The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (39 page)
Read The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen Online
Authors: Ellen Datlow
If he’d shot that, it would have outsold every film of the season, and doubtless been an Oscar contender.
Except Sean Mickles has always calculated success differently, it would seem.
Take
Abasement
. It was box-office poison for good reason. Not that the premise is unsound: an accountant tells a joke at a dinner party one night and the joke slays, and this accountant starts to believe he might have been a comedian all along.
Abasement
is his slow, awkward awakening. At its heart, it’s the sports story we all know: believe in yourself, insist that you can win, and you will, even if you lose the game. That was
Abasement
’s potential, anyway—remember the poster? “Laugh or Death”? It was all set up such that this accountant’s wife could have been waiting just past the footlights, after his first big bomb. Or she could have been the one heckling him from the bar all along, prodding him to be better, to rise to the occasion, become the jokesmith she’d known he was all along.
Instead, Mickles takes us along for the accountant’s fledgling attempts to tell jokes. To coworkers, deli attendants, whomever. And the jokes fail each time, worse and worse, such that, when the accountant starts to laugh at them himself, trying to prime the pump, as it were, his eyes open the whole time to watch, see if it’s working, you want to leave the theater, please.
Abasement
indeed.
Worse, it leaves those unformed jokes in your head in such a way that, when you try to sweep them out, they scuttle into an even darker corner.
It’s not for the faint of heart.
It was a first attempt, though. That was the excuse. Mickles was showing promise, he just had a little bit of film school left to shake off. Let him be, he’s coming along fine, so this wasn’t
Duel
or
Eraserhead
, okay. It can at least be
THX-1138
, right?
Dark Star
?
Thirty-Nine
, then, it was supposed to be a new direction, his second chance, where everybody could see the wings investors kept insisting he had.
And we of course know why it was called
Thirty-Nine
, right? Though Mickles had been charged by Unshelved Productions to re-imagine Hitchcock’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, possibly by returning to Buchan’s source material, the thriller he instead gave us (eight months late . . . ) had the necessary MacGuffin, yes, but at the end of the very first sequence, he let us look into the case.
Teeth.
Thirty-nine of them.
The central mystery, what’s supposed to supply the narrative tension, it comes not from some cinematic game of Clue, as Hitchcock perhaps would have done it, or even the three-card monte kind of shenanigans you expect to be surprised by in any good caper flick, but from an increasingly uncomfortable meditation on the source of those teeth, and whether or not our point-of-view character is inserting them into the gums of sleeping passengers. And whether they’re even teeth at all.
In the famous final scene, when the teeth finally spill onto the floor of the train and wriggle for the shadows of insteps and the black caverns between luggage, that persistent rattle we’ve come to associate with them, it’s not just missing, it actually leaves a sort of gaping cavity in the soundscape.
The result of that missing familiar sound is that it makes your tongue, completely independent of your instructions, check your own teeth.
And then you check them again.
It’s this more than anything else that’s responsible for
Thirty-Nine
’s brief theatrical stay—who wants to be in the dentist’s chair?—and Mickles’s contentment with that response, his refusal to explain or deny or do anything more than shrug and turn away, it’s likely why the studio licensed him for the handle-with-care content of
Tenderizer
.
With
Abasement
and
Thirty-Nine
he had proven he didn’t have it in him to flinch anymore, that that response had, perhaps, been burned out of him by finding his daughter in the garage on the fourth day. With
Abasement
and
Thirty-Nine
, he had proven that he was more concerned with art than receipts. That he had vision, and that he would insist on it at the cost of all else. To borrow from another era, Mickles had established that he didn’t think the public deserved its spoonful of sugar.
Where many directors anesthetize us with spectacle, charm us with frivolity, Mickles is more interested in laying eggs in our subconscious. Or perhaps in squeezing them from a bloody cuticle, then rubbing his finger on the insides of our skulls.
And, of course, had his daughter not played that one game of hide-andseek, what director would we have then? What set of movies?
We’ll never know.
And now it’s time to talk about what I just saw.
You already know the movie’s premise, of course—no, the conceit, the logline: the Woodrow Massacre happened over the course of forty minutes between two and two-forty on the afternoon of March 9th. But what happened that morning?
This is
Tenderizer
.
You don’t even need an epic-voiced announcer for it.
And, true to its promise, there’s no violence whatsoever in the film’s seventy-one minutes. Actually, had Aklai wanted, they could have petitioned the ratings board for a G, based solely on content.
