Innocents and Others (12 page)

CARRIE GETS A GIFT

Will's band was the second to last to go on. It would be midnight before the set started. Carrie waited, sipping a beer at the bar, trying to bide her time.

“This is Carrie. Carrie, this is Mike,” said Will. All night he had introduced her to his music friends. She had been with Will for months, and still there were new friends to meet. They were at a place called Enid's in Greenpoint, and everyone knew Will. They looked at her closely, not unkindly, as though they thought it was great that Will had found someone. Will was six years older than Carrie, and he hadn't had a serious girlfriend since a big breakup three years ago. Despite being in a band, he was not rock-star handsome. He was a little heavy, and he was losing his hair. Carrie didn't find him attractive at first, but he quickly grew on her. He was very funny, and, most appealingly, he was attracted to her, every inch of her. The more she knew Will, the sexier he became.

They had met when she was the crew for a short film made by her college classmate Lindsay. They all worked crew on one another's projects. Will was a friend of Lindsay's, and she had recruited him to act. He was really good, playing a kind of savvy loser, a role Will was born to play. Carrie and Will talked about music. Or rather he mentioned his band rather proudly, and Carrie told him she pre
ferred opera and musicals. He invited her to a gig, and she surprised herself by showing up and even dancing a little. She bought all three of the band's albums (released on a local indie label, but released), and she listened carefully to each one. Will was an accomplished songwriter, witty and poetic. But the thing she loved best about Will, what really struck her, was his lack of indifference. So many guys she met were cool and, well, uninterested. She always felt she had to hide her enthusiasm. Carrie just fell in love with people, that was her way. She knew it frightened men. Will: not frightened. Will met her enthusiasm and exceeded it. For instance, he collected vintage ephemera, and he would write her long notes in black ink on old ads or toy packaging that ironically played off whatever he wrote in his note. She soon had a collection of love notes, and all together they looked of a piece, like an art project.

Carrie drank her beer and congratulated herself on her own instincts. She never understood the appeal of unrequited love. It was much healthier to love someone who loved you back. She liked being attended to. He called her every day. He met her after class and walked her home. He bought her dinner (albeit at a cheap Polish diner, but still). And after they spent a few weeks together, they both declared themselves in love. Loving Will made Carrie feel happy. Now she didn't have to worry or guess. She had Will.

The band finally went on at 12:45. Carrie rallied herself, and Will dedicated a song to her. They went back to his place, a one-bedroom railroad walk-up. In the winter, it was either freezing or way overheated from the clanking steam heat. When she complained, Will sang, “Oh my California baby,” which was part of a song he had written for her. But the apartment—god. It had mice and was very dark. There were gates on the five windows: three in the bedroom and two small ones in the kitchen that went to the fire escape. It was spacious,
but the space was awkward. The middle “living room” section was full of band gear. She thought it funny that they both had so much gear; so much stuff was needed.

Will made her a late meal of a hamburger with a glass of red wine. He handed her a wrapped box.

“What's this?” Carrie said, the first bite of food waking her and making her suddenly hungry.

“A birthday present,” he said.

“My birthday is two months from now.”

“A Saturday night present, then.”

She unwrapped the small felt box. Inside was a clear plastic heart on a chain. The heart had bent gold wire embedded in it that spelled the word
Sweetheart.

“Oh,” she said.

“Do you know what it is?” Will asked.

“It looks antique,” she said.

“It's a piece of sweetheart jewelry from World War II. The Lucite heart is made from the windshield of a fighter plane. Handmade. Some soldier made it for his girl back home so she would remember him. Like trench art and love tokens.”

Carrie put it on. “I love it.”

Will smiled. “I will get you more.”

“Thank you,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him.

In the morning she picked up the heart from the side table and watched it spin on its chain. She pulled the chain over her head and felt it bump against her breasts as she moved. When she got back to her apartment, she hung it over her desk so she would see it every day as a reminder of how strong love and longing could be. Someone made this by hand for his love as he waited for whatever fate held for him. He was far away but their love would endure.
People need forget-me-nots and mementos so they remember they are loved.

But the opposite idea was true too. That all love ends. Why was Will able to buy this cherished object, this marker of some long-past connection between two people, in an antiques store? At some point there had to be an ending, a death or a breakup, and it got tossed in a box to be given away or sold.

