owned by Adam Kessel and Charles Bauman. There was the usual counter where the operators from the nickelodeons brought back the reels of the program they had shown to exchange for other reels to make up their next program. Empire had a small office for the bosses and a still smaller screening room where they looked at pictures they might buy. –From One Reel a Week, University of California Press, 1967.

Here is one of those nine photographs, and its possible, secret story.

She exists, now, in sepia. She is taking notes in the offices of the Empire Film Company in New York in a photograph from 1910, her hair done up in the style of the day in the years before the “war to end all wars” which, beginning just four years after this photograph, will claim over 15 million lives. His suit is too big. The sole of one of his shoes is exposed beneath the chair. He looks weary.

They are in the offices of Empire Film at a moment in time when there is not yet any such thing as a motion picture industry, but rather a diverse assortment of scrappy film productions companies—some very short lived—including The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (which D. W. Griffith joined in 1908), Majestic Films, The Edison Manufacturing Company, The Duquesne Amusement Supply Company, The Selig Polyscope Company, The American Vitograph Company, and others.

There are so many details in the picture, but which ones are important? Neither of them are looking directly at each other. He might be dictating; she might be taking notes. Or perhaps she is simply recording information, tallies of how many reel rentals there were this week, etc. Or there is nothing written at all on her pad of paper; she is posing, acting for the camera, just like the actresses in the films of the offices of the Empire Film Company. There is the carved face on the wall above her head. There is his seat cushion. There is the overexposed window behind him, which is open. There are many objects on the desk whose meaning can only be guessed at. It’s not fair that we don’t know.

Their story could take the guise of any of the film genres that guided thought in the 1910s and 20s. In the western he is the new sheriff and she his young wife, and when she sees a man’s throat slit behind a barn and the way he tries to hold his life in as it bleeds through his fingers something in her mind will become dislodged and even the act of acting happy will be impossible for her. In the train robbery version her husband will act the hero, stupidly, to the bandits (including a boy no older than ten) who are about to burst into the photograph from off-screen right and demand the cash from the day in the hidden drawer next to the man’s left knee. In the Civil War nostalgia film version she will treat the house slave with unexpected compassion, subtly reinforcing the fact that she, the mistress of the house, has the power to confer such compassion. In the domestic melodrama version she will be the mistress, seated in the very chair where he first fell in love with her, the light coming in from the window at frame left illuminating her face in such a way that makes us wonder even now, over one-hundred years later, what she is thinking about.

There are the moments after this photo was taken, moments that while lost to documented reality exist nonetheless. In these, after the photographer is satisfied and wipes the sweat from his brow, the woman will throw her hands to her mouth in laughter. Her brother (his name, let’s say, is Edward), seated opposite her, will laugh also, because this is what they have always done; this is their way. She laughs and then he laughs. Sometimes they don’t even know why. No, wait: he knows why. When she (her name is Evelyn) was a girl, she nearly died of scarlet fever, the rash slowly spreading from her neck to arms to back as if she were being consumed by her very own body. He stayed with her for those two weeks (he was ten; she was seven), sleeping on the wooden floor beside her bed, and listen to her labored breathing and the mysterious, incoherent phrases she would sometimes call out during her fevered nightmares. And sometimes, now, years later, when her face flushes in embarrassment, he calls her Scarlet, and she smiles and laughs. And then he laughs. It is these small, private exchanges that—in a way that even he himself does not fully understand—give order to his life.

But there is also a darker version of events, one in which Evelyn never wakes up from the scarlet fever, and Edward, perhaps too sensitive to the tragedies of this world, as if even the sight of broken-winged sparrow fluttering in the street gutter would tinge his day with sadness, never recovers from the loss. Oh, he appears to. And in this version of the story the woman in the photograph is not his sister at all, but rather some other person, hurried in from the outer offices of The Empire Film Company to fill the seat. And even at the moment this picture is made, Edward can feel himself being torn between two possibilities: the so-called real world and the world of magic cast by the very movies he has helped to produce.

The only book he has ever truly loved is Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which he first read several years prior to this photograph, when it was still James’s latest book. And in that novel (whose words to him are like steel cage bars that either protect him from something terrible or else trap him away from something wonderful) one phrase especially has stuck with him: the darkening shadow of a false position. That’s how he feels now, looking at this photograph: that ever since his sister’s death (for she died, not “nearly died”) he has lived more and more comfortably beneath the darkening shadow of a false position. The false position of hope.

The most horrendous—but also the truest—version of what happens in the moments after this image was taken is that there will be a knife fight between them, whoever they are, and fuck Henry James, because this will be the real thing. She will strike first, out of lustful revenge (“You promised. I was the only one!”) and he will be wounded in the arm and leap out of his chair, scattering papers. He has no knife per se, so he reaches for the silver letter opener as she takes another jab at him, puncturing his leg. He falls back against the wall. A framed picture falls. She will shake her hair loose and for a moment it’s possible that, rather than kill each other, they’ll have sex right then and there. But then he lunges at her with the letter opener and punctures the soft flesh beneath her ribs. Her white blouse is stained in crimson blood (scarlet you might say were this the different version of the story) and she lunges right back at him and gets him in the same spot, beneath his ribs, and life leaks out of both of them now. And then, unexpectedly, she jabs him again, and again, in the same spot. It’s as if she has prepared all of her life for this very moment. In desperation he lunges for her in agonized fury and bites her arm so hard he breaks a tooth.

Just over a month before this picture was taken, a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times Building, killing over 20 people, and when he hears gunshots outside the window his mind is seized with the images of the mangled dead in Los Angeles, their severed parts in the dust only to be re-animated in the second coming (“He will come again to judge the living in the dead”) and this epiphanic moment of his gives her time to finish him off, to gut him like she gutted deer so many times as a young girl with her full-bearded uncle in Oneonta, New York.

There is so much blood now on the wall and the window and the desk and the floor that she slips. Somewhere, not far away, a camera is rolling and Edwin S. Porter is directing a scene from the short film The Greater Love. The earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet, and a woman in Philadelphia is said to die from the resulting cyanogen gas. President William Howard Taft has a nightmare in which the sheets of his bed metamorphosize into sheets of black quicksand that suck him into outer space. H. G. Wells republishes his story “When the Sleeper Awakes” which contains the lines “We have our troubles . . . this is a time of unrest.” There is so much blood now, even the sepia can’t disguise the color.

But the story doesn’t have to end this way. Why should it? It could end, instead, in the very instant it began: the precise moment of the photograph. There is no before. There is no after. There is just the forever now of this frozen moment, full of possibilities, when their eyes are always-already on the verge of meeting.

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It was in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which were in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and was taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot came to suspect, was a Nazi collaborator. She was beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it didn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There was a dog with a limp, I remember, that was poisoned and that died terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach, and that’s when the pilot began to suspect that the daughter was on the Nazi side, and that she had murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.

There was a castle-like factory, I think, not far from the farm house that sheltered the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl went to have long, philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations that inevitably turned into Production Code-era love-making scenes that were interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. That’s when the flashbacks happened, for some reason, at dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this). In the first flashback, Total War switched suddenly to color, and it wasn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that showed the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces were obscured on a farm from what appeared to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams were presented in color in the film was never clear. (One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.)

Then the dream switched without warning to something very simple, so simple as to be terrifying. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman reacted to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.

After this, the film fell back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, began to suspect with more confidence that the girl was a Nazi sympathizer; he lied and told her that he was Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangered her family; the girl went out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watched her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rang out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought was that this was a trap, and that perhaps the girl had indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulled on his wool coat and dashed out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film went black. Instead of images, there was nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot called out the girl’s name breathlessly as he ran, until another shot rang out, and the moon cleared from behind the clouds. There at his feet was a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appeared to be German, although it as hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could tell wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasped his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. The pilot leaned down to listen to the man’s dying words, in the moonlight.

“She can’t . . .” said the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settled in, the screen grew brighter, in flickers, and the pilot look back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He took off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it became clear that all was lost. By the time he arrived the farm house was engulfed in flames and the pilot fell to his knees and slumped forward. Then something very strange happened: the film switched to color again, but not because it was a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remained hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerged from frame right.