All that happens for seventy-one torturous minutes is that an unnamed person has a handheld video camera, and is making a last circuit or tour of his or her house. As if taking stock. As if recording each item. Lingering on this chair, that painting, while a memory surfaces unseen, behind the camera.
Unseen but specifically felt.
It’s an elegy is what it is. For a violation that’s yet to take place. It’s a suicide note without any words, it’s a bitter apology, it’s an explanation if we’ve got the eyes to see. One last look around before stepping into the fire.
Worse, there’s a quality to it that suggests a sense of waiting. A distinct willingness to be convinced not to go through with it, like the day could have gone either way from here.
Except we’ve all already gone through that day.
Tenderizer
never would have gotten that G. Were triple-X in fact a real rating, not a marketing ploy,
Tenderizer
likely would have required that mythical “fourth” X. It doesn’t need NC-17, it needs an NC-300, because America isn’t old enough to be seeing this yet. And by the time it is, it should know better.
What the two trailers had done was get us locked into considering options that were never really on the table at all.
This isn’t Mickles’s daughter’s accidental last voice mail, and it isn’t the digitally scrambled faces of the bottom-feeders of the acting world. And, all those production delays? They had to have been staged.
I’m saying this to keep you away. But I know it’s not going to work like that.
We are what we are.
This is what I propose: somehow or another, in the months following Woodrow, Aklai Studio came into possession of the actual shooter’s actual video recording from before the Massacre—likely it was mailed before lunch that day, perhaps with the title already in place—and, to insulate themselves from it, Aklai attached a controversial, difficult-but-capable director. A director known for leading the audience down suspicious paths, and then leaving them with the light failing.
Tenderizer
is real, though. Even if it’s not. And this isn’t because of any chain of possession or documented provenance that surfaces. And it’s not because of the padded envelope that probably showed up in Aklai’s general delivery later that week, while we were all still watching them sift through the rubble on television.
Tenderizer
is real because it’s real.
Even without the shadow of the coming massacre draped over it, it would be just as haunting, just as cloying.
It’s something about the actual succession of items, something both profane and instinctual—I can’t articulate it any better than that, I’m sorry.
Maybe “succession” is the wrong word, though.
Progression? Order?
No: procession. Like for a funeral.
You know how in magic, in spells, words are supposed to have an innate, possibly occult power, and, when recited in certain orders, they can enact the user’s will on the world?
Tenderizer
has found the visual analog to that.
Mickles isn’t the dreamer, this time out, but the weaver.
And he’s hungry.
It gets to the point where you’re in such lockstep with the film that it ceases to be a film altogether. Worse, you can almost guess what the next item is going to be, much in the same way you’ve been conditioned to know which note follows which in music. You may not be able to quite guess that a B-flat is coming up, but you do hear the slight clang when that B’s sharped, don’t you? Even if it’s your first time through this piece of music.
It’s the same with
Tenderizer
.
Thirty minutes in, you’re dreading that fork, that lap blanket, that skateboard-scarred baseboard with such intensity that when the viewframe catches it at the edge of its demure green lines, then settles on it as if relieved to have remembered it, you can feel fingers lightly on your back, worms wriggling in your hair, something unnamable and blind rising in your throat.
If this isn’t actual footage recorded by the shooter, then Mickles has seen that footage, anyway, and mocked-up the interior of a similar-enough house, planted the same items, crawled across them with a torturously slow camera.
As if that’s not bad enough, then—I’m trying to inoculate you here, yes; I’m trying to protect you—the viewfinder drifts as it has to, to the promise of the foggy sliding door just off the dining room table.
Into the backyard.
Into the rest of this day.
No, you’re saying, watching it. Shaking your head please.
You’ll look through your fingers, though.
I did.
The film-school graduate in me of course catches the all-too-obvious edit as the camera passes across the threshold of this sliding door, and I fumble for the term, the technique, come up empty-handed. What it is, simply, is Mickles reminding us that this is a film we’re watching. The jangly cut is visual shorthand for a clumsy splice—it is that clumsy splice.
In another film, it would break the spell.
In
Tenderizer
, it only deepens it.
Next, the film critic in me tries to interpret the meaning behind the sunny day over this backyard. The blue skies that weren’t hovering over Woodrow on March 9th, or that whole week.
Is this heaven?
No.
Though we hear a dog, and expect a dog, what that green frame finally settles on is the lower legs of a little girl, in a swing.
