The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (30 page)

“She wanted to get the doctor from the other camp, but after what we’d done I thought we’d be in for a nasty reception from the wounded fisherman’s tribe. I was absolutely against it. I convinced her that the arrow, which we had left behind, was a fishing arrow and would not be poisoned. Finally, she agreed, and decided to nurse him herself. She went into that hut and, well, I have my own ideas about the events that followed, bizarre as they might seem to you now, in the light of a Parisian day. Things were different there. It was all a little surreal.
Our
light, filtered by the roof of the rain forest, was of a sickly, greenish hue, and shadows moved back and forth through it, like phantoms. There were the constant murmur of insects and sudden confrontations with amphibians and reptiles, which seemed to appear on trees, in the grass, as if by magic. The whole place had a sense of the fantastic about it.

“Perhaps the arrowhead
had
been tipped with some kind of substance? Anyway, McArthur went into a state of fever. I heard him yelling occasionally, between bouts of absolute silence. Most of his complaints were concerned with being too hot, or too cold, but I also heard him shouting about the ‘snake’ and the ‘river’—and following these cries, the low, soft voice of Denise, telling him it was all right, she would protect him. I didn’t go into the hut. They had no need of me.

“Of course, fever can bring on hallucinations during bouts of delirium, but I believe it was more than that—something quite extraordinary was happening to McArthur. The mind is a delicate mechanism—if that’s the right analogy—and once you tamper with its intricacy, its balance, it can respond in strange ways, playing havoc with reality. As I said before, I have my own ideas—ideas about memories and self-protection.

“The mind is like a camera, recording memories, which are never projected. Short films, locked away and only replayed internally, so there is never any doubt of their unreality. I say
never
, but I think in McArthur’s case, there was.

“When McArthur was yelling about the snake, I think he was talking about the anaconda we had seen basking on the river bank a few days earlier. From the canoe we had watched it uncoil its enormous length, as thick as a man’s thigh in places, and slip into the river. McArthur had been petrified. He thought the creature might come towards the canoe and he was shaking so much there was a danger of the canoe overturning.

“It didn’t. It swam away, upriver—slow, sinuous movements through the brown water, its blunt head showing just above the surface.

“I think that McArthur’s mind was replaying this encounter, projecting it and superimposing it on the actual scene—the interior of the hut. A sort of double-exposure effect, which had him believing that the snake was
in
there with him and as real as everything else around him.”

Cartier paused as a waiter passed our table, as if he did not want any eavesdroppers to hear what he had to say next. Once the man was out of earshot, he continued.

“He was projecting, not just memories of the snake, though, but longer, deeper memories, which he had buried to keep from the light. These too began to emerge, to superimpose themselves on the dim scene within the hut. Memories evoke not only recognition of their familiarity, but emotions. Just as the snake stirred some primal fear within him, those older memories aroused a forbidden desire, a passion indulged during earlier years. McArthur’s past was with him in that hut, and he could not separate real from unreal. Combined with this was his need to be protected from that terrible serpent, and Denise was there to provide that protection. She wanted to
help
him, you understand? She saw it as essential to herself to do what she could for him, at the same time, making her contribution to the expedition.”

Cartier took a swallow of his cognac. I sensed that the revelation was about to emerge and tried not to make any movement that might distract him. He seemed on the verge of abandoning the tale altogether. So I sat, quietly, waiting for him to continue.

“They were in that hut three days,” he said. “I sent in food and drink, of course, but I didn’t enter the place myself, not until I heard McArthur talking in more rational tones. I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said—there was an intense quality to the speech—but the long periods of silence, punctuated by irregular sessions of screaming, had ceased.

“I went in, then. I’m afraid I interrupted them. I was expecting to see— well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t two naked bodies locked together. I left immediately, but though Denise hadn’t seen me, McArthur had.”

I groaned inwardly, expecting now that I would get a sob story about how much he, Cartier, had been in love with Denise, and that he had never suspected that her uncle would take advantage of her hero worship.

“So—it was incest,” I said, hoping to ward off his outpourings. “A fairly mild form though. Both adults—and the relationship not as close as it could have been.”

He stared at me, his dark eyes holding mine, something troubling their depths.

“Yes. That’s what I thought—and no doubt Denise. She didn’t know either, you see.”

“Know what?”

