The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (26 page)

V1 (MOUSCH): People digitize old stuff all the time!

V3 (HURT): Really? Yeah, Soraya, I get that, actually; do it for a living, right? Look, the upshot is that you do have some deliberate image degradation going on here, so—

V2 (HOLBORN): I knew it, I knew it was a fake. Thank Christ.

V3 (HURT): I’m not finished. There is image degradation, but it wasn’t done through any of the major editing programs; I’ve run your file through all of them and tested for the relevant coding, and this thing’s about as raw as digicam gets. I’m betting whoever sent this to you digitized it the old brute-force way, like a movie pirate: Physically projected the thing, recorded it with a digital camera, saved it as your .mpeg, and sent it to you as is. Whatever the distortions are, they’re either from that projection, or they were in the source clip all along.

V1 (MOUSCH): So . . . this could be a direct copy of that original clip you were talking about. The “urban legend boojum.”

V3 (HURT): Yeah, if you wanna buy into that shit.

V2 (HOLBORN): And when Laszlo Hurt tells you something’s too weird to believe. . . .

V1 (MOUSCH): Max, don’t be a dick; Laz’s doing us a favour. Right?

V2 (HOLBORN): Yeah, okay. Sorry.

V3 (HURT): (PAUSE) Way I heard, it goes back to this turn-of-thecentury murderess called Tess Jacopo. . . .

8/23/08 1902HRS

TRANSCRIPT SUSPECT INTERVIEW 51 DIVISION CASEFILE #332

PRESIDING OFFICERS D. SUSAN CORREA 156232, D. ERIC VALENS 324820

SUBJECT MAXIM HOLBORN

D.VALENS: Jacopo. That was in Boston, in the 1900s—she was a Belle Gunness-type den mother killer, right? The female H.H. Holmes.

HOLBORN: Why am I not surprised you know this?

D.CORREA: Mr. Holborn, please. Go on.

HOLBORN: The story isn’t really about Jacopo herself. What happened was, this guy who’d been corresponding with Jacopo in prison, her stalker I guess he was, he managed to bribe a journalist who was on-site at her execution into stealing a copy of the official death-photo and selling it to him. Guess he wanted something to whack off with after she was gone. Anyway, a couple weeks later this guy’s found in his flat, dead and swollen up, the Jacopo photo on his chest.

D.CORREA: How did he die?

HOLBORN: I don’t think it matters. The point is, somebody there took a photo of the photo, and that became one of the biggest murder memorabilia items of the 20th century. You know these guys, right—kinda weirdos who buy John Wayne Gacy’s clown pictures, shell out thousands to get Black Dahlia screen-test footage, ’cause they think they’ll unearth some lost snuff movie they can show all their friends. . . .

D.VALENS: I’m not seeing what this has to do with your film clip, Mr. Holborn.

HOLBORN: Okay. This is where the urban legend kicks in. See, Jacopo’s mask slipped a bit during the hanging, so you can just barely see a sliver of her eyeball, and the story says if you blow up and enhance the photo like a hundred times original size, you’re supposed to be able to see in the eyeball the reflection of what she was looking at when she died. Like an asphyx.

D.VALENS: Ass-what?

HOLBORN: It’s the word the Greeks used for the last image that gets burned on a murdered person’s retina, like a last little fragment of their soul or life-force getting trapped there.

D.CORREA: And under sufficient magnification, you’re supposed to be able to see this?

HOLBORN: “Supposed to,” yeah. Thing is, everyone who ever tried this, who actually tried blowing up their copy of the Jacopo photo? Went nuts or died. Unless they burned their photo before things got too bad. That’s supposed to be why it’s impossible to find any copies.

D.CORREA: Why? What did they see?

HOLBORN: How the fuck should I know? It’s a spook story. Maybe they saw themselves looking back at themselves, whatever. The point is . . . it’s not about what those people saw, or didn’t. It’s about the kind of voyeuristic obsession you need to go that deep into this shit. And Laszlo said that was what the clip reminded him of. Somebody trying to make some kind of, of—“mind-bomb”, was the term. An image that’d scar you so badly, the mere act of passing it on would be enough to always keep its power alive.

D.CORREA: Uh . . . why?

HOLBORN: Excellent question. Isn’t it?