It was the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you could see that her eyes were blue. She kneeled down beside the pilot and put her hand beneath his chin and gently lifted his face toward hers. By this time the color had become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish, red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly panned down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opened, palm up. In her hand she held a small, silver swastika, which gleamed in the light. It seemed to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. Then film switched again back to black and white, and the familiar Hollywood music began, signaling the end. The camera slowly panned back up to pilot’s face, which wore an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continued panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farm house.

At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farm house to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farm house, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. Afterwards, I tried to explain the film to my friends, but the more I talked about it the more confused it became in my mind. I’ve never really searched for the film. I have no desire to see it again. In a way, it was the most horrifying film I’ve ever watched, and I watched it alone.

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So I was surprised that Paranormal Activity 3 continues pushing the envelope in terms of formal experimentation in a mainstream genre. What follows are some rough notes from my one viewing of the film, in a theater packed with teenagers who were so embarrassed (it seemed to me; I may be reading the whole vibe wrong) by the genuine terror (i.e., the presence of “Toby,” the invisible demon that functions as a horrific, nightmare version of the “pooka” from Harvey) of the film that they laughed, talked back to the screen, and made such a general ruckus that not one but TWO theater managers were called in to try to quell the noise. I say “rough notes,” but I don’t really mean that. I’ve thought about this too much, but the more I think about it, the rougher and more unformed the central idea becomes, so I’m putting it out here before the idea loses its shape entirely.

1. Paranormal Activity 3 is a structural film, in the avant-garde tradition, described best by P. Adams Sitney in Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde:

The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography of the screen. Very seldom will one find all four characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements.

2. In the film, the husband/father Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) attaches a VCR camera (holding 6-hour tapes) to the base of an oscillating fan in order to capture a wider angle of vision in the kitchen/dining room/ foyer entrance.

Kubrick-like, the film in these stretches (some of them quite long) becomes automated, as the notion of a director is erased. If “the structural film” insists on its shape, then this is all shape. These long takes, as the automatic camera pans steadily from left to right, from right to left, not pausing to reflect on any dramatic action, erases traces of human agency, and what emerges is the pure structure of the film.

3. In his ever-surprisingly-current 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes wrote: “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

4. The underlying terror of the Paranormal films is not their invisible demons so much as their invisible authors. The fact of the fixed camera’s supposed impersonality—in an era of hyper-confessionalism—suggests that we are, after all, merely subjects of our own subjectivity.

5. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with its off-screen presence of the demonic, is literally the father/mother/baby of the Paranormal films. And Michael Snow’s structural masterpiece Wavelength (1967), with its 45-minute slow zoom, and the death that occurs in that film, is also somehow responsible for the fierce, formalist constraints of the Paranormal films.

The creeping darkness, and the darkness of words, where we always struggle together, dear reader, rare and true,

Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.

–Olena Kalytiak Davis, “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled” from
shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities

8. The wondrous indecipherability of “Toby.” The camera, endlessly (as long as the power holds out, as long as the camera functions, as long as the tape VHS tape lasts) panning horizontally, back-and-forth, across the blank and filled-in spaces of an American home, haunted not by demons, but by cameras.

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Movies like this, they figure out a way to dominate us. Here are the first 8 shots from the Evil Dead sequence of Donnie Darko, with the full clip at the end of the post.

CREDITS:

“Watching Hollywood films delayed both reinforces and breaks down these oppositions [between active male and passive female]. The narrative drive tends to weaken if the spectator is able to control its flow, to repeat and return to certain sequences while skipping others. The smooth linearity and forward movement of the story become jagged and uneven, undermining the male protagonist’s command over the action.” Laura Mulvey from Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image

“Most of what we ‘see’ is really just what we ‘remember’ because at any given moment, the majority of the image will not be seen, merely remembered. The cognitive quilt that was sewed by foveal vision is the cognitive map we have, both obscuring and defining the shape of the real image that lies beneath.” Mark Stephen Meadows, from Pause and Effect

1. Donnie and his girlfriend Gretchen are outside the theater, buying tickets for Evil Dead. In an early version of the Evil Dead script, there is this exchange as the characters arrive at the remote cabin:

LINDA:  This place is perfect.

CHERYL: The woods come awfully close to the house don’t they?

SCOTT: So what’s wrong with the woods, they can’t bite ya.

CHERYL: It’s just a little claustrophobic, that’s all.

LINDA: Well, I think it’s beautiful.

2. CUT to inside the theater, as Donnie and Gretchen watch the movie. The camera slowly tracks closer, showing them to us in right profile.

 We hear the sound of The Evil Dead, but will we see its images? In some part of our brain, we understand that this is a copyright question, and that the Law and what it says about Property determines and shapes the context for what we are permitted to see. Will we be permitted to see what Donnie sees?

In an interview with Rebecca Murray, Richard Kelly said:

In the script, they went to see the movie “C.H.U.D.” But our friends at 20th Century Fox Archives told us it would take 8-12 weeks before they could process the paperwork to begin to tell us whether or not we might be able to use the footage from “C.H.U.D.” We needed to know in a week, and it wasn’t going to happen. Linda McDonough at Flower Films is close friends with Sam Raimi’s producing partner. Sam Raimi and his partner own “Evil Dead.” They own the negative so there isn’t a sludge of bureaucracy associated with getting “Evil Dead.” You’ve got to call up Sam’s partner, and he’s cool. He’s like, “Yeah, sure you can use it.” We could get it and it became so much more appropriate.

3. CUT to their left profile, close-up. Gretchen sleeps. In terms of narrative point of view, we are gradually being drawn into Donnie’s consciousness. In his classic study The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth explored the mechanisms by which literature drew readers into an imaginative identification with characters: “The changes which go to make up the story are all changes in fact and circumstance and knowledge, never in the essential worth or rightness of the character herself. She must be accepted at her own estimate from the beginning, and that estimate must, for greatest effect, be as close as possible to the readers estimate of his own importance. Whether we call this effect identification or not, it is clearly the closest that literature can come to making us feel events as if they were happening to ourselves.” The curious thing here is Booth’s notion that how readers feel about a character is linked to how they feel about themselves. In this sense, we might say that movies are projections on at least two levels: of light onto the screen, and of ourselves into that light.

4. CUT to a shot of Evil Dead, as suggested from Donnie’s point of view. The audience is now cut (“sutured”) into Donnie’s angle of vision, and this is the most totalitarian aspect of cinema: to assume control of our gaze so completely that when we look, we look through the eyes of another. Jacques Aumont has written about “the frequent use in cinema of ‘frames within frames (or ‘over-framing’), for instance through the inclusion of a mirror or a window.” Rather than fill the screen with The Evil Dead, Kelly has left space around it, so that we literally are watching a frame within a frame, which serves as a visual reminder that not only is Evil Dead just a movie, but so is Donnie Darko.

5. CUT back to a shot of Donnie watching the movie again, as he slowly turns his head towards the camera.

6. CUT to a shot from the same angle as in #2, this time with Frank sitting beside them. Frank functions as the evil “other” and projection of Donnie himself, just as Frank (Dennis Hopper) functions this way for Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. And then there is little “Donny” in Blue Velvet, a time-warped echo of Donnie Darko himself. This tangle of associations doesn’t really mean anything on an interpretive level, and it’s not something most viewers of Donnie Darko might even notice. Let’s just leave it at this: the Frank/Frank, Donnie/Donny connections are terrifying, either by design, or by coincidence, and are perhaps better left as one of the film’s mysteries. The demonic bunny mask echoes not only the implied reverse of the invisible pooka/rabbit from Harvey (1950), but also more obscure sources, such as the Easter Bunny (with its overdetermined ears) in “Hopping Down the Bunny Trail” from the 1980 DC comic “Unexpected.”

7. CUT back to Donnie, who asks Frank: “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?”

8. CUT to Frank, who slowly turns to face Donnie, and who replies: “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” This recalls (in the same impossible time-wormhole way that governs the logic of the film) another David Lynch project, his series of short films “Rabbits” (2002) some of which made its way into Inland Empire, and which features humans wearing rabbit suits to such a visually literal extent that the figures become at once non-human and non-rabbit at the same time.

