House of Leaves (4 page)

Interview
magazine quoted Harvey Weinstein as saying, “It is what it
is
.”
[9—Mirjana Gortchakova’s “Home Front” in
Gentleman’s Quarterly,
v.
65,
October
1995,
p.
224.]

The Navidson Record
now stands as part of this country’s cultural experience and yet in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have seen it, the film continues to remain an enigma. Some insist it must be true, others believe it is a trick on par with the Orson Welles radio romp
The War of the Worlds.
Others could care less, admitting that either way
The Navidson Record
is a pretty good tale. Still many more have never even heard of it.

These days, with the unlikely prospect of any sort of post-release resolution or revelation, Navidson’s film seems destined to achieve at most cult status. Good story telling alone will guarantee a healthy sliver of popularity in the years to come but its inherent strangeness will permanently bar it from any mainstream interest.

II

The labours of men of genius, however

erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in

ultimately turning to the solid advantage

of mankind.

—
Mary Shelley

The Navidson Record
actually contains two films: the one Navidson made, which everyone remembers, and the one he set out to make, which very few people ever detect. While easily overshadowed by the finished film, the filmmaker’s original intentions provide an early context in which to view the peculiar properties of the house later on.

In many ways, the opening of
The Navidson Record
,
shot back in April of 1990, remains one of the more disturbing sequences because it so effectively denies itself even the slightest premonition about what will soon take place on Ash Tree Lane.

Not once during those initial minutes does Navidson indicate he knows anything about the impending nightmare he and his entire family are about to face. He is wholly innocent, and the nature of the house, at least for a little while, lies beyond his imagination let alone his suspicions.

Of course not everyone remains in accordance with this assessment. Dr. Isaiah Rosen believes, “Navidson’s a fraud from frame one and his early posturing puts the entire work at risk.”
[10—Isaiah
Rosen. Ph.D..
Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus
(Baltimore: Eddie Hapax Press, 1995), p. 73.]
Rosen assumes the beginning is just a case of “bad acting” performed by a man who has already envisioned the rest of the film. Consequently Rosen seriously undervalues the importance of Navidson’s initial intentions.

All too often major discoveries are the unintended outcome of experiments or explorations aimed at achieving entirely different results. In Navidson’s case, it is impossible to disregard his primary goal, especially since it served as progenitor or at the very least the “near origin” to all that followed. Rosen’s presumptions
[
11—Not the first and definitely not the last time
Zampanô
implies that
The Navidson Record
exists.]
lead him to dismiss the cause for the result, thereby losing sight of the complex and rewarding relationship which exists between the two.

“It’s funny,” Navidson tells us at the outset. “I just want to create a record of how Karen and I bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children. Sort of see how everything turns out. No gunfire, famine, or flies. Just lots of toothpaste, gardening and people stuff. Which is how I got the Guggenheim Fellowship and the NEA Media Arts Grant.

Maybe because of my past they’re expecting something different, but I just thought it would be nice to see how people move into a place and start to inhabit it. Settle in, maybe put down roots, interact, hopefully understand each other a little better. Personally, I just want to create a cozy little outpost for me and my family. A place to drink lemonade on the porch and watch the sun set.”

Which is almost literally how
The Navidson Record
begins, with Will Navidson relaxing on the porch of his small, old-style heritage house, enjoying a glass of lemonade, watching the sun turn the first few minutes of daytime into gold. Despite Rosen’s claim, nothing about him seems particularly devious or false. Nor does he appear to be acting. In fact he is a disarmingly pleasant man, lean, attractive,
slowly edging through his 40s, [12—In his article “Years of Those” in
The New Republic,
v. 213, November 20,
1995, p.
33-39, Helmut Kereincrazch puts Navidson’s age at forty-eight.]
determined once and for all to stay in and explore the quieter side of life.

