House of Leaves (36 page)

Fortunately Reston’s nausea does not last long, and he and Navidson can spend the rest of the day pushing deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

Initially, they follow the scant remains of the first team and then continue on by following their instincts. Based on the fact that there was very little evidence of the first team’s descent remaining on the stairs, Navidson determines that the neon markers and fishing line last at most six days before they are entirely consumed by the house.

When they finally make camp, both men are disheartened and exhausted. Nevertheless, each agrees to alternately serve as watch. Navidson takes the first shift, spending his time removing the dark blotched gauze around his toes—clearly a painful process—before reapplying ointment and a fresh dressing. Reston spends his time tinkering with his chair and the mount on the Arriflex.

Except for their own restlessness, neither one hears anything during the night.

Toward the end of their second day inside (making this the ninth day since Holloway’s team set out into the house), both men seem uncertain whether to continue or return.

It is only as they are making camp for the second night that Navidson hears something. A voice, maybe a cry, but so fleeting were it not for Reston’s confirmation, it probably would have been shrugged off as just a high note of the imagination.

Leaving most of their equipment behind, the two men head out in pursuit of the sound. For forty minutes they hear nothing and are about to give up when their ears are again rewarded with another distant cry. Based on the rapidly changing video time stamp, we can see another three hours passes as they weave in and out of more rooms and corridors, often moving very quickly, though never failing to mark their course with neon arrows and ample amounts of fishing line.

At one point, Navidson manages to get Tom on the radio, only to learn that there is something the matter with Karen. Unfortunately, the signal decays before he can get more details. Finally, Reston stops his wheelchair and jabs a finger at a wall. On Hi 8, we witness his gruff assertion: “How we get through it, I don’t have a clue. But that crying’s coming from the other side.”

Searching out more hallways, more turns, Navidson eventually

leads the way down a narrow corridor ending with a door. Navidson and Reston open it only to discover another corridor ending with another door. Slowly they make their way through a gauntlet of what must be close to

fifty doors (it is impossible to calculate the exact number due to the jump cuts), until Navidson discovers for the first and only time a door without a door knob. Even stranger, as he tries to push the door open, he discovers it is locked. Reston’s expression communicates nothing but incredulity. [212—See Gaston Bachelard’s
La Poétique de L’Espace
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p. 78, where he observes:

Francoise Minkowska a exposé une collection particulièrement émouvante de dessins d’enfants polonais ou juifs qui ont subi les sévices de l’occupation allemande pendant La demière
guen.
Telle enfant qui a vécu cache, a Ia moindre alerte, dans une annoire, dessine longtemps après les heures maudites, des maisons étroites, froides et fermées. Et c’est ainsi que Françoise Minkowska pane de “maisons imrnobiles,” de maisons immobilisées clans leur raideur: “Cette raideur et cette immobilité se retrouvent aussi bien a Ia
fumée
que dans les rideaux des fenêtres. Les arbres autour d’elle sont
droits,
ont l’air de Ia gander.”…

A un detail, Ia grande psychologue qu’était Francoise Minkowska teconnaissait le mouvement de la maison. Dans Ia maison dessinée par un enfant de huit ans, Françoise Minkowska note qu’à Ia porte, ii y a “une poign&; on y entre, on y habite.” Ce n’est pas simplement une maisonconstruction, “c’est une maison-habitation.” La poignée de Ia porte désigne ëvidemment une fonctionnalité. La kinesthdsie est marquee par ce signe, Si
souvent
oublid dans les dessins des enfants “rigides.”

Remarquons bien
que
Ia “poignCe” de La porte ne pourrait guère être dessinée a
l’échelle
de La maison, C’est sa fonction qui prime tout souci de grandeur. Elle traduit une fonction d’ouverture. Seal un esprit logique peut objecter qu’elle sert aussi bien
a
fermer qu’à ouvrir. Dans le regne des valeurs, la clef ferme plus qu’elle n’ouvre. La poignée ouvre plus qu’elle ne ferme.