Neglected, forgotten, and ignored in these “CUTS” are the cuts we make ourselves as we watch the film, our eyes choosing what to look at in any individual shot. But also the cuts we make between the film itself and our surroundings: whatever it is that tempts and distracts us in the theater or at home or in a coffee shop or in a dorm room or on a train or wherever we are as we watch the movie. Liberated from the dark, movies no longer tyrannize us today. Who would have guessed that one day we would find ourselves longing not for freedom from the image, but for bondage to it? And yet, just when you think you are free, along comes something like the Franks . . .

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This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine

10 minutes

Marnie (Tippi Hedren), visiting her mother, suffers one of her red-flash anxiety attacks upon seeing red gladiolas on a table. “I never could stand gladiolas,” she says as she walks over to replace them, which this shot captures. Released in July 1964, the film’s shooting schedule (slated to begin November 25, 1963) was delayed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and indeed the film itself is haunted by a sadness and humorlessness that in some way absorbs the national mood at the time. (The film was shot in studios in California at various locations around the U.S.) That tension is evident in Marnie’s face, which rarely shows a smile. The red she approaches with terror in this frame and throughout the film is not just a visible sign of her childhood trauma (she murdered, at age 6, a man she saw fighting with her mother the prostitute) but also, a weird way, Presidential blood. And for audiences at the time living at the height of the Cold War (the Cuban Missile crisis had occurred just two years earlier) red wavers a dangerous, unstable, coded sign for the other Red. And then there is the little neighbor girl, Jessie, peering from behind the doorway, a substitute Marnie who sort-of lives with Marnie’s mother. This frame captures Marnie caged by three gazes: the little girl’s, her mother’s (off-screen right) and the camera’s. In other words, Marnie is right where Hitchock wants her, just like he wanted all his screen women: pinned and tormented by the the relentless Gaze.

40 minutes

Having just come from the racetrack, Marnie and the wealthy publisher Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), the man she will marry soon, are on their way to visit Mark’s father, whom Marnie is about to meet for the first time. This catches her by surprise, and she worries that she’s not dressed properly for the occasion. It’s a small moment that reveals the complex power dynamics at play in the film, for just as Mark exerts control over Marnie by throwing her off balance with small but authoritarian gestures like this, so too Marnie has her own secret knowledge, her own trap to spring to Mark after their marriage, as he has little awareness at this point of the depth of her madness. “At the opposite pole to this nature of darkness,” Michel Foucault has written, “madness also exerts a fascination because it is knowledge.”

And there also is the gravitational pull of Sean Connery to account for, who was the face of James Bond, having appeared in From Russia with Love that same year, and Dr. No previously. It is perhaps not possible to watch Marnie while forgetting that it is Sean Connery—not James Bond—playing Mark Rutland and this fact casts the film with an aura of artificiality that only strengthens the dream-like quality of the film. Of all of Hitchock’s films, Marnie is the most bold when it comes to functioning as a traditional narrative film that pulls us in through the classic strategies of invisible editing, while at the same time exposing its own artifice. Hitchcock’s post-1960 films for the most part stubbornly refused the visual anarchy of the French New Wave and hand-held cinema vertité which informed another film released in 1964, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. In shots like this, which depended on rear-camera projection, Hitchcock doesn’t seem to be seeking realism so much as a symbolic, elegant expression of realism.

70 minutes

On their honeymoon, on a cruise, Mark discovers that not only does Marnie not want to sleep with him, but she doesn’t even want to be touched by him. “Don’t—please don’t,” she pleads with him at this moment. In the trip-wired logic of the film, Marnie exists at this moment as the female “hysteric” in need of being cured by the same beast that wrecked her: a man. But she also exists, if less clearly, as the coming woman of the new Age of Aquarius, resisting—and let’s just be frank—being fucked by a man. For the whole film is really a giant narrative equation trying solve the problem of: why doesn’t Marnie want to have sex? But while it’s tempting to see the movie as a yet another Hollywood male fantasy, it’s also true that the sheer power of Hedren’s iron-willed performance is so overwhelming and focused that we can’t help but identify more strongly with Marnie than with Mark. For Marnie has some serious problems, which means, in other words, that she’s recognizably human in all her flaws. She is us, and despite the narrative momentum towards her “cure,” she can no more be cured than being human can be cured.

The difference between Marnie in 1964 and Marnie in, say, 1967, is that in 1964 her combustive personality is still repressed, controlled, in the same way that Hitchcock’s visual style remained controlled in the face of the coming anarchy of the New American Cinema, epitomized by films like Easy Rider (1969). Even as he was a hero and an inspiration to the directors of the French New Wave, especially Truffaut and Godard, the tightly controlled formalist universe of his films stood in contrast to the restless “mistakism” of the new wave. In an essay published in Cahiers du cinéma just before the release of Breathless (1960), Godard wrote:

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of film-makers. Those who walk along the streets with their heads down, and those who walk with their heads up. In order to see what is going on around them, the former are obliged to raise their heads suddenly and often, turning to the left and then the right, embracing the field of vision in a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on the precise point which interests them. When the former are shooting a film, their framing is roomy and fluid (Rossellini), whereas with the latter it is narrowed down to the last millimetre (Hitchcock). With the former (Welles), one finds a de ́coupage which may be loose but is remarkably open to the temptations of chance; with the latter (Lang), camera movements not only of incredible precision in the set but possessing their own abstract value as movements in space.

Marnie is perhaps the closest Hitchcock ever got to matching form and content in a film, as Marnie’s repression (her caged body language and the position of her left arm and hand in the 70-minute frame) is mirrored in the tightly controlled montage of the film’s visual style. Some of these techniques, which were already becoming anachronistic by 1964, included extensive use of rear projection and matte shots, which have a weird, double-effect on the film. These formal strategies, by 1964, called attention to themselves as artificial, and were just a few cultural moments shy of becoming camp. “The center cannot hold,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967 and in Marnie you can see and feel its disintegration, burning through the screen, as the black hole gravity of the late Sixties destroyed all the old forms, only to make them new again.

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The entire trailer is so Kubrick-like in its formality that it verges on a sort of avant-garde Puritanism. In an age where graphic depictions of sexual practice proliferate and are available with a few keystrokes (production design be damned!) the trailer’s sheer force of aesthetic and tonal seriousness suggests either something ironic or deeply reactionary.

Shot 1: The titles OFFICIAL SELECTION COMPETITION FESTIVAL DE CANNES, in white, over the screen, as a woman, in medium shot, walks from left to right across the screen, apartment complexes looming behind her. Our vantage point is from across the street, and as she appears between a parked truck and a parked car she stops and crouches down, it appears, to adjust the strap on one of her high-heeled shoes. She is too distant to be recognizable.

Shot 2: In voice-over, a woman (Clara, we will come to presume) speaking the words “Thank you for coming.” The only movement in the frame comes from the laptop where, presumably, Lucy has arrived at the mansion for her interview. That seems to be her getting up from the chair, but we can’t be sure. Her face has still not been shown to us. The angle and point of view of the shot suggests that we—the audience—have adopted the point-of-view of someone looking at the laptop screen but again, we can’t be sure; perhaps there is no one behind the desk and the shot is, instead, simply the perspective of the camera itself. The frame within the frame suggests two different camera perspectives: the surveillance camera that Lucy may or may not be aware of, and the motion picture camera, the one filming a movie called Sleeping Beauty.

Shot 3: The voice over: “Such a pleasure to see such a unique beauty.” This coincides with the first time we see Lucy clearly enough to appreciate her “beauty,” which makes us weirdly complicit in a way that watching movies is in itself an act of voyeurism. In this shot, as Lucy’s face turns slowly towards the camera, her pale-skinned face framed against the heavy oak, the mansion itself is imagined as a palace with a series of doorways, in this case the doorway Lucy passes through in the background, and the doorway in the foreground which frames her actions.

Shot 4: An establishing shot of the presumed mansion wherein the story unfolds, with the words JANE CAMPION PRESENTS filling the screen in white letters. It is not a dark, gloomy mansion but something open and available in the full sun, as if to suggest that the darkest secrets are hidden in the plain light of day.

Shot 5: Clara’s voice over, as we see her watching as Lucy is inspected: “Let me tell you how things should proceed.” Lucy’s body seems to be glowing. It is white beyond white. The man’s hand upon her thigh, in which direction does it move? The bonsai in the background, carefully selected and tended and restricted in their growth, suggest what will become of Lucy.

