The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (34 page)

LES YEUX SANS VISAGE

You met her in one of those Midwestern towns where the sunsets were gold and not impaled by tall buildings. You had gone from NYU Film School to waiting for jobs to waiting tables at the Salvador Deli, and when the magazine asked, you answered. Soon after you had written the expected fanboy froth about Troma and Incarnate and the rest of the local scene, you were sent into the heartland to write the set report on the latest annual installment in the film life of a hockey-masked hooligan. At night you would stand around for hours while thirty-yearolds trying to act like teenagers were taped up with rubber tubes that would, for the few seconds of a take, spout out a mixture of Karo Syrup and melted chocolate that looked something like blood. In the mornings you would sleep and then, in the afternoons, write a few pandering paragraphs of the usual nonsense before taking a walk around the town, the reporter from the big city, and stop by the Rexall and the Kroger and the Payless Shoe Store and on the third day, after boredom had set in soundly, you found her in a place called Kenny’s. You remember that she was drinking a Nehi, leaning easily against a wall, one blue-jeaned leg crossed over the other. She was wearing black Keds. Her eyes were closed, and she was listening to a song on the jukebox, something by Public Image Limited, the two of them so out of place there in Hicksville that you thought you had walked into a dream. You wanted to shoot her, just to shoot her right then and there, and you wished that you had a camera. You told her she should be in movies, and, of course, this is what she wanted to hear.

Within the week, she had moved in with you. She talked about the day your movie would go into production. All your plans were aimed at Hollywood. She wanted to live in The Malibu, and you wished to join the film life of El Lay. You watched videocassettes of Lang and Franju, Bava and Pasolini, and bullshitted her with beginning film theory until you both had enough to drink and then you went to bed. It wasn’t long before you decided you would marry her.

You returned to New York with the question of what Miranda was going to do. She had talked about college, talked about modeling, talked about children. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. People were always telling Miranda that she should be in movies. At dinners you would talk about directors and their actress wives: Bardot and Vadim, Russell and Roeg, Rossellini and Lynch. About how only you could direct her. About how only you could show the world Miranda. And then, of course, she died.

STILL DEAD

No one is kind. Their jobs are on the line. You have been inclined of late to underestimate the value of the dollar. Now you wonder what you would do if the magazine were gone.

You wander down the hall to the archives and browse through back issues. That first appearance of the magazine, way back in 1979, wore Godzilla on the cover and promised a photo preview of
Alien
. It seems like a century ago. No one in this country had heard of Deodato or Lenzi or Fulci; certainly no one cared. You flip through the years, and the bright-blooded covers, and you wonder at everything that has changed.

Later you find an empty office and make the call. You take a deep breath and dial the number of Jay’s loft. You don’t recognize the voice at the other end. “Tell him I’ll do it.” The voice asks you to identify yourself. “Tell him that Dario Argento called, and that he’ll do it.” The voice says that she has no idea what you are talking about, but that if you would leave your number, Jay would call right back. You hang up the phone and wonder whether it could have been traced. In your mind are images of men in blue suits with badges.

You escape the building without incident. It is a cold, snowy morning. Fall or winter. Miranda died in October. They called it Black Wednesday, but the day was bright and clear. There were leaves on the ground the morning she died, a blanket of green and gold that turned wet and red by noon and then grey with ash by night. It was mid-afternoon before the National Guardsmen had secured the apartment building. It was two weeks until the barricades were complete and the city was safe again. Each morning you would awaken to the smell of Miranda on your pillow, and then the other smell, the smell of the corpses burning in the midnight heaps at Union Square.

You slip into a bar near Penn Station. On the large-screen TV is a repeat of the Morning News. The daily CDC press conference is uninformative. As is that from Central Command. Protests continue outside the White House. The bartender rolls his eyes and says, “Fucking hippies.” No one trusts a man who will not wear a flag on his lapel or tie a yellow ribbon to the antenna of his car. You nod and drink your beer.

It’s late when you leave the bar, your footsteps uncertain, the sidewalk slick with ice. You haven’t seen a taxi in months. Ahead is a checkpoint and you brush your pockets, trying to remember if you’re holding. You imagine a pat down, the sound of a gloved hand on a plastic case. A copy of Fulci’s
Zombie
in your coat could get you six months, maybe a year with the right judge; don’t even think about the contents of your apartment. You’re next at the gate. The soldier shines a flashlight into your eyes and you say, “Jack Valenti.” No smile. “Forty-fifth president of the United States.” He doesn’t appreciate the joke, just waves you through, and you can’t help but feel that you have escaped something.

At your apartment, you discover an envelope with the logo of Jay’s former employer, a comic book company, stuck beneath the door. Inside there is a note: soon.

CANNIBALS, QUESTI, AND GUINEA PIGS

Your interest in film doesn’t normally take you beyond the racks marked Horror and Suspense, but at the moment there seems to be a shortage of inventory in both departments. This morning you are standing on the second floor of RKO Video on Broadway, where a patron is complaining to the cashier about the quality of her copy of
Pretty Woman
. You are looking for something, anything, with the word “dead” in its title. Nothing is to be found. You start looking instead for the word “living.”

He walks past you, blood-brown Armani coat flapping like wounded wings. “Mister. . . .”

“Fulci,” you say, slipping a copy of
Heaven Can Wait
from the shelf in front of you.

He nods and smiles and follows you back to the checkout counter. The woman there looks like she would rather be at the dentist’s. It could be a mistake to rent this tape and leave some sort of record of where you were and when. You excuse your way to the front of the line and announce in a loud but tempered voice that you would like to special order
Faces of Death
, all three installments, and by the time that the kid has hold of you, pulling you back, people are talking and the woman at the counter has a telephone in her hand.