PORTRAIT OF DEKE

Meadow's desire to make a film returned to her as she and Deke sat up one night. They'd had a couple of drinks, and Deke was smoking a cigarette. Young Deke was such a beauty that sometimes it was hard to hear what he said because his prettiness upstaged him. But talk he did: one of Deke's characteristics was to be quiet and retiring during the sober light of day and to transform, Mr. Hyde–like, in the night. Meadow liked him this way: unspooling and unable to hold back as he told her everything about his young life. He smoked and drank and added another clause to a long endless string. Deke had a voice she liked to listen to, a face she liked to watch. After an hour of watching and listening (in-and-out listening, looking really), Meadow started to film him. Just picked up her camera and shot a three-minute silent film of him as he talked.

“And then I go— Wait, are you filming me?” Deke said.

“Yeah,” Meadow said.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“As you no doubt know, no face was ever better built for a viewfinder than yours,” she said, and Deke laughed.

“So I go, are you going to pierce it? And he goes, it only hurts for a second, but there will be a lot of blood—”

Deke moved his face a lot when he spoke, eyebrows furrowed, lips
twisted. His drunkenness was making him silly, and with his large eyes he looked like an animated creature, a cartoon. Not the beauty she expected. She put her camera down.

“Why did you stop?” he said, looking at her, the animation now toward a frown.

Meadow held up another pack of film.

“Oh lord,” he said.

“And no sound,” she said.

“This will never do,” he said, his eyes rolling and his voice in some theatrical zone between joking and serious. He was imitating someone without knowing it. An imitation of some fake gay man in a bad movie. So an imitation of an imitation. Meadow loaded the camera and aimed it at him and when she began to film, he got back into telling his story. He had waited for her camera. The fakey theatrical element was still there, but it almost always is when you shoot someone in three-minute segments. It isn't long enough to shake off the fake, but it is long enough to do something to the person being filmed. Depending on the person, of course.

In high school when Meadow got her first real movie camera, she wanted to make films like Andy Warhol's screen tests. She set up a tripod in front of a sheet in her garage. She lit it with three stark, hard lights so there were no shadows to hide in. Unlike Warhol's, her tests would have color and sound. Still only fifty feet of film, or three minutes. It was a kid's project, simple and derivative. Film various people doing nothing. Use the same background and precise setup each time. The person on a stool, the camera four feet away on a tripod. The exact same harsh lighting. Then press record and film them for three minutes. Meadow thought her big variation on Warhol—aside from the addition of sound and color—was that she wouldn't slow the film down to four minutes the way Warhol did. She would
show her faces in real time. It seemed a little like cheating to her to slow the film down, as if the audience must endure something the subject and the filmmaker did not. She wanted to experience time, and the discomfort of that duration would be the same for everyone. Three minutes felt long indeed, and she imagined that some people would get very uncomfortable. Being filmed doing nothing required composure that not everyone had. Which is why she was interested in the first place.

Meadow knew what it felt like because she filmed herself first. She stared into the lens of the camera and did not move. She resisted the urge to entertain the camera, to do something. She would be a statue, like Gerard Malanga's Warhol screen test, not a collection of twitchy fake emoting like Dennis Hopper's screen test. She refused.

She knew her screen test concept was a little too obvious, even for a high school kid, but it didn't go as she had expected in a number of ways.

First she filmed Carrie. Carrie smiled and talked to her the whole time
(Is it on? Should I look into the camera? It's funny, when I was a little kid I used to hate it when my mom would make a movie of me. Whatever I was doing I would stop as soon as I saw the camera . . .
)
. Meadow did not respond but watched her closely, arms crossed, face neutral. It wasn't a dialogue. This didn't faze Carrie. Right away she relaxed into stories of her mother sneaking up on her.
(I could feel the camera on me like a rash. I just knew I was being filmed . . .)

“Okay, that's it. Film is done,” Meadow said.

“Three minutes up already?” Carrie said. “I can go longer if you want.”

“Fuck you,” Meadow said. Carrie laughed.

But other people were not as comfortable as Carrie or as stubborn as Meadow. Meadow's mother, for instance, sat with a rigid smile on
her face. Impossible to sustain, it melted away and she grew older in seconds. Her father fidgeted and did not hide his irritation
(this stool is uncomfortable, you know)
. But he tried to be a good sport and gamely stuck it out.

Meadow asked a few friends from school to do it, and to her surprise everyone she asked said yes. Many of the girls moved their heads as if they were in front of a mirror. The three-quarter turn of the face and the look back. The slide of hair in front of the eyes. It was a photo shoot, and they had practiced for the gaze of a camera since they were eight. Some of the boys she asked were the same way: actory, striking various poses. One sang a song a cappella. Then it started to happen. Kids she didn't even know asked to be filmed. Everyone wanted a screen test. She shot two a day after school for weeks. She thought the volunteers were self-selected extroverts, so she sought out kids beyond the film and drama people: the punk rock kids, the skateboarders, the math nerds. Everyone said yes. Even one of the basketball players told her he wanted to be filmed.