Shot 6: Lucy walking along a brick wall, at night, moving towards something, reaching out casually and touching the vines: “I’ll describe the job and then, if you’re interested, we’ll discuss particulars.”

Shot 7: A static shot of Lucy sleeping, naked, her back toward the camera, that seems to recall a shot from Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. A FILM BY JULIA LEIGH in the center of the screen, again in clean white.

Shot 8: “You will be working with other girls, some of whom will have . . . more responsibilities.” That beat, that pause between have and more seems ominous, freighted with meaning, as if the narrator wanted to speak more openly but thought better of it and stopped herself. Why? Who is she afraid of? In this shot, the camera tracks left, to reveal Lucy, standing outside in front of a door into the mansion, looking to her right at something happening off-screen.

Shot 9: For the first time, we adopt Lucy’s point of view, witnessing what she is witnessing: a mincing scene of a woman (another “worker?”) being put, forcibly it seems, into the back of a car. There is no voice over to lead us into understanding the significance of this moment. The bridge between shots 8 and 9 sutures us into the narrative thickness of the trailer, as we take the position of someone within the film: Lucy. First (in shot we see her looking, and then (in this shot) we adopt her gaze as our own.

Film theorist Kaja Silverman has written that “Equally important to the cinematic organization are the operations of cutting and excluding. It is not merely that the camera is incapable of showing us everything at once, but that it does not wish to do so. We must be shown only enough to know that there is more, and to want that ‘more’ to be disclosed. A prime agency of disclosure is the cut, which divides one shot from the next. The cut guarantees that both the preceding and the subsequent shots will function as structuring absences to the present shot. These absences make possible a signifying ensemble, convert one shot into a signifier of the next one, and the signified of the preceding one.” The process of suture is fundamentally tyrannical (Orson Welles once said that he preferred long shots with no editing because they were more democratic, allowing the viewer’s eyes to wander the screen) because we don’t noticing it happening, as classical film editing is largely invisible to us. Lured on by the expectations and pleasures of the unfolding narrative (what is going to happen next?) we don’t notice (or don’t want to notice) the process by which we are sutured into locked, limited point-of-view shots within the film. The speed of editing and the point of view of shots binds us into a perspective that is simultaneously a way of knowing. In this case, the case of shot 9, we can’t help but identify with Lucy, as we see this act of aggression from her point of view and wonder, as she must: might this happen to her/me?

Shot 10: We are back in the mansion, where Clara and Lucy sit uncomfortably across from each other. “There is room for promotion,” Clara says in voice over. This frame is like an oil painting where the monster is so carefully hidden between brushstrokes, waiting patiently for centuries.

Shot 11: “We rely on mutual trust and discretion and I am obliged to tell you there are . . .” says Clara as Lucy burns what appears to be money. Obliged by whom? The formal obscurity of Clara’s warning suggests a spidery bureaucracy of violence.

Shot 12: “. . . heavy penalties, very heavy . . .” as Lucy rides in the back seat of a car. What, exactly, does she mean? The mind races to imagine the worst sorts of things one human being could do to another.

Shot 13: “. . . penalties for any breaches of discretion. Am I clear?” The driver’s eyes are reflected in the rearview mirror. Just before “Am I clear,” the eyes avert from the road and seize upon Lucy, and once again we have been sutured into her position and are somehow warned, as viewers.

Shot 14: Lucy, dressed casually again, in the “outside” world, it seems, keeping one self hidden from the other self. “It’s not a game.”

Shot 15: This is the shortest shot in the trailer, lasting only one second. A woman in lingerie falls and drops a tray in an opulently outfitted room, and the overdetermined danger of this moment recalls the criticisms leveled against Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: that the film (as evident in this shot and in shot 18) takes its subject matter more seriously than the audience.

Shot 16: It feels like this shot comes from near the beginning of the movie, perhaps after Lucy has agreed to the job after learning “how things should proceed.” In a white, sterile lab-like room Lucy sits chin up, mouth open, eerily passive (she is someone who allows things to be done to her) as a man in a white lab coat inserts something into her mouth. Perhaps he is making her “more beautiful” (see shot 21).

Shot 17: Now it’s dark, and Lucy is in action, in an even darker bar, revealing her legs to a well-dressed man. He wants them.

Shot 18: A pretty startling image. In her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey wrote that in “a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” Even thirty-six years after its appearance (and Mulvey’s own reconsideration of the essay) “Visual Pleasure” vibrates like an arrow that has just struck its target. Yes, the person who directed the film and who wrote it is a woman named Julia Leigh, and there is Jane Campion’s name, right below the prostrate, please-behead-me-or-at least-do-with-me-what-you will position of a woman. The trailer, and this shot in particular, bring to mind a rush of contradictory, fragmented thoughts:

1. post-feminist feminism
2. there can be power in the rendering of powerlessness, can’t there?
3. the shot adopts a presumed male gaze only to subvert it in the parts of the film we haven’t seen
4. the clash of formal restraint and blazing sexuality in this frame is interesting
5. Leigh’s statement that she was “intrigued by the idea of how would you feel if you knew something was happening to you in your sleep, but you didn’t know exactly what it was.”
6. Alfred Hitchcock’s statement to Peter Bogdanovich in 1963: “As I tried to explain to that girl, Kim Novak, ‘You have got a lot of expression in your face. Don’t want any of it.’”
7. visual pleasure in the age of visual pleasure

Shot 19: Lucy arises from a chair in an elegant room and begins to take off her dress.

Shot 20: “You are very beautiful, very talented . . .” says the voice, as we glimpse Lucy’s naked body on her back on a bed, a male patron on top of her. The camera moves in on her forearm. She is, presumably, sleeping.

Shot 21:  “. . .but we’re going to make you even more beautiful . . .” continues the voice, as this shot is linked to the previous by another image of Lucy’s forearm, her palm opening to reveal something.

Shot 22: “. . . even more talented.” An elderly man in a white beard (Chris Haywood) looks directly at the camera . . .

Shot 23: . . . which is followed by Clara—presumably the voice in the voice over—also looking directly into the camera which, again, may be the implied space where Lucy is. “You’ll feel  …”

Shot 24: “. . . profoundly restored.” We see Lucy in water at night, her face like a beacon.

Shot 25: The screen goes black. “Goodnight.”

Shot 26: The dramatic final chords, an image of Lucy asleep in a luxurious bed, her face between the words SLEEPING BEAUTY.

In Briar Rose, his retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Robert Coover describes the prince: “Caught in the briars, but still slashing away valiantly, driven more by fear now than by vocation, he seeks to stay his panic with visions of the sleeping princess awaiting him within, as much in love with her deep repose as with any prospect of her awakening.” This is almost too unbearable and totalitarian in the way that romanticism is totalitarian, pretending to free human desire from the artificial restrictions of culture only to lock it back into the prison-house of human signs and words and images. Sleeping Beauty is ever thus, beautiful as long as she remains asleep. In the tightly sealed, hermeneutic world of the Sleeping Beauty trailer, the only way that Lucy will ever feel “profoundly restored” is to never wake up.

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***

The Rumpus: Hi, are you there?

Megan Boyle: Hi Nick, yes, I’m here, just getting situated hold on one second… sorry.

Rumpus: Oh good. I’m rusty at this. I just poured, spilled, some wine that was a gift, hold on.

Boyle: Oh, damn. Red or white?

Rumpus: Red but it was cheap. It’s okay. Are you in Brooklyn?

Boyle: I’m in Manhattan in Think Coffee by NYU trying to counteract loud music via loudly playing quiet music on earphones. Where are you?

Rumpus: We just had a big thunderstorm here in Ann Arbor and I think that contributed to the wine spilling. Thanks for doing this.

Boyle: Thunderstorm contributing to wine spilling sounds interesting. Barometric pressure wine interactions…no problem (re doing interview). I liked reading the ones you sent me. I usually type without caps, should I upper-case things?

Rumpus: This is a silly question but can you send me a copy of this afterwards in case I mess up saving it? Oh yes, lowercase is fine. Do you want to go to Wikipedia and I’ll go there too and you can click on random article and tell me where it takes you then I’ll go there. It may take a few seconds, that’s okay. (And I’ll clean up typos, etc and make minor edits before this appears.)