At least initially he succeeds, providing us with pristine glimpses of the Virginia countryside, the rural neighborhood, purple hills born on the fringe of night, before moving past these establishing shots and focusing more closely on the process of moving into the house itself, unrolling pale blue oriental rugs, arranging and rearranging furniture, unpacking crates, replacing light bulbs and hanging pictures, including one of his own prizewinning photographs. In this way, Navidson not only reveals how each room is occupied, but how everyone has helped apply his or her own personal texture.

At one point, Navidson takes a break to interview his two children. These shots are also impeccably composed. Son and daughter bathed in sunlight. Their warmly lit faces framed against a cool backdrop of green lawn and trees.

His five year old daughter Daisy approves of their new house. “It’ s nice here,” she giggles shyly, though she is not too shy to point out the absence of stores like “Bloomydales.”

Chad who is three years older than Daisy is a little more self- conscious, even serious. Too often his response has been misread by those aware of the film’s ending. It is important to realize, however, that at this point in time Chad has no sense what the future holds. He is merely expressing anxieties natural for a boy his age who has just been uprooted from his home in the city and deposited in a vastly different environment.

As he tells his father, what he misses most is the sound of traffic. It seems the noise made by trucks and taxi cabs created for him a kind of evening lullaby. Now he finds it difficult to fall asleep in the quiet.

“What about the sound of crickets?” Navidson asks.

Chad shakes his head.

“It’s not the same. I dunno. Sometimes it’s just silent… No sound at all.”

“Does that scare you?”

Chad nods.

“Why?” asks his father.

“It’s like something’s waiting.”

“What?”

Chad shrugs. “I dunno Daddy. I j
ust like the sound of traffic.” [l3—The question of lengthy narrative descriptions In what is purportedly a critical exegesis is addressed in Chapter 5: footnote
67.
— Ed.]

Of course, Navidson’s pastoral take on his family’s move hardly reflects the far more complicated and significant impetus behind his project—namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion Karen Green. While both have been perfectly content not to many, Navidson’s constant assignments abroad have led to increased alienation and untold personal difficulties. After nearly eleven years of constant departures and brief returns, Karen has made it clear that Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his family. Ultimately unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into a subject for documentation.

None of this, however, is immediately apparent. In fact it requires some willful amnesia of the more compelling sequences ahead, if we are to detect the subtle valences operating between Will and Karen; or as Donna York phrased it, “the way they talk to each other, the way they look after each other, and
of course the way they don’t.” [14—Donna York’s “In Twain” in
Redbook,
v. 186, January 1996, p. 50.]

Navidson, we learn, began his project by mounting a number of Hi 8s around the house and equipping them with motion detectors to turn them on and off whenever someone enters or leaves the room. With the exception of the three bathrooms, there are cameras in every corner of the house. Navidson also keeps on hand two 16mm Arriflexes and his usual battery of 35mm cameras.

Nevertheless, as everyone knows, Navidson’s project is pretty crude. Nothing, for instance, like the constant eye of CCTV systems routinely installed in local banks or the lavish equipment and multiple camera operators required on MTV’s
Real World.
The whole effort would seem very home movie-ish at best were it not for the fact that Navidson is an exceptionally gifted photographer who understands how one sixtieth of a second can yield an image worth more than twenty-four hours of continuous footage. He is not interested in showing all the coverage or attempting to capture some kind of catholic or otherwise mythical view. Instead he hunts for moments, pearls of the particular, an unexpected phone call, a burst of laughter, or some snippet of conversation which might elicit from us an emotional spark and perhaps even a bit of human understanding.

More often than not, the near wordless fragments Navidson selects reveal what explication could only approximate. Two such instances seem especially sublime, and because they are so short and easy to miss, it is worth reiterating their content here.

In the first one, we see Navidson climbing to the top of the stairs with a crate full of Karen’s things. Their bedroom is still cluttered with lamps in bubble wrap and assorted unpacked suitcases and garbage bags full of clothes. Nothing hangs on the walls. Their bed is not made. Navidson finds some room on top of a bureau to set down his load. He is about to leave when some invisible impulse stops him. He takes Karen’s jewelry box out of the crate, lifts the hand-carved horn lid, and removes the inner tray. Unfortunately, whatever he sees inside is invisible to the camera.