She also noticed that although many people readily agreed to be filmed or volunteered themselves, some of the subjects didn't enjoy the actual filming as much as they expected. A number of them started out playing up to the camera and then appeared a little bored as they waited out the clock. They didn't seem to experience the filming as something challenging the way Meadow did. It was more of a nuisance. A very small group hated it, and of these, one became very upset by the filming. Lisa Helprin had bad skin, but she was still fairly pretty. Her long hair fell in her face, and she kept playing with it as Meadow filmed. She looked down, and then she looked up at the camera with a wince. She looked at Meadow, but Meadow was behind the camera staring back, unmoving. Lisa's eyes darted down again and then back up at Meadow. Lisa started to bite her lip. Her
eye twitched. What was she thinking about? One minute was up, and Lisa looked a little sweaty. She breathed out loudly, almost a sigh, and put her hand on her head as she heavily breathed in.

Lisa looked up again, now a little annoyed, almost angry. Meadow stared back. Lisa mesmerized her; Meadow could watch her all day. Then Meadow saw Lisa's eyes redden and start to tear up. She finally jumped up and ran out of the frame.

“Sorry,” she shouted as she stumbled out the door, but Meadow didn't look up from the stool where Lisa had sat. Then the roll ran out. Three minutes. Lisa Helprin's would be the best screen test by far.

Two other subjects also walked off before the three minutes were up. Some others stayed but looked deeply uncomfortable for the last minute. Uneasy, nervous laughs. One person turned his back to the camera. He was so hostile that she half-expected him to smash the camera to the ground like Frank Sinatra. Meadow began to feel that her camera was a magic machine that made people reveal themselves whether they liked it or not. Some people could resist and control it, while others quickly unraveled. She suspected that if she had longer than three minutes, and if the subjects didn't know how long the shoot would last, she could undo anyone.

After she had thirty-two screen tests, she spliced them together in four twenty-four-minute reels, eight screen tests per reel. Then she showed them in one of the mini-auditoriums at school for her eleventh-grade end-of-the-year project. It never occurred to Meadow that anyone who agreed to be filmed would feel any differently after the experience of being filmed, even the people who left. Everyone who came to the screening claimed to love it, but many people left after the first reel was done. Many more left after the second. And by the last reel, the audience that remained were mostly teachers and some of the subjects who were still waiting to see their screen tests.
In the end, Meadow thought it was more interesting to make than to watch. And she decided her whole senior project would investigate the subject of watching the screen. What makes something compelling to her? If it is only narrative, then repetition should make it boring, right? Once the narrative is known, it has to grow less interesting. So slowly she came up with her own test. She had the idea of watching her favorite film over and over, night and day. She knew that Godard learned about film by watching Bresson's
Pickpocket
ten times in a row, over and over. And Orson Welles learned everything by watching John Ford's
Stagecoach
twenty times in a row. She needed to do something like that, for she was convinced that endurance tests revealed that there is no such thing as “familiar.” The longer you looked at a person or a thing you knew, the stranger it became. Now Meadow saw a chance for another kind of endurance test.

Meadow's proposition to Deke (but she wasn't really proposing, she was telling) was simple. She would set her camera on the tripod and film him all night long. She had read about Shirley Clarke's
Portrait of Jason
although she had never seen it. Clarke made the film in one twelve-hour block, letting Jason talk with occasional questions thrown at him. She later edited it down to 102 minutes. Meadow wanted to make a film that allowed enough continuous time for the subject—no matter how comfortable—to come undone. Then they would keep going and see what happened next. Clarke used continuous sound but the visuals of the film went black periodically when she had to change rolls of film. Meadow decided she would go to the city and borrow Carrie's Betacam video camera so she would have two. She would film on video so she could shoot thirty minutes without having to change the tape. She would set up two tripods next to each other. When one was almost done, she would press record on the other. This way, she could shoot continuously all night long. All she
would do was edit the pieces together, and every thirty minutes there would be a slight jump, a few seconds lost, a marginally different angle as she went from one camera's tape to the other's. She would go all night and show it as an eight-hour video. She would not direct Deke, but she wouldn't pretend she wasn't there either. She would hand him a drink or even sit with her back to the camera in the foreground. She wanted it to be a long night with Deke. And she wanted to see what it would do to Deke. And to her.

“Yes,” said Deke. “Let's do it.”