Boyle: Sure. Do you think people ever purposefully select random articles they think are more interesting/have more to say about? (Just wondering.) (I won’t do that.)

Rumpus: I’ve thought about that myself and that’s the part of human nature I like.

Boyle: Yeah… think I like that too. Seems endearing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Football_League_1924%E2%80%9325

Boyle: Damn.

Rumpus: Is it 1924-25?

Boyle: Yes. Trying do discern whether their team names are towns or just like, phrases of the day. “ayr united.” The way the teams are listed reminds me of little league or some forgotten little league team somehow garnering a Wikipedia page. Team 12 in ‘Scottish league division three’ is named ‘Dykehead.’

Rumpus: So of that first list, division one, which of those names strikes you? I like “Motherwell” and “Aberdeen” but only because, I think, of the grunge, riot grrrl, Nirvana connection. But ‘Dykekead’ — this is my new favorite team name.

Boyle: I think I like ‘Bo-ness’ because it sounds like a sweet name for a rapper, and ‘Stenhousemuir’ because it sounds like the result of someone trying to insult someone and remember the name of a dinosaur at the same time. ‘Dykehead’ seems great. Their coach probably had a time machine.

Rumpus: Yes, and ‘Raith Rovers’ sounds like someone trying to say something else while holding the tip of their tongue.

Boyle: The name ‘Mid-annandale’ sounds like they weren’t even trying…like, no wonder they placed 15^th.

Rumpus: I think “Patrick Thistle” was a name Ian Fleming rejected for a villain in one of his James Bond novels. Actually this whole list is a weird poem.

Boyle: ‘Raith Rovers’ also sounds like someone’s first death metal cover band.

Rumpus: Do you want to click on another?

Boyle: Sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_County_Championship

Boyle: Jesus. It must be UK sports night at Wikipedia random article generating headquarters. Instinctually felt like clicking another one for diversity.

Rumpus: Let’s skip it, we make the rules!

Boyle: Yeah we do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%282008_film%29

Boyle: Sweet. Didn’t know this movie existed. Title seems controversial. Immediately pictured it would be a documentary-like series of short interviews of diverse opinions on ‘blackness’… seems like, no… the main character’s name is ‘black’ and he’s black it seems.

Rumpus: It looks like it wasn’t released theatrically in the US.

Boyle: Must be some kind of tour video. Interpol tour video (jk). Plot sounds kind of formulaic. Feel like most copies must be in French ‘discount bins’ now.

Rumpus: The synopsis is almost like a Marxist tract. The last line about how it’s ‘peppered with comedy and mysticism’ is worrisome. The word ‘mysticism’ is like a warning…

Boyle: Seems like they were obviously trying to get in on the success of the ‘three colors’ trilogy. On a side note, for some reason I think the word ‘mercenaries’ is really funny…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-waste_village

Rumpus: This one is strange. I need a second. Since when did ‘Hi-Fi’ become obsolete? Do you have a turntable?

Boyle: I do. I don’t use it much anymore but used to a lot… crackly record noise…

‘The opportunity to cheaply dispose of these substances forms the economic incentive behind the exporting of E-waste to countries such as China, India, and some African nations which have little or no environment checks and control. This export creates a global E-waste village.’ Seems really terrible.

Rumpus: They still use the word ‘First World’ which is strange and anachronistic because it’s not the First world, far from it.

Boyle: The ‘electric waste by country’ section looks unfinished, maybe intentionally/out of shame like the wiki page is perpetuating the shittiness of what it’s describing just by existing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Lorestan

Rumpus: My God.

Boyle: I laughed when I clicked on that… seems… like perhaps the most obscure wiki page, like its author and us are the only people who have ever seen it. Wikipedia itself might not be aware of its existence.

Rumpus: Do the numbers 31 or 41 mean anything to you?

Boyle: My initial thought was they’re prime numbers.

Rumpus: For the love of God, Megan. Click on one of the cities and I’ll follow you.

Boyle: I clicked ‘Dorood.’

Rumpus: I’m following you there…

Boyle: Follow me to Dorood.

Rumpus: I feel like I know so little…

Boyle: Me too.

Rumpus: There are over 100,000 people there, and I don’t know any of their names.

Boyle: I’m down to do a few more articles, if you are.

Rumpus: Let’s do it.

Boyle: I just resisted temptation to click ‘Portuguese Wikipedia’ and surprise you by only speaking Portuguese for the remainder of the chat… however, I landed on “Luke Hamlin.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Hamlin

Rumpus: Buenas figaros spieta andula.

Boyle: Obrigao lisbon.

[Note: A big chunk about rock candy was edited out.]

Rumpus: “Luke Hamlin.” What’s strange about his name is that “Luke Skywalker” was played by Mark Hamill.

Boyle: I thought that too. Seems strategic, on his part. Oh wait, no, he was born in 1904. “Nicknamed ‘Hot Potato’”…the bolded ‘hot potato’ is really funny.

Rumpus: Okay: speaking of Star Wars. If you were to make a sci-fi movie… well, would you ever consider making a sci-fi movie?

Boyle: Yes, I would consider that. I’m intrigued by sci-fi things/feel like a lot of my thoughts naturally veer towards sci-fi-like things.

Rumpus: Like the world is just, sometimes, a little bit off?

Boyle: Yes, definitely. I think I always feel ‘a little bit off,’ maybe or assume I am, just out of not ever being able to viscerally experience another person’s reality so ideas about different realities seem interesting. The world seems mysterious. Do you like sci-fi?

Rumpus: You know, it’s very strange having you type, knowing you are somewhere. What you say about experiencing another person’s reality, maybe that’s why writing and making movies is so imperative. I love sci-fi, like Alien and Moon and The Descent, which is I guess isn’t really sci-fi.

Boyle: I agree. I think whenever I gchat with a person I almost unavoidably mentally picture their surroundings (like I feel like you’re in a leather chair in the corner of your living room and there is a large window in front of you and a porch and it’s raining). Yeah, I think that’s why I like writing and making movies. That’s it, definitely, actually the fundamental thing. I saw Moon recently and really liked it.

Rumpus: Moon is good. I only found out after I watched it that it was directed by David Bowie’s son and then I thought that makes sense, because the movie is about identity changing (“Changes”) and he gets so pale like Bowie the Pale King. Sorry, this is the geeky film prof.

Boyle: It’s probably actually his attempt at a biopic about David Bowie’s ‘true life’ before he returned to earth.

Rumpus: Or a metaphor for what a rock star or any celebrity goes through: changing into something, a version of themselves that they only partially recognize.

Boyle: Seems like that can apply to non-celebrities also. Like altering your persona based on your surroundings/audience in addition to more long-term personal changes. Running around being clones of ourselves.

Rumpus: I really like that idea of being clones of ourselves. It’s something I think you and Tao brought to light in the Bebe Zeva movie. Because while Bebe was “Bebe” she was also someone else, and especially in that scene near the end in the pool, where she seemed most unguarded and afraid. That scene was genius and very touching. It was, honestly, hard to watch but in a good way. It was almost as if she was on the edge of something, some decision. I’m wondering, were you aware of this or did this just happen sort of fast and naturally?

Boyle: It happened mostly fast/naturally but I had been aware of the shift in group dynamic since returning to the hotel (“since returning to the hotel” is like a cliffhanger…) and how we were talking in the hot tub seemed like a quiet, distracted almost ‘mirages’ of the high energy conversations from earlier…There was an awareness that each of us were probably aware of that and I was wondering what Bebe was thinking a lot, thinking she may have been having personal conflicts with Travis that she might want to keep private, but we were filming a documentary about her. At that point in the night I think all of us were subtly aware of things ending but unsure of how the ending would happen.

Rumpus: And that tension really shows up beautifully in the film. Do you want to go to one more?

Boyle: Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauna_Foundation

Boyle: ‘Fauna foundation.’

Rumpus: What is it with Canada and chimps?

Boyle: The combination of the notification that the article is “an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it” and last sentence “it is the first sanctuary to accept chimpanzees with HIV.”

Rumpus: “150 acre farm”? Is that significant?