It was the first time since we had met that I saw anything like real discomfort registering in Cartier’s features.

He said, “She didn’t know McArthur was her father.”

My thoughts did a few acrobatics and I said, instinctively, “But Denise was his sister’s daughter.” Then I stopped. I had the whole picture. He had fathered his sister’s child and had now taken that daughter to bed. What a mess! The whole thing was revolting: incest in layers.

“He told you this?” I asked.

“Shortly afterwards. We pieced together the theory of memory projection from it. You can see how it relates to the film.”

“And you want me to distribute this movie?”

I stared out of the café window, waiting for his reply, watching people hurrying along the boulevard. My distaste for this project almost made me jump to my feet and join them, but I decided to see the thing out.

“Yes—we all do. We thought you should have some background to the movie—it might help to create a little publicity, don’t you think?”

Cartier’s face was devoid of expression. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind. It wasn’t easy.

“Let me take the film away with me. I’ll contact you tomorrow.”

He agreed and we went outside and transferred the movie from his car to mine. I did not shake hands with him. I just climbed into my car and said, “Tomorrow then.”

I had noticed, when we left the café, that he was limping.

As I drove home I thought about my own predicament. The bills were mounting up and I still had not found the successful movie that would get me out of the rut. My recent decisions might have been sound ones, based on my experience in the business, except that no one can predict certain success in the movie world.

That evening I watched the film in my private studio. It was a boring collage of river and forest scenes. The Herzog boat was there, the area around busy with people, but it could have been an amateur movie, taken by a camp follower, or, more likely, it had been put together from stolen discarded cuttings of
Fitzcarraldo
itself, and the film of the film, to form a bastardised child of both. The whole effort folded in on itself, until nothing made sense because it was too internalised. It exposed too much of its inner self, which in the revelation showed nothing but a confusion of scenes and snatches of close-ups. It revealed everything, yet it revealed nothing, because at any core, whether it is human emotion or something more substantial, there is no truth that can be grasped and understood. Everything becomes a cluttered wash of incomprehensible colour tones, weakened further by the continual rinsing of the thing in itself, until all you have is a faded copy of a copy, recurring.

When the film reached the scene where the arrows were exchanged, I paid particular attention, but even here I was disappointed. The light was all wrong, either too weak or too strong. There were figures in the gloom of the forest, and action certainly took place, but, bright and dark, what came out of it was a flurry of furtive movements, glimpsed through curtains of leaves and fences of tree trunks. There was a close-up of the wound in McArthur’s leg, which looked genuine enough, as did the agony on his face, but it had been done better, by Charlton Heston in
El Cid
. McArthur, on film, was of course the spitting image of the man I met in the restaurant, calling himself Cartier.

There was also a single scene of the niece, or daughter, or both, half hidden behind smoke from a campfire. Either the shot was overexposed or she was thin and pale, almost translucent, with red-rimmed eyelids. The sort of will-o’-the-wisp female who gets cast as a fairy extra in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

What it amounted to was an unholy tangle. Of course, if the story were true, there were enough vultures in the world to make the film a success in terms of sales at the box office. Artistically, it stank, but some cinemagoers would be curious about this trio and their incestuous goings-on in the South American jungle. If it were released to the media, the gutter press would provide all the publicity needed.

However, I doubted very much that the story
was
true and I had my integrity to consider.

I met Cartier, or McArthur, at the same café the next day.

I gave him the standard rejection.

“It’s not good cinema,” I said.

He seemed very disappointed, leaving me his card and saying I was to call him if I changed my mind. I replied that there was little chance of that. Once I had made a decision, I told him, I usually stuck with it.

His eyes went to a corner of the café, where there was a door with a small window set in it. I thought I caught a flash of something behind the glass of that window and turned back to him. He had a dejected expression on his face.

“Who’s behind the door?” I said.

He seemed about to argue, then must have changed his mind. I suppose that, since I had rejected his offer, he saw nothing to gain by denial.

“A friend of mine—cameraman. He’s filming us. I thought it would make a good postscript to the movie—you and I meeting, discussing the project.”

I looked him straight in the eyes.

“
You’re
McArthur, aren’t you? Who’s that behind the door? Cartier?”