From: Liat Holborn [email protected]

Date: Thursday, July 3, 10:25 AM

To: Soraya Mousch [email protected]

Subject: Max and me

Dear Soraya,

I was talking to Max last night about how we’re going to try to handle the next few months, and it came out that for whatever reason, Max still hadn’t filled you in completely on our situation. I think he finds it pretty tough to talk about, even to you. Upshot is, the last CAT-scan showed I have an advanced cranial tumour, and Dr. Lalwani thinks there’s a very good chance it could be gliomal, which (skipping all the medicobabble) is about the least good news we could get. Apparently, it’s too deep for surgery, so the only option we have is for me to go into a majorly heavy chemo program ASAP. So I’m going to be spending a lot of time in St. Michael’s, starting real soon now.

My folks’ve volunteered to foot a lot of the bill, which is great, but poor Max is feeling kind of humiliated at needing the help—and of course he totally can’t complain about it, which just makes it gall him even more. The reason I’m telling you all this is because (a) I want the pressure of keeping this a secret to be off Max, and (b) I know how much you depend on Max this time of year, and I don’t want you to think he’s bailing on you if he has to take time out for me, or that he’s finally gotten fed up with you, the Wall of Love, or your work.

(Actually, I’m pretty sure the festival’s the only thing that’s kept him stable this past little while. I hope you know how much I appreciate the support you give him.)

Could you show this e-mail to Max when you get a chance, and apologize to him for me when he blows his top at my big mouth? :) He doesn’t feel he can shout at me any more about anything, obviously. But I really think things’ll be easier once all the cards are on the table.

Thanks so much for your help, Soraya. Come by and see me soon—I want you to get some photos of me before I have to ditch the hair.

Much love and God bless,

Liat

P.S.: BTW, I’m also totally fine with accidentally seeing that thing you sent Max, that file or whatever, so tell him that, okay? Impress it on him. He seems to think it “injured” me somehow—on top of everything else. Which is just ridiculous.

I have more than enough real things to worry about right now, you know?

—L.

8/23/08 1928HRS

TRANSCRIPT SUSPECT INTERVIEW 51 DIVISION CASEFILE #332

PRESIDING OFFICERS D. SUSAN CORREA 156232, D. ERIC VALENS 324820

SUBJECT MAXIM HOLBORN

HOLBORN: We were on about the third or fourth draft of the final mix when we started splicing in the clip—

D.VALENS: Splicing? I thought you said this was purely electronic.

HOLBORN: It is, it’s just the standard term for—look, do you want me to explain or not?

D.CORREA: We do. Please. Go on.

HOLBORN: We broke the clip up into segments and spliced it in among the rest of the film in chunks; we were even going to try showing some shots on just the edge of subliminal, like three or four frames out of twenty-four. This was a few weeks ago, beginning of August. And then it started happening.

D.CORREA: What started, Max?

HOLBORN: The guy. From the clip. He started . . . appearing . . . in other parts of the film.

D.VALENS: Somebody spliced in more footage? Repeats?

HOLBORN: No, goddammit, he started popping up in pieces of footage that were already in the film! Stuff we’d gotten like weeks before, from people who never even saw the clip or knew about it. Like that performance art piece in Hyde Park? Guy walks by in the background a minute into the clip. Or the subway zombie ride, you look right at the far end of the car, there he is sitting down, and you know it’s him ’cause he’s the only one not wearing any clothes. This was stuff nobody ever shot, man! Changing in front of our fucking eyes! Christ, I saw him show up in one segment—I ran it to make sure it was clear, ran it again right away and he was just fucking there, like he’d always been in the frame. The extras were fucking walking around him. . . .

(FIVE SECOND PAUSE)

D.CORREA: Could it have been some kind of computer virus? Something that came in with your original video file and reprogrammed the files it was spliced into?

HOLBORN: Are you shitting me?!

D.VALENS: Dial it back, Holborn. Right—now.

HOLBORN: Okay, sorry, but—no. CGI like that takes hours to render on a system ten times the size of mine, and that’s for every single appearance. A virus carrying that kinda programming would be fifty times bigger than the file it rode in on and wouldn’t run on my system anyway.

Besides, it kept getting worse. He didn’t just show up in new segments, he’d take more and more prominent places in segments he’d already, corrupted, I guess? Goes from five seconds in the background to two minutes in the medium frame. I’d get people to resend me their submissions, I’d splice ’em in to replace the old ones and inside of a minute he’s back in the action. It was like the faster we tried to cut him out the harder he worked at—I don’t know—entrenching himself.

ERROR MESSAGE

404 Not Found

The webpage you were trying to access (“http://www.kerato-oblation.org/ cadavrexquis”) is no longer available. It may have been removed by the user or suspended by administrators for terms-of-use violation. Contact your ISP for more information.