Boyle: Hm, seems like average farm acreage. Seems like Canada should be able to do ‘way better.’ However. I feel like there must be so much land in Canada… somehow…

Rumpus: And so much mercy…

Boyle: Just pictured Canada as the ‘hair’ of the earth, like it actually ‘rolls down’ onto Russia.

Rumpus: Okay… the lights are dimming.

Boyle: Enjoy the storm. Thank you Nick. This was fun.

Rumpus: It was great talking with you, thank you for your creativity.

Megan Boyle lives in Baltimore, co-founded MDMAfilms, has been published by Muumuu House, Thought Catalog, Vice, 3:AM, Pop Serial, and has a Twitter account. Her debut poetry collection, “selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express exployee,” is forthcoming from Muumuu House on November 15, 2011.

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Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series. Here are parts 1 and 2.

As it turns out, the almost comically fictional “underground” group that A. warned me about turned out to be real in all the worst possible ways. I saw remnants of it for myself in the basement of the Burrowes building at Penn State in 1992, and if you’ve ever smelled the scent of the Other before, you can understand that I knew what I would find in that room before I took that fatal step across the threshold. Fatal, that’s too strong a word, or at least it’s too final, for that step has not yet been fatal to me. Back then, everything seemed to be a prediction waiting to come true. I had been in love, and had married the very person whom I loved, and felt so immensely fortunate that I was sure (like only an egomaniac can be) that the universe would one day take notice of this spot of happiness and crush it. In 1996, the year after my wife and I left Penn State, one of her former students in math at what was then called the Alternative Program in State College took a rifle to campus on a sunny morning, laid down on her stomach, and began shooting people at random, killing one. It was as if we had escaped just in time.

The Burrowes building basement, this is where A., so it turns out, fled to after I chased her into the park, although chased makes what happened sound too dramatic. She ran, and I followed her. She only looked back once as she ran, and on her face I thought I detected a smile. The incident in the basement which I was witness to, this happened on a very hot day in August 1992; I remember this because the green leaves of the campus trees—even the strong and old trees lining the broad walkways through the middle of campus—these leaves had curled inward, taking he shape of little green tubes, like cigarettes with nothing inside them. They would survive, I knew, and unfurl again miraculously when it cooled, and it reminded me of A., in her apartment with the blankets over the windows to keep the sun out, and how that might not have been an act of retreat or depression, but rather survival, as she waited (she, with her page-boy hair and small knees) for the pressing evil to pass. One item I forgot to mention when I described A.’s apartment in the last column—and it’s only an important detail in light of what happened in the basement of the Burrowes building—was a white sheet that she had hung across doorway into what I suspect was a narrow hallway.

“Something terrible is happening in the basement.” What sort of person would say that? And yet as I stood there, the sheet gently and rhythmically bulging and retreating like the rising and falling of a breathing chest, A.’s words were like a taunt, a playground taunt, and for a moment the most ominous feeling came over me. I imagined that the only way to get beyond the sheet and into the hallway was to burn it, was to kneel down and light the sheet afire, which is strange because that is exactly David Lynch did in his remarkable Lumière-inspired 50-plus seconds film “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed,” which was made with a restored Lumière camera, with no post-filming editing. And so to make edits in camera, Lynch burned a sheet to lead us into the next scene, which was behind the sheet.

What I want to say is that what happened after I followed A. into the basement of Burrowes was like standing directly in front of a burning sheet that led from one scene into another. Of course I realize now that I never should have gone into that basement room, and perhaps I even knew that then; it’s hard to remember. The Burrowes building itself was utterly familiar to me. It was the home of the Graduate English Department, the place where the secret transactions between theory and practice happened. The light inside always seemed the same soft aquarium green. There had been rumors of the basement, a place where, so it was said, enormous computers generated code during he early years of the Cold War. The writer John Barth had taught and written there in the 1950s, and although no one we knew ever actually read the novel to verify it, it was said that he (with the Machines behind him and the cigarette in hand) set a few scenes from his 1966 novel Giles Goat-Boy in the basement of Burrowes. By the time I caught up with A. and spotted her darting into the building the end-of-the-day light was already spreading across the sky in red like blood slowly leaking though a bandage.

It turns out that the door to the basement was located in an abandoned bathroom (what gender it had been assigned to was indeterminate; the spot where urinals should have been was damaged), where I heard A. moving about. We were all still so heavily into Julia Kristeva at that point and her fascination with the abject that, standing just outside the restroom door, I expected a corpse to greet me on the other side as I gently pushed it open after minutes of silence. The restroom was empty. The static-y hum of the fluorescent lights, the dripping of water on the porcelain sink, this is what I remember most about that moment. If A. had been in there just a few seconds ago, there was no sign of her now. The door closed behind me and there I was, in that spaceless restroom, three stalls with old wooden doors to my right, and two stand-alone sinks to my left, and a plastic dispenser half-filled with pink soap. The floor was white tiles and the mirror above the sinks was just long enough that, from where I was standing, I could see into the middle stall, whose door was open.

The door to the basement was on the back wall of the stall, above the toilet. It was more of a large vent than a door, a vent whose grate had been removed and set carefully across the toilet seat, which, I soon discovered, had been placed there to stand on to lift oneself into the vent and descend the stairs into the cool basement, which was not as menacing a place as you might think. (And of course all of this is true in the same way that a Lynch film is true, which is to say it’s a version of a possible past.) The darkness seemed to seep into the basement from another place, just like it had in A.’s apartment. The basement was an enormous room with a series of partitions that stored old furniture, filing cabinets, bookshelves, wooden office chairs, obsolete typewriters, analog phones choked in their own cords, etc. The screams, distant and muffled, seemed to be coming from the farthest corner of the basement, where an orange light glowed and flickered like an EXIT sign. At the time I thought that these screams (and to this day I don’t know why I thought this) were not occurring in real time, but that they were being played back on a tape recorder. Perhaps my mind needed to think this in order to summon the courage to move forward toward the sound.

That wavering orange light, it dimly illuminated the entire basement just enough for me to find my way between and around the partitions and the wooden crates and the ropes on the floor to find my way slowly to the source of the screams which was, as I’ve said, in a room whose doorway was overhung by a white sheet. The screaming had stopped and the sheet, just as the one in A.’s apartment, gently billowed in and out, like the chest of a carefully breathing beast. The orange light was coming from the room itself, casting the sheet from behind with a glow that reminded me of a jack-o-lantern or what I imagined could be a distant city on fire. The notion to reach forward to pull back the sheet kept entering and fleeing my mind. I understood on some weird gene-memory level that touching the sheet would be akin to touching some highly radioactive object. There was no sign of A. I was alone in the basement. If there remained a world out there, outside of this black tar-pit trap building (and of course there was) it meant nothing to me anymore. Around the time that this all happened, in the early 90s, a phrase became popular underground. All your base are belong to us. This was spoken in the sort of off-hand, coded way among us late at night after many drinks. Even those of us who didn’t recognize its source used it, and standing in front of that sheet in the basement I felt as I was at the threshold of whomever “us” was at the end of that phrase.

I thought of A., and the fragility of her smile during the chase and of the absurdity of believing in half the things I believed in and of the absolute perfection of my wife as she ran alongside a chain link fence on a fierce winter day so many years ago, and of the words in the book of Isaiah to “Arise, Shine” and how all that meaning now was poured onto my head. So I lit the sheet afire. I crouched down, fumbled with my lighter, and the sheet disappeared in flames as if some prop on a magician’s stage. It was a transition, an edit, (as I would realize later watching the Lynch film) and the room behind the sheet was bare, except for a tipped over wooden chair tangled in binding rope and when I stepped inside the room I could smell the odor of a ruined human being and it was then that I understood that the implied speaker of the phrase all your base are belong to us was not them, but us. It was me, at this moment. I was the colonizer, having no natural right to set foot in this room (which was really a territory) and it was I who through my sick curiosity had followed A. where she should never have been followed and, years later, watching Lynch’s “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed” I understood that any depiction of the room would be like a Theodor De Bry etching, De Bry who never traveled to the Americas but whose engravings of the Native Americans, nonetheless, entered into the realm of historical fact.