You run for the doorway, and the lights suddenly are bright. A security guard looms in front of you; he doesn’t like what he sees. You toss him the video and his hands react. A perfect catch. You feel the kid pushing, and you look back over your shoulder as you reach the exit. You are laughing a little too hard.

Outside you take opposite sides of Broadway, and when you watch the kid wander into an alley off Fifty-seventh, you step in after him and try on a smile.

“Got it, dude.” Now he is smiling, too. “All yours. Uncut
Django Kill
. From Argentina.
Se habla? No más, mi muchacho. Ingles
, my man, with subtitles.”

“How much?”

“Hundred dollar.”

“Get lost.”

“Pure stuff. Uncut. Got the scalping scene.”

“Right. Twenty-five.”

“I ain’t giving the stuff away.”

“I can’t do more than fifty.”

“It’s a steal. Fifty. You’re robbing me.”

You can’t believe you’re doing this. Finally you follow the kid farther down the alley. “I want a look.”

“Shit,” he says. “Who do you think you are, Siskel and Ebert? This is a steal, man. I’m telling you it’s good.”

You give him the fifty and then there is nothing to do but hustle it back to your apartment and give it a try. The tape is unmarked but for a torn handwritten label that reads giulio questi. You want to believe that this means something. Images of dust and blood and molten gold are burning in your mind. You watch a few seconds of noise, and then a faded color spectrum appears. Finally you see a picture, so grainy that you need to squint. It’s not
Django Kill
, oh no, not at all. You think you can see something happening, something with a Japanese girl tied to a dingy bed, and there is man in a samurai helmet standing over her, the lights turned blue and a long-handled knife that dips down into her torso and comes up wet. He cuts away her right hand, throws blood onto the walls. You seem to think that this video is called
Guinea Pig
. There is no story to it, just the girl kidnapped, bound, and slowly cut into pieces. Finally the psycho eats her eyeballs. You want to feel something, do something, say something, but it’s only 11:30 in the morning, and everyone else in the world is dead or has a job.

NO CULTURE

Over coffee and toast, you read the
Daily News
. Miami is gone, carpet-bombed back into swampland. The president is regretful but unshaken in his resolve. Food riots in Boston and Providence. A news team in Palm Springs got footage of what looks like a zombied Tom Cruise, his buttocks chewed away but otherwise intact. And there is another entry in the Still Dead. This makes five of them. Five who have died only once. Five who have not returned. They wait in that white room at the CDC, and the whole world waits for them.

At dawn you woke like a man accustomed to the hour, your vision clear and in focus. You are committed to the task that awaits you. You wanted to call Jay again, maybe tell him you see the storyboards, you see frame by frame, you see and see and see.

It is Saturday, and your apartment is a dungeon from which you must escape. You decide to go to the movies. The only remaining theaters are in Times Square, but the Times Square you remember is gone. A Holiday Inn has supplanted the Pussycat Empire on Broadway. What was the Peppermint Lounge is now Tower 45. You pass the Marriott Marquis and walk onto Forty-second Street. The Urban Development Corporation has done its work so very well. Ghosts of grindhouses past fade in and out like distant television signals. The Adonis, the XXXtasy Video Center, Peepland: all gone. Even the Funny Store has vanished beneath the weight of another office tower. Progress is our most important product, and progress has taken them, one by one.

The new theaters on Forty-second Street are sedate and shadowless waiting rooms, places of pleasant dreams, not nightmares. The first is showing Disney cartoons, the next
Jesus of Nazareth
. You wonder what they will do about Lazarus. There is no choice but the third one, which does not admit children. You are hopeful, but there is no doubting the fear.

With two cans of beer hidden in your coat, you move away from the ticket booth and find a seat in the middle of the theater. The lights dim. An animated usherette tells you not to smoke and to use the trash receptacles as you exit. The following preview has been approved for all audiences by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The Absent-Minded Professor.
Your knees are shaky. You sip at the first beer. You stand and walk back up the aisle. This will not work.

Finally the previews are at an end. You sneak another drink of beer and take a seat on the aisle, just in case. The following motion picture has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America. This is a London Film Production. There is a clock tower, Big Ben; the time is 11. The music is so very strange, plucking strings, a zither. The film is called
The Third Man
. Written by Graham Greene. Directed by Carol Reed. It is set in Vienna, after the Second World War. Some man named Holly Martins, a writer, comes to visit his friend Harry Lime, but Harry Lime is dead. There is no color. The faces look out at you in black-and-white. Nothing is happening. The actors are just talking and talking, walking and walking.

You clutch at the armrests and wait for the next surge to hit you. It comes just as you begin to understand. Harry Lime is back from the dead. He was never dead, not really. It was a joke of some kind. “We should have dug deeper than a grave.” As the audience murmurs, you stand up, knowing that Harry Lime is alive, yes alive, even to the very end, when the bullets find him. You think about the squibs that could explode from beneath his clothing, sending clots of blood across the grey walls of the sewers, and you hear yourself groan with the knowledge of what is missing, what is gone, what was never there.

People are turning in their seats to look at you. They are saying
Sit down!
and
What does he want?
An usher in a suit is hurrying down the aisle. At least he is in color. Another usher is coming from the other side. You move along the row of seats, bumping knees and outstretched hands. The beer falls onto the carpet, another unseen stain. You do not resist as one of the ushers takes your arm.

In the lobby you see nothing but the poster for the film, and then the night waiting outside. There, in black-and-white, is the knowledge of the way that we have chosen to be entertained, like a book read once too often, leaving a trail of images and emotions so familiar that there is nothing left to see or feel. You know the future, and it is now; it always will be now.