TRANSCRIPT CHAT LOG

08/07/08 0344-0346

: max, wtf

: the sites gone. like GONE

: did u do that? ur only other one w/password

: wtf max, were supposed 2 b live tomorrow WHY

: u there?

: max, u there? need 2 talk.

: laz sez he maybe has an idea who sent the file, and why. need 2

: im not going 2 b here, back

: don’t know when.

: liat had episode. bad. in hosp. st mikes.

: u ever want 2 talk in person, that’s where ill b.

: (User max_hdb has disconnected)

: (User sor16muse has disconnected)

8/23/08 1937HRS

TRANSCRIPT SUSPECT INTERVIEW 51 DIVISION CASEFILE #332

PRESIDING OFFICERS D. SUSAN CORREA 156232, D. ERIC VALENS 324820

SUBJECT MAXIM HOLBORN

D.VALENS: So who was that guy? In the film?

HOLBORN: No idea. It’s not like he
—

D.CORREA: And what’s it got to do with Tess Jacopo?

HOLBORN: Nothing, directly. But it’s like Internet memes, man; Laszlo understood that. Stuff gets around. Maybe this guy heard about the thing with the photo, and thought: Oh hey, wonder how that’d work with a moving picture. Maybe he just stumbled across the concept all on his lonesome, or by accident: I don’t know. But . . . he did it.

D.VALENS: Did WHAT, Holborn?

HOLBORN: He put himself in there. Made himself an asphyx.

D.CORREA: So he could live forever.

HOLBORN: Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe just . . . so he could . . . not die. Maybe—

(TEN SECOND PAUSE)

HOLBORN: Maybe he was sick. Like, really sick. Or sick in the head. Or both.

Maybe it just seemed like a good idea, given the alternative.

At the time.

D.CORREA: So what did happen to the Wall of Love mainframe, Max?

HOLBORN: I crashed it. (BEAT) I mean—I told people there was a big Avid crash and the whole server got wiped . . . actually, I used a magnet. Like Dean Winchester in that “Ghostfacers!” SUPERNATURAL episode.

D.VALENS: What?

HOLBORN: Doesn’t matter. Ask me why.

D.CORREA: . . . why?

HOLBORN: Because I thought maybe I could trap him there, like he must have trapped himself inside that loop. Because he probably didn’t think about that, right? When he was doing it. How it wasn’t likely anybody was really going to watch that sort of shit, once they figured out what it was, let alone show it in public. How probably it would just end up left in the can, passed from collector to collector, never really watched at all, except by one person at a time. One . . . very disturbed . . . other person. I thought I could stop him from going any further, so I crashed my own mainframe, without telling Soraya. But. . . .

D.VALENS: . . . it didn’t work.

HOLBORN: Well. Would I even be here, if it did?

CYBER-CRIME OFFICE, TORONTO POLICE SERVICE 51 DIVISION
EXCERPTED REPORT

DETECTIVE LEWIS McMASTER (CYBERCRIME) SUPERVISING
DETECTIVES ERIC VALENS, SUSAN CORREA (HOMICIDE) CONTRIBUTING

Casefile #332: Notes

INITIAL CONTACT
:

Aug 14 2008 – CyberCrime received anonymous email sent from Hotmail account created that morning, with copy of “suicide guy” .mpg attached. Flagged as “harmful matter.” Email noted .mpg was sent to kerato-oblation. org as experimental film clip submission; identified source of original message, webmail address [email protected].

[Hotmail account eventually traced through Internet café to Laszlo Hurt, known member of local Toronto “collector” circuit; Hurt now missing, presumed deceased. –EV, SC]

INVESTIGATION: August 15 – Flagged file screened and sent for forensic analysis, results inconclusive. Source of original submission email traced to Googleowned server in Newark, New Jersey, United States of America.

August 16 – Established contact with Detective Herschel Gohan of Newark CyberCrime Unit, who persuaded server admins to cooperate with investigation; message back-tracked and triangulated to establish physical location and address of originator machine. Address is confirmed as unit #B325 of E-Z-SHELF storage locker facility, 1400 South Woodward Lane, Newark. Facility manager, Mr. Silvio Galbi, provides name of renter (“John Smith”), confirms unit prepaid for six months with cash. Mr. Galbi refuses to cooperate with search request without a warrant.