The unbearable sadness of that tipped over chair. With both hands I gripped it and set it up right in some lame attempt to restore order. Did I understand that in doing so I had become an intruder of the highest order? I suppose I did, and yet I was still under the spell of Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Tzvetan Todorov and the other alien theorists for whom there was no action that could not be explained in terms so deterministic that they made a complete lie out of the concept of free will. Todorov, especially, his name over-spilling with vowels and that lone and violent letter z. His book Conquest of America: The Question of the Other quoted heavily from The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, published in 1552 by Bartolomé de Las Casas, which offered a first-hand account of the Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean:

As has been said, the Spaniards train their fierce dogs to attack, kill and tear to pieces the Indians. It is doubtful that anyone, whether Christian or not, has ever before heard of such a thing as this. The Spaniards keep alive their dogs’ appetite for human beings in this way. They have Indians brought to them in chains, then unleash the dogs. The Indians come meekly down the roads and are killed. And the Spaniards have butcher shops where the corpses of Indians are hung up, on display, and someone will come in and say, more or less, “Give me a quarter of that rascal hanging there, to feed my dogs until I can kill another one for them.” As if buying a quarter of a hog or other meat.

If I was the intruder here—in this room that A. had led me to in the basement of the Burrowes building—then whose territory was this, and how was righting the fallen chair an act (which I considered an act of love) more violent than the atrocities that had been borne upon the poor soul who had been strapped to that chair? By the time A. appeared in the doorway behind me, stepping over the remnants and ashes of the burnt sheet, I realized that the phrase All your base belong to us was no longer a sentence that I was outside of, but rather a sentence that I inhabited in some fatal way.

Of course, the solution to all this was obvious in that moment: the only way to make things right was to seat myself in that chair, and to wait for the terrible inevitable. I had placed the fallen-over chair back on its feet to prepare it for the next subject: me. And if it hadn’t been for A., at that moment (who I feared had fled me forever) putting her hand gently on my shoulder, and leading me back, out of the basement, then I really do think I would have given myself over to the strange territory of that room whose dull orange light, even to this very day I still see sometimes when I shut my eyes, glowing like both a warning and an invitation.

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Another split edit comes in Blue Velvet, just as Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds himself getting into deep river trouble. The crew, led by Frank (Dennis Hopper) is about to leave Ben’s (Dean Stockwell’s) place. (As a side note, before getting to the split edit, there’s a sly visual joke, as Frank utters his infamous line “Now it’s dark” right after Ben turns off his light, giving Frank’s ominous words an almost comic meaning that competes with the escalating menace of the scene.) Then, squaring off against the camera as if to suggest he would be the last man standing after a nuclear holocaust, he screams, “Let’s fuck! I’ll fuck anything that moves!” And then he laughs, and disappears suddenly and magically from the screen. We switch to a shot of the road speeding by at night, the yellow caution lines disappearing into the bottom of the frame, illuminated by car headlights. But just before we see that–while the shot still holds us in Ben’s apartment–we hear the sound of squealing tires, announcing sonically the blacktop-at-night scene just a second or two before we see it.

It’s hard for me to write about David Lynch and Thomas Y. and A. because that was a very dangerous time, a time when I felt that hot cauldron beneath my feet. We—all of us enduring the mental excesses of grad school at a university falling apart under the weight of bad ideas—had been reading Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God for a seminar on the religious experience in America, where Edwards’s words became super-charged colliding like spooked atomic particles against our postmodern skepticism. Secretly, Edwards’s sermon frightened me. There were so many traps in his writing, and the easiest solution was laughter, but that was temporary.

“It is no security to wicked men for one moment, that there are no visible means of death at hand,” he said. “The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable. Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day.”

“Now it’s dark,” Frank says, murmuring to himself, a moment of what psychologists call insight: he knows that something wrong with him, and that he’s going into the dark place, which make his actions even more terrifying. In “Julia Kristeva’s Face” I wrote that, in another era, I would have suspected that A. might be an informer. What I didn’t reveal in that essay (what I was afraid to reveal, even to the editors of The Rumpus in the private note that accompanied the piece) was that, as it turns out, A. was an informer, for a shadowy group whose goals remain obscure to me, even to this day. As I said, it turns out that A. was uninterested in the short films of David Lynch that night at Penn State because she had already seen them, but what I didn’t say (and am only revealing now out of a perverse sense of obligation to some historical memory that is inconsequential because no “official” history of this group exists yet) is that after I discovered the Kristeva book with the reversed cover image for sale on that piece of plywood laying on the sweaty grass on the green lawn of A.’s apartment, A. invited me inside. I leaned my bike against a tree and, book in hand, followed her.

Already at this point I could feel the undertow of Lynch’s movies tugging at me. Back then I knew nothing of split edits and so had no framework for understanding what was about to happen in A.’s apartment. She threw a blanket over the books on the lawn, and we went inside. Blankets—not unlike the one she had just tossed over the books outside—hung over the windows in place of drapes. It was dark. The furniture—a few ladder-back chairs, a white wicker loveseat with no cushions, a round table piled with newspapers and magazines, a floor lamp—was pushed back against the walls. The room, for lack of a better word, was enigmatic. The pall of danger hung over it, and the ceiling itself was so obscured in darkness that it seemed as if there was nothing above us except black, empty space. A. didn’t (thankfully) invite me to sit down. She didn’t invite me to do anything. In fact, for several minutes she was so still, so silent that she seemed to have disappeared completely, and there I was standing alone in this strange, dark apartment that felt like some sort of pressure chamber, as if the blankets on the walls were not covering windows but tightly sealed portals into the outside world, which I yearned for suddenly now, the world of grass and wind and bees and the warm summer sun.

But of course A. hadn’t disappeared. She was standing, instead, near the round table, in a thicket of shadows that seemed permanently fixed in the room. I remembered distinctly sitting behind her watching those Lynch shorts a few weeks earlier, and the way the side of her face seemed to flicker in and out of existence to the dim blue light of the movie projector. You should know where it is, A., said suddenly and for a terrible and tender moment I thought she might do something else, but instead she reached into the pile of junk on the table and pulled out a simple red shoe box. These people, she said, waving the box in the air, they are blacker than a hole inside. And that’s when, by complete surprise, she told me about the revolutionaries who had “disappeared” her mother in 1971, when A. was only seven-years old. How she expected me to keep up with the reckless flow of her words (which frankly struck me more like a hasty confession) I don’t know. It was all very dramatic: the graphic nature of her story, her standing there in the shadows with her long arms, holding the shoe box in the air between us like some sort of totem, and the really sickening feeling I had that I never should have followed her into this room.

It was only years later, re-watching Blue Velvet and then Wild at Heart on DVD, that it came back to me, what happened next with A. The room was very still, very quiet, until there was the sound of something swooshing, like the soft noise a canvas tent might make if it collapsed. I looked to the source of the sound—the largest window in the apartment—and saw as the enormous blanket that had been covering it slid to the floor in silence, flooding the room with sunlight. At the time I don’t think it even registered with me that I had heard the blanket fall before I saw it fall. A split edit. The scene changing suddenly from dark to light, but the sound and the image not matching up. Here, it’s yours now, A. said, and shoved the red shoe box (the shade of red reminded be of the Indiana Ave. card in Monopoly) into my hands and fled the room like a vampire, though of course she was not afraid of the sun at all, having just minutes before been standing in it on the front grass of her apartment building as I rode my bike. Just before fleeing, an expression passed across her face that was so beautiful and sad that it furrowed her brow, as if for that moment the entire beauty of the known world accumulated there, and how I wished I could reach out and gently draw my thumb across the caterpillar fur of her eyebrow. The room, bathed in orange-yellow light, looked as if creatures with yellow blood and guts had exploded. A hyper-realistic oil painting on the wall that had gone unnoticed before—a woman in a long red cape whose deep folds practically undulated like slow rolling waves across a deep and immense ocean—seemed to foretell the dawning of some new dark era.

I followed A. out of the apartment, chasing her down the stairs and out into the Martian Chronicles sunlight (it hadn’t been this bright for weeks) as she cut across the street and headed towards the sloping greens of West Park, where just the previous week a boy had been knifed to death. As she trailed away in the distance I had a feeling that the shoebox contained something dangerous—perhaps a bomb that was set to go off at any moment—and that that’s why A. had fled. It’s true that the events of the past few hours (Kristeva’s reversed book cover image; the darkened apartment draped with blankets to keep evil from seeping out; the Lynchian split edit, followed by A.’s escape) had really disoriented me, and I finally gave up on A., and sat down, out of breath, on a park bench beneath the doomy shade of an enormous Oak tree. Beside me was a thin homeless man staring into what seemed to be a worn and crinkled  empty brown paper bag, the sort of which that mothers and fathers pack their children’s school lunches in.