Before he could reply, I saw his eyes widen as he looked up, over my left shoulder. Then a tremendous explosion filled my head. I felt the heat of a blast on my cheek, and smelt the acrid odour of cordite. My head rang with the noise and for a few seconds I could not see, let alone hear anything. If any sensible thought at all crossed my mind, it was that the café had been bombed by some terrorist organisation.

When I was able to register a conscious understanding of what was happening, I realised that McArthur was sprawled on the floor, where he had gone flying backwards. There was blood in his hair, on his collar. What I had heard was the sound of a revolver being fired close to my ear.

As I turned around, still groggy and shocked, she was just putting the barrel of the gun beneath her chin. There was another explosion, not so loud as the first, since it was muffled by soft flesh. The body struck my shoulder as it fell and I think I screamed.

The next thing I knew I was being helped to my feet and led away towards the bar. My legs were shaking violently and someone forced a brandy down my throat. I couldn’t even hold the glass, my hands were trembling so much. There was a lot of shouting, which I could hear above the ringing in my ears. I remember glancing back at the woman’s corpse, once. But it was impossible to tell whether the face—now covered in gore—belonged to the girl I had seen in the movie the previous evening. It crossed my mind that it might even be McArthur’s sister, the mother of their daughter.

An unholy tangle. The police came and took me into another room at the back. I can’t recall what I told them, but I must have just recounted what had passed over the last two days, between the man on the floor and myself. I found out later that they had secretly videoed my statement. Finally, I remembered about the cameraman, behind the window in the door, and started to tell them when one of them pointed towards the corner of the room. There was another man there, talking to more policemen. He glanced across at me and I recognised him.

There was a movie camera, on the table, between him and his interviewers. He gave me a look, as he nodded at his recording device. It was difficult not to interpret that gesture into a language I knew well, that said:

“I’ve got it all here on film, if you want to use it.”

That was just before the TV crews arrived, and I believe you saw what followed, for yourselves, on the six o’clock news.

Alain d’Ivry, the talk-show compere, offers me a glass of water, and with the cameras still working, I take a long drink.

“Are we still on?” I say.

He nods. “But don’t worry—we’ll edit this out later. Let’s get back to the café scene. You say you didn’t recognise the woman’s face after she turned the gun on herself, but now of course. . . .”

“. . . all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceived or known.”

—George Berkeley (1685–1753)

“It is a simple equation: take me, subtract film, and the solution is zero.”

—Akira Kurosawa

THEY ARE FILMING something on the street, in front of our house, very close to the front door.

Even though he can’t see them when he pulls up his blinds or pushes aside one of the curtains, my six-year-old son Brian senses that someone is watching. After dismissing his claims as “. . . an overactive imagination,” Dianne, my wife, finally admitted to feeling the same way, though with the nervous, slightly embarrassed, “Maybe-I’m-Just-Full-Of-Shit-Today” laugh she always uses whenever she can’t put her finger on what’s bothering her. So far neither of them have directly asked me what I think, how I feel, do I believe them or not.

I think this is exactly what the Onlookers want, for you to convince yourself that it’s just your imagination playing tricks on you; it’ll make the work easier for them, and perhaps less terrifying and painful for the rest of us, if and when we cumulatively figure out what’s happening; after all, isn’t perception both perceiving
and being
perceived? If the Onlookers are edging us toward a state of non-being without our knowing it, then what can we do to stop it, to re-balance the equation, to perceive while being perceived?

My wife and son are fading before my eyes, you see; and more than once in the last few days, both have asked me if I’ve been losing weight, which means I am lessening in their perception, as well.

All around, the colors of our life are become paler. There is a dogwood tree in our back yard, and the red spots on all the leaves have turned to the same foggy gray as an old black-and-white film; as have many of the leaves on the other trees; as has much of the grass.

Dianne and Brian say I’m too pale lately. (Dianne called it “looking a bit gray around the gills.”)

I can’t bring myself to tell them they look the same to me.

They are filming something on the street, in front of our house, very close to the front door.

Something tells me they’re going to want their interior shots soon, before they lose the light.

I don’t think there’s any way I can stop them.

I first saw the Onlookers when I was a child, but had no idea what they were, what they wanted, or of what they were capable.