August 18 – Warrant issued for search and seizure operation at 1400 South Woodward, Unit #B325, by Judge Harriet Lindstrom. Operation executed under supervision of Detective Gohan. Contents of unit as follows:

–

Unclothed body of unidentified male, Caucasian, est. premortem age mid-20s, seated on floor in pool of waste.

–

One (1) empty film canister.

–

One (1) 35mm film projector, set up to project upon unit interior wall.

–

One (1) 35mm film reel mounted in projector, est. 15 minutes in length, confirmed on-site to be original of transmitted .mpg file.

–

One (1) white cotton sheet at base of same interior wall; tape on corners indicates sheet was hung on wall.

–

One (1) SONY video camera, with tripod, set up focused on same interior wall.

–

One (1) TV monitor, with built-in VCR and DVD player.

–

One (1) DELL laptop computer, with built-in wi-fi modem.

–

One (1) Coleman oil lantern, fuel supply depleted.

–

Pile of empty water bottles.

–

One (1) Black & Decker emergency brand power generator.

–

Fifty (50) gallon gasoline containers, empty.

–

Two (2) six-socket power bar outlets.

–

One (1) tube-gun of industrial caulking sealant.

Galbi confirms he accepted illegal payment to lock unit on “Smith’s” written instructions without confirming contents, in violation of state safety and insurance regulations. Galbi arrested and cited.

FORENSICS
:
Examination of laptop hard drive reveals series of webcam capture
s
which suggest basic chronology of events as follows
:

–

Unidentified male (UM) arrives in unit roughly two weeks before email sent to kerato-oblation.org.

–

UM uses video camera to record digital copy of original film reel from wall projection (distortion visible in .mpg file caused by loose fabric in sheet).

–

UM uses laptop to program recorded file into continuous video loop on DVD.

–

UM arranges laptop and webcam to face DVD monitor, setting DVD on continuous play and webcam on indefinite record.

–

UM remains seated in front of monitor for majority of remaining time, urinating and defecating in place. Time-signatures confirm he created .mpg file, wrote submission email, then waited until death was imminent to send it, on date above.

–

Final action of UM on morning of death was to use sealant gun to caulk up door, rendering unit virtually airtight. This prevented odors from escaping unit, and retarded decomposition by hindering evaporation of fluids from the body.

AUTOPSY: Body shows no sign of struggle or restraint. Autopsy reveals primary cause of death as oxygen deprivation, aggravated by starvation and dehydration. Probable date of death on or around June 25 2008 (date on which .mpg file was sent to kerato-oblation.org). Corneas of victim preserved by airtight environment, and found to be deformed on both exterior and interior surfaces, damage suggesting both physical and heat trauma to tissue. Computer reconstruction of deformation suggests artificial origin, as pattern appears to portray a fixed image: the face of suicide victim in original film, in close-up still frame. Pathologists unable to establish cause or method of corneal deformation.

RECOMMENDATIONS
:
Unidentified male’s selection of Holborn/Mousch as recipients suggest
s
foreknowledge, possible contact. Recommend either Holborn or Mousc
h
be brought in for further questioning
.

From: Det. Herschel Gohan [email protected]

Date: Thursday, August 21, 7:20 AM

To: Det. Lewis McMaster [email protected]

Subject: Notification: Evidence compromise

Lewis –

Bad news. We had a fire in our station evidence locker last night; looks like some meth really past its sell-by date may have spontaneously cooked off. Nobody hurt, but we lost some critical evidence on a number of cases, including, sorry to say, your film-nut-in-the-storage-unit material. The film reel’s melted, the laptop motherboard is gone, and most of the other equipment’s unusable now. I’ve attached .jpgs to document the losses; I’m hoping this’ll be enough for your dept. to maintain provenance on your own stuff.

Sorry again; call me if you need to know anything not covered by the pictures.

—Herschel

8/23/08 1928HRS TRANSCRIPT SUSPECT INTERVIEW 51 DIVISION CASEFILE #332 PRESIDING OFFICERS D. SUSAN CORREA 156232, D. ERIC VALENS 324820

SUBJECT MAXIM HOLBORN

HOLBORN: So I went home after crashing the mainframe, and I didn’t go upstairs, because I thought my wife was asleep. And I wanted to let her sleep, because . . . she’d been in pretty bad shape, you know? She’d only just finished her chemo, she hadn’t gotten a lot of . . . sleep. . . .
But then I turned on TCM, to relax,
and they were playing Richard Burton’s adaptation of ‘Dr. Faustus,’
which was made the year before I was born, and
—
in the scene in the Vatican? Where Faustus is throwing pies at the Pope?
I saw him. That guy.