When Karen walks in carrying a basket stuffed with bedsheets and pillow cases, Navidson has already turned his attention to an old hairbrush lying next to some perfume bottles.

“What are you doing?” she immediately asks.

“This is nice,” he says, removing a big clump of her blonde hair from the tines and tossing it into the wastebasket.

“Give me that,” Karen demands. “Just you watch, one day I’ll go bald, then won’t you be sorry you threw that away.”

“No,” Navidson replies with a grin.

It is unnecessary to dwell here on the multiple ways in which these few seconds demonstrate h
ow much Navidson values Karen, [15—See “The Heart’s Device” by Frances Leiderstahi in
Science,
v.
265
August
5,
1994, p. 741; Joel Watkin’s “Jewelry Box, Perfume, and Hair” in
Mademoiselle,
v. 101 May, 1995, p. 178-181; as well as Hardy Taintic’s more ironic piece “Adult Letters and Family Jewels”
The American Scholar,
v.
65
spring 1996, p. 219-241]
except to highlight how despite his sarcasm and apparent disregard for her things the scene itself represents the exact opposite. Using image and exquisitely controlled edits, Navidson has in effect preserved her hair, called into question his own behavior and perhaps in some ways contradicted his own closing remark, which as Samuel T. Glade has pointed out could refer to either “watch,” “b
ald,” or “sorry” or all three.
[16—Samuel T. Glade’s “Omens & Signs” in
Notes From Tomorrow
ed. Lisbeth Bailey (Delaware: Tma Essay Publications, 1996).]
Even better, Navidson has permitted the action and subtlety of the composition to represent the profound sentiments at work without the molestations of some ill-conceived voice-over or manipulative soundtrack.

In keeping with this approach, the second moment also does without explanations or disingenuous musical cues. Navidson simply concentrates on Karen Green. Once a model with the Ford Agency in New York, she has since put behind her the life of Milan fashion shoots and Venetian Masques in order to raise her two children. Considering how beautiful she appears on the dreadful Hi 8 tapes, it is hardly surprising editors frequently relied on slides of her pouty lips, high cheek bones, and hazel eyes to sell their magazines.

Early on, Navidson gave Karen a Hi 8 which he asked her to treat like a journal. Her video entries—which Navidson promised to view only after the film was shot and then only if she agreed—reveal a thirty-seven year old woman who worries about leaving the city, growing old, keeping trim, and staying happy. Nevertheless, despite their purely confessional content, it is not a journal entry but rather an unguarded moment captured on one of the house Hi 8s that demonstrates Karen’s almost bewildering dependence on Navidson.

Karen Sits with Chad and Daisy in the living room. The children are in the midst of a candle-making project which involves several empty egg cartons, a dozen long lengths of wick, a bucket of plaster of Paris and a jar full of crystal wax. Using a pair of red handled scissors, Daisy cuts the wicks down to three inch pieces and then presses them down into an egg cup which Chad in turn fills with a layer of plaster followed by a layer of the tiny wax beads. The result is some kind of candle with plenty of goop to go around, most of it ending up on the children’s hands. Karen helps brush the hair out of her daughter’s eyes lest she try to do it herself and end up smearing plaster all over her face. And yet even though Karen keeps Chad from overfilling the molds or Daisy from hurting herself with the scissors,
she still cannot resist looking out the window every couple of minutes. The
sound of a passing truck causes her to glance away. Even if there is no sound, the weight of a hundred seconds always turns her head.

Though clearly a matter of opinion, Karen’s gaze seems just as lost as it is “surfeit with love and longing.”
[17—Max C. Garten’s “100 Looks” in
Vogue,
v. 185, October 1995, p. 248.]
The reasons are in part answered when at last Navidson’s car pulls into the driveway. Karen hardly attempts to contain her relief. She instantly leaps up from the mini candle factory and dashes from the room. Seconds later—no doubt thinking better of herself— she returns.

“Daisy, hold off using the scissors until I get back.”