In the summer of 1964, when I was five, my father—who sold medical supplies—took my mother and me along on a business trip to New York. Spending nearly a third of every year on the road, Dad always felt bad because we’d never had a “proper” family vacation; rightly thinking that Mom and I got sick of spending every summer stuck in Cedar Hill, he hoped this “. . . madcap excursion in the wilds” (as he called it, like it was going to be some Great Adventure worthy of Jules Verne) would suffice.

We had a wonderful time, as I recall (being only five, my memories are divided into two categories: the bus, taxi, or subway ride
to
someplace in the city, and the
cool
stuff I got to do once we arrived).

Dad was meeting with some doctors whose offices were on the Upper West Side in the 140s, near the Hudson River, and for a few hours Mom and I were left to our own devices—which meant sightseeing and shopping.

We’d just left a restaurant where I’d had the best ice-cream sundae in the history of ice-cream sundaes (that I ate way too quickly; it would later come back to haunt me with a stomachache) and were heading for some boring old antique store when we rounded the corner and walked right into a movie—or, rather, the movie walked into us, in the form of hunched, roundish man in a dark coat that was far too heavy for the summer weather. His head was down so that his face was buried behind the high upturned collar of the coat; all I could see of him was that coat and the gray, flattened hat he wore (which Dad later told me was called a “Porkpie” hat).

The man bumped into Mom, almost knocking her over (he was walking
very
fast and seemed to be trying to get away from something), then veered left and plowed straight into me.

I spun around, arms pinwheeling, trying to catch my balance, tripped over my own feet, fell backward against one of the sawhorses, went over, tried to twist around so I didn’t crack my skull on the pavement, and landed on the other side on my butt. I immediately began crying; everything hurts more when you’re five years old, and it
especially
hurts more when it happens in a big, strange, scary city that seems like it could eat visitors from Ohio for breakfast and still want a second helping.

I looked up, hoping to see Mom’s face lowering toward me; instead she stood frozen, having just seen the face of the man in the coat and Porkpie hat.

And that’s when I saw my first Onlooker.

My head and vision were still swimming from the tumble—everyone and everything around me seemed to be spiraling—so it took a moment for me to realize that one of the people in the crowd had a camera for a head; to my momentarily skewed five-year-old’s perception, that’s what it looked like: instead of a human head, one of those old-fashioned oversized box cameras sat atop their shoulders, and on either side of the box, like the eyes of a horse, a half-sphere of metal blinked opened and closed with a soft metallic
shnick!
(no, I couldn’t actually hear them, but I imagined that to be the sound these “eyes” made when they blinked). For a moment all I could do was stare at this weird but wonderful thing in the back of the crowd, then the pain from my fall fully registered and the world was lost under a heavy wash of tears that blurred everything into one shimmering mass; I pulled in a deep breath, wiped my eyes on my shirt sleeve, and looked up to see that the scary man in the dark coat was now on one knee and reaching for me.

“Hey there, little fellah,” he said in a deep, croaky voice that sounded like it belonged to some old monster frog. “Took a little tumble there, did you? I’m sorry—didn’t see you. But if you don’t mind me saying, you can take a fall with the best of them!”

Mom laughed when he said that, and I cried all the harder because here she was, laughing at something this scary man in the dark coat said when she ought to be down here giving me hugs and telling me it was all right and promising me another ice-cream sundae if I was brave. I looked around to see if Camera-Head was still nearby—the memory of it made me want to laugh and I figured if I saw it again I’d laugh and everything would be all right—then I saw the kneeling man’s face and screamed.

I’d never actually seen someone with an eye patch in person; sure, there had been all those pirate movies, people
always
wore eye patches in those, but that was just pretend; the scary man in the porkpie hat had one for real and it was
so
scary. I tried backing away from him like a crab but then hit the curb behind me and almost did a somersault into the street.

Mom and the scary, one-eyed man applauded.

I stopped crying; my butt and back still hurt, but now I was just pissed, so I scowled at both of them.

“That’s quite the little tumbler you got there,” said One-Eye Porkpie, turning toward my mother, who introduced herself and shook his hand like she was meeting President Johnson or Elvis.