[203—See also Dr. Helen Hodge’s
American Psychology: The Ownership Of Self
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 297 where she writes:

What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson’s comdors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any
Mysr-like
discoveries f see Chad; p. 99.] thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? or better yet: what
is
exciting? While the degree varies, ‘ are always excited by anything that engages us, influences us or more simply involves us. In those endlessly repetitive hallways and stairs, there is nothing for us to connect with. That pennanently foreign place does not excite us. It bores us. And that is that, except for the fact that there is no such thing as boredom. Boredom is really a psychic defense protecting us from ourselves, from complete paralysis, by repressing, among other things, the meaning of that place, which in this case is and always has been horror.

See also Otto Fenichel’s
1934
essay “The Psychology of Boredom” in which he describes boredom as “an unpleasurable experience of a lack of impulse.” Kierkegaard goes a little further, remarking that “Boredom, extinction, is precisely a continuity of nothingness.” While William Wordsworth in his preface for
Lyrical Ballads
(1802) writes:

The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability… [A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners
the
literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

See Sean Healy’s
Boredom,
Self and Culture
(Rutherford, NJ.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); Patricia Meyer Spacks’
Boredom: The Literary I-f istory of a State of Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and finally Celine Arlesey’s
Perversity In Dullness
…
and Vice- Versa
(Denver: Blederbiss Press, 1968).]

See also Anne Balifs article in which she quotes Dr. F. Minkowska’s comments on
De Van Gogh er
Seurat
aux dessins d’enfants,
illustrated catalogue of an exhibition held at the
Musèe Pedagogique
(Paris) 1949.]

As Navidson pulls away to re-examine the obstacle, he hears a whimper coming from the other side. Taking two steps back, he throws his shoulder into the door. It bends but does not give way. He tries again and again, each hit straining the bolt and hinges, until the fourth hit, at last, tears the hinges free, pops whatever bolt held it in place, and sends the door cracking to the floor.

Reston keeps the chair mounted Arriflex trained on Navidson and while the focus is slightly soft, as the door breaks loose, the frame gracefully accepts Jed’s ashen features as he
faces
what he has come to believe is his final moment.

This whole sequence amounts to a pretty ratty collection of cuts alternating between Jed’s Hi 8 and an equally poor view from the 16mm camera and Navidson and Reston’s Hi 8s. Nevertheless what matters most here is adequately captured: the alchemy of social contact as Jed’s rasp of terror almost instantly transforms itself into laughter and sobs of relief. In a scattering of seconds, a thirty-three year old man from Vineland, New Jersey, who loves to drink Seattle coffee and listen to Lyle Lovett with his fiancée, learns his sentence has been remitted.

He will live.

As diligent as any close analysis of the Zapruder film,
similar frame by frame examination carried
out countless times by
too
many
critics to
name here [
214—Though
still
see
Danton Blake’s
Violent Verses: Cinema’s Treatment of Death
(Indianapolis: Hackett,
1996).]
reveals how a fraction of a second later one bullet
pierced
his upper lip, blasted through the
maxillary
bone, dislodging even
fragmenting
the central
teeth,
(Reel 10; Frame 192)
and
then in the following frame
(Reel
10; Frame 193) obliterated the back side of
his
head, chunks of occipital lobe
and parietal
bone spewn out in an
instantly
senseless
pattern
uselessly
preserved
in celluloid light (Reel 10; Frames 194,
195,
196, 197, 198, 199,
200,
201,
202, 203, 204, & 205). Ample information perhaps to
track
the
trajectories
of individual skull bits
and
blood droplets,
determine
destinations, even origins, but not nearly enough information to actually ever reassemble the shatter. Here then—

the
after

math

of meaning.

A
life

üme

finished
between

the space of

two
frames.

The dark line where the

eye in

something that was never there

To
begin
with

[215—Typo. “T” should read “t” with a period following “with.”]

Ken Burns has used this particular moment to illustrate why
The Navidson Record
is so beyond Hollywood: “Not only is it gritty and dirty and raw, but look how the zoom claws after the fleeting fact. Watch how the frame does not, cannot anticipate the action. Jed’s in the lower left hand corner of the frame! Nothing’s predetermined or foreseen. It’s all painfully present which is why it’s so painfully real
.” [216—you probably guessed, not only has Ken Burns never made any such comment, he’s also never heard of
The Navidson Record
let alone Zampanô.]

Jed crumples, his moment of joy stolen by a pinkie worth of lead, leaving him dead on the floor, a black pool of blood spilling out of him.