“Oh Sailor, honey, I hope seeing that girl die didn’t jinx us,” Lulu says in Wild at Heart, unraveling a complete universe of truth with the pull of a thread. The movie is a weird sort of triumph (of the sort you don’t want to claim) because it balances so precariously on the unpoliced border-fence between sincerity and irony that periodically rises up and something important happens. What a terrible (“I hope seeing that girl die . . .”) and honest thing to say. By this time, I was desperate, and the park bench sagged and the old drunk beside me seemed to have completely lost himself in that paper bag, as if the whole history of the universe was in there, reduced to the size of a pea. The shoebox seemed to vibrate there on my lap, like a dying wasp, and I imagined opening it right there and unleashing a terrible fury and blaze that was meant for some apocalyptic future, like some carefully erased sentence slowly re-appearing across the page. My hands trembled at the thought of opening the box, not so much for what I would find inside but for the irrevocable action of it all, and now comes the moment when I must tell you what A. said to me back in the apartment, standing in the impossible shadows near the table, just before she grabbed the shoebox off the table and shoved it into my hands. Don’t let on you’re being watched, she said.

Of the several things A. told me in her apartment the two that sent a chill up my spine and that continue to haunt me were: Don’t let on you’re being watched, and Here, it’s yours now. It had grown dark very suddenly, and I left the park bench with the box and walked alone back toward A.’s apartment where I had left my bike. I cut through the old part of town, with its crooked alleys and hidden art galleries and stopped at Zeno’s—where once the bartender had taken pity at just the right moment in my life, a moment when nothing but the pity of a kind stranger would have saved me—and ordered a cold beer. There was a baseball game on the television (the Mets losing to the Braves as usual, whose Tom Glavine that year worked like a terrorist on the mound) and the light in the thin bar was the darkest of oranges, as if an enormous door to hell were cracked open only a hair. I found myself thinking about Julia Kristeva again, just like that, and how that black and white photo of her on the cover of Powers of Horror seemed like a dire warning to anyone who cared to notice. The bartender (Bill was his name, I think) read my mind (although that was part of his job and the duty of every decent bartender around the world) and set another glass of beer down before me on a fresh white napkin, embossed with some symbol that seemed familiar but that I couldn’t place, just as I had finished my first one. He had the old eyes of a man who, it seemed, had suffered the deepest and most painful sort of betrayal, and for that he was our comrade, the comrade to all of us who came to his bar.

Don’t let on you’re being watched, A. had warned. Watched by whom, and why? There was a moment—and I’m just remembering this now—when Laura Dern in Wild At Heart glances at the camera, not in a self-conscious, ironic way, but in a desperate and serious way, as if she understood—too late—that the film she was starring in was nothing less than a long, unfurling, celluloid secret message. At some point during the night the professor who had vowed never to teach Faulkner to northerners came in to Zeno’s, stinking of gin, wearing a ridiculous, immaculately fitted, dusty three-piece suit, damp with sweat beneath the armpits, and tried to strike up an argument with me, calling me “boy” in his exaggerated southern accent and whispering sexual insults about the bartender. He left after I refused to open the shoebox for him, which by that time—it must have been two or three in the morning, because the insects in the trees outside were screaming at a resurrection pitch—I realized that the baseball game was not yet over, and that it was into the 17^th inning, and that it would not be over until I left. Except that I was afraid to leave the bar. Literally afraid. I understood now the meaning of A.’s warning about being watched: now that I had the shoebox, I was no longer alone. In those moments—just before I left the bar—I remembered one more detail from A.’s blackened apartment, which was this: the dampness of A.’s eyes that suggested she had been crying, crying because she understood that opening that shoebox would be like breaking the seal to the blanket-covered window in her apartment, letting some terrible blank darkness seep in.

David Lynch has said that “I did not feel that Blue Velvet was so strange—in fact, I always said that it was my most normal film. It’s an American picture.” In one of the deleted sequences, “Dinner at the Williams’s,” (the images are included on the special edition DVD) Sandy (Laura Dern) and her boyfriend Mike watch television with Jeffrey in the basement. In one frame, Mrs. Williams (Sandy’s mom) brings some dessert in on a tray. In another frame, after Mike pretends to leave the room, Sandy and Jeffrey lean across their couches, the blackness of an open doorway behind them, and talk about the Dorothy Vallens case: “I’ve found out some things,” Jeffrey says, “nothing really for certain. There are some strange people involved,” and in those lines there’s a recognition that “nothing really for certain” constitutes an entire method of knowing. Or not-knowing. The detective’s job is to move forward towards the unachievable, collecting and arranging clues and evidence and testimony in the service of some truth—any truth—that will make sense of the monstrous actions of others. When A. handed me that red shoebox, which to this day remains unopened on my bookshelf, she committed a monstrous action, and that’s why she ran, ran away from her dark apartment with curtains not to keep the beasts out, but to keep them in. That’s a mystery, right there, akin to when, in 1947, Albert Einstein, in a letter to Max Born, expressed skepticism about quantum entanglement, referring to it as “spooky action at a distance.”[i]

“Spooky action at a distance.” David Lynch’s split edits, where the sound arrives before the image that creates the sound, is some distant cousin to this spooky action. And A.’s action that day—handing me the box while saying Here, it’s yours now—was in itself a weird sort of time-space game of tag, making me “It.” But was is “It”? I walked out of Zeno’s bar, finally, and the night greeted me not with the terrorizing blackness that I feared but with soft air and the smell of honeysuckle. Before gong home, I made my way back up to A.’s apartment. In the distance, in the moonlight, I saw my bike. I could tell that it had moved by someone, for it was leaning against a different tree, but even this didn’t spook me, because I understood now that my life, for some uncertain time, would be marked with small, strange occurrences like this. Carrying the shoebox beneath my arm, I approached A.’s apartment in the dark, positioning myself so that I could see the window from which the blanket had fallen. I leaned against a tree, set the shoebox at my feet, and lit up a cigarette (the first one I had smoked in years) given to me by the bartender as one of his small gestures of camaraderie. And then I waited. For what? For something to happen at the window, of course, like in any good detective story. I learned as a child never to stare for too long into an animal’s eyes, as it might awaken or provoke some dormant violence, and I thought about that as I watched the window. Was I provoking something? Was the window alive in some inscrutable way, in the same way that Julia Kristeva’s face was alive on the cover of Powers of Horror? “The unseen, unthought-of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable,” Jonathan Edwards preached, in his own, unintentional way predicting modern film editing.

At some point during the night, I began to sense that I was the watched, not the watcher. The apartment building was completely dark, except for the faint blood-orange glow of A.’s window which, for all I know, may have been a reflection of the distant sunrise. In any case, it seemed to take on the semblance of an eye, fixed in some pestilential way upon me. It was only then, my body penetrated (as absurd as this sounds) by the gaze of the window, that I realized that the shoebox A. had given me was not an object of danger, but of salvation. I scooped the box up from the ground beside me and dashed across the dark apartment lawn to my bicycle, terrified in such a way that made me laugh openly that I would be dragged back by some unseen force, and rode like a ten-year old through the empty night, one hand on the handle bars, the other clutching the shoe box to my chest, against my very own beating heart.

—————

[i] Here is the larger context of Einstein’s “spooky action” phrase in his letter to Born, dated 3 March 1947: “I cannot make a case for my attitude in physics which you would consider at all reasonable. I admit, of course, that there is a considerable amount of validity in the statistical approach which you were the first to recognize clearly as necessary given the framework of the existing formalism. I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance. I am, however, not yet firmly convinced that it can really be achieved with a continuous field theory, although I have discovered a possible way of doing this which so far seems quite reasonable. The calculation difficulties are so great that I will be biting the dust long before I myself can be fully convinced of it.” (From The Born-Einstein Letters, 1916-1955: Friendship, Politics and Physics in Uncertain Times. New York: Macmillan, 1971 [2005], p. 155.)

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