One-Eye Porkpie removed his hat and waved to a bunch of people with cameras and microphones and lights who were behind him (Camera-Head wasn’t among them, either, and I wondered: had he been trying to run away from these people?), and that’s when I realized that I’d landed on something that looked like a train track, and that one of the cameras that had been following One-Eye Porkpie was setting in a wagon of some sort that was attached to the tracks. I was suddenly terrified that the camera wagon was going to roll right over and cut me in half, but it stopped moving when One-Eye Porkpie waved. I thought it was weird that he’d been running
away
from the camera, because it seemed to me it hadn’t been going all
that
fast.

Mom looked down at me and smiled. “It’s all right, hon, he’s not going to hurt you.”

“Wouldn’t hurt a fly,” said One-Eye Porkpie in his froggy voice, helping me up.

Mom dug into her massive shoulder bag and removed the Cine-Kodak 8 Model 90 home movie camera that Dad had insisted she carry “. . . in case you see any movie or TV stars.” She’d never been able to operate it properly, and as she chatted with One-Eye Porkpie she fumbled around with it until he took it from her and got it going.

“Wanna be in a movie with me, little fellah?” he asked me.

“My name’s Patrick,” I said, trying to sound grown-up.

“Is it now? Well, mine’s Joseph,” he replied, offering his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Mom spent the next ten minutes filming him clowning around with me; at one point he made a big show of shaking out his hands and reaching behind my left ear to remove a shiny silver dollar, then did the same with my right ear. (He let me keep them, and that made him less scary, though it didn’t help my butt from being any less sore,)

As we were getting ready to leave (a man Mom said was “. . . the director” told everyone they needed to get moving because they had a schedule to keep), Porkpie called over a sweet-faced woman he introduced as “. . . my wife and official handler, Eleanor,” and asked her to take some pictures of him and me. At one point, he removed his hat and put it on my head.

“Say there, little fell—’scuse me,
Patrick
—that hat looks right at home on your noggin.” He looked at his wife. “Don’t you think it looks right at home?’

She and Mom both agreed that it did. I thought it felt like it was going to drop down and eat my face, it was so big.

“You okay there, Patrick?” One-Eye Porkpie asked.

To which I responded, with all the tact of a child: “What happened to your eye?”

He laughed, then flipped up the patch to show me his other eye was still there. “Nothing. They just wanted me to wear it in this movie.”

“How come?”

He leaned forward, whispering: “Heck, I have
no idea
. I guess they think it makes me look creepy or tragic or something. But it’s want they wanted, and they’re paying me to act, not think or ask questions, so I go along with it.”

“Just pretend, huh?”

He nodded. “Just pretend, that’s right.”

Porkpie knelt down beside me for a few more pictures. He smelled like cigarettes and medicine. “I think you ought to keep that hat, is what I think, Patrick.”

“But it’s your only one.”

Everyone around us laughed.

“I bet maybe I got a couple more around here someplace,” he said, winking at me. “Besides, it ought to belong to a little buster like yourself.”

“What’s a buster?”

Another laugh. “That’s a nickname Harry Houdini gave me when I was born. It means some little fellah like you that can take a tumble with the best of them.” Then he winked, like he was letting me in on some Big Secret. “That hat’s got a lot of miles on it. A
lot
of miles. You keep it safe for me, and if I ever lose the other ones, well . . . you’d let me borrow it back wouldn’t you?”

“I sure would.”

“That’s all a fellah can ask for, then.”

He called over someone else—a tall, skinny, hawk-nosed man with round wire-framed glasses and a shock of spiky white hair on his head— and said, “Sam, I want you to meet Patrick. Patrick here is a first-class tumbler.”

“It’s a honor to meet you, little sir,” said Hawk-Nose. He had a rich, musical accent that reminded me of Father Fitzgibbon from that Bing Crosby movie
Going My Way
that Mom always watched whenever it was on TV. Porkpie insisted that Hawk-Nose be in a picture with us, and even though it seemed like the guy felt awkward about it, he knelt down on the other side of me so Eleanor could get us all in. Mom kept filming with the Kodak.

“
Esse est percipi
,” said Hawk-Nose.

“Huh?” I said.

Porkpie shook his head. “It don’t mean nothing, little fellah.” He leaned forward so as to look past me at the other man. “Sam, I’m warnin’ you, don’t go starting in with all that malarkey about perception and non-being and the flight from extraneous perception breaking down in the inescapability of self-perception and . . . whatever in the hell else it is that this picture’s supposed to be about. Brother—I just gave myself a headache
talking
about it.”