Whether the recording actually stopped at the screen door, this playback now showing what the shooter had been recording over—another day, before all this—or whether this is actually Mickles’s own daughter spliced in and memorialized, the way that girl’s toes point at the ground, then catch it, it’s so natural, so complete, so hollowing, so familiar that you might realize you’ve stopped breathing.
And then, in stark contrast to the contemplative quality of every other sequence in the film, the camera starts to flip around, panning across the side of the house—a house—catching the sky reflected in a bedroom window, a rake leaned up against brick, a patio set rusting at the welds, and comes to rest on what that little girl’s seeing, on the person holding this camera, and then the shot stays there for maybe a second, a second and a half.
It’s enough to see that no one’s there. That no one’s been there the whole time.
And what you see next, it’s what you first saw of
Tenderizer
all those months ago: that famous “black” trailer that wasn’t a trailer at all, but the last ninety seconds of the movie.
Except now the ragged breathing, it’s yours and yours alone.
Welcome to the new world.
Welcome home.
—
Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, February 9, 1975
WHAT IS IT Pilot John says right before we drop from the sky?
Where is Molly’s body?
No, that’s my own voice haunting me on account of someone else’s ghost, someone else’s guilt.
The pilot’s head inclines to the left, slick as any disco floor pro. He gasps and takes the good Lord’s name in vain. There’s a quality of terror in the sharp inhalation that precedes this utterance. There’s rapture in the utterance itself. His words are distorted by electronic interference through the headset. The snarl of a lynx wanting its fill of guts.
Obligingly, the world rolls over and shows its belly—
—I come to after the crash and call Conway’s name the way I sometimes do upon surfacing from a nightmare. In this nightmare he is kissing me, but his left eye is gone and I can see daylight shining all the way through his skull. He says hot into my mouth,
This wound won’t close.
Now, I’m awake and alive. Hell of a surprise, the being alive part.
Snow trickles down through a hole in the fuselage and crystallizes in my lashes and beard. The last of the daylight trickles through the hole too and the world around me resolves into soft focus. Buckets of white light saturate everything until it’s all ghostly and delicate. I’m strapped into the far back seat of the Beaver. I close my eyes again and recall low mountains rising on our left and the shadow of the plane descending toward an ice sheet that seems to stretch unto the end of creation.
Our particular jag of beach lies south of Quinhagak, not that that helps. In the summer, this is a vast circulatory system of bogs and streams on the edge of the Bering Sea. Ptarmigan and wolves, bears and fish dwell here, feast upon one another here. In the winter, it’s one of God’s abandoned drawing slates. The temperature is around negative thirty Fahrenheit. That’s cold, my babies. The mercury will only keep dropping.
“Conway’s in Seattle,” Parker says. “He’s safe. You’re safe. Who’s your favorite football team?” His breath is minty. He thinks I’m slipping away when I’m actually slipping
back
into the world. Sweet kid. Handsome, too. Life is gonna wreck him. That’s funny and I chuckle. He grips my shoulder. His mittens are blue and white to match the stripes on the plane. “C’mon Sam, stay with me. Who’d you root for in the Super Bowl? The Vikings? I bet you’re a Vikings man. My cousin met Fran Tarkenton, says he’s a gem. Can’t throw a spiral, but a hell of a quarterback anyhow.”
“Cowboys fan.” I’m remarkably calm, despite this instinctive urge to smack the condescension from him. He means well. His eyes are so blue. Conway’s are green and green is my favorite color, so I’m safe as Parker keeps saying.
“The Cowboys! No kidding? Seattle doesn’t have a club. One more year, right?”
“Dad is from Galveston.” I haven’t thought about my father in an age, much less acknowledged him aloud. Could be a concussion.
“Where’s your accent? You don’t have an accent.”
“Dad does. Classic drawl.” I hesitate. My tongue is dry. Goddamned climate. “How are the other guys?” The other guys being Pilot John, regional historian Maddox, and our wilderness guide extraordinaire Moses.
“Don’t worry about them. Everybody’s A-OK. Let’s see if we can get you outta here. Gonna be dark any minute now. Moses thinks we need to be somewhere else before then.”
His voice is too cheerful. I’m convinced he’s lying about everyone being all right. Then I catch a glimpse of Pilot John slumped at the controls, his anorak splashed red. His posture is awkward, inanimate—he’s a goner for certain. The engine has to be sitting on his legs. Snapped matchsticks, most
definitely. The windshield blasted inward to cover him in rhinestones. I lack the strength to utter recriminations. Abrupt stabs of pain in my lower back suggest my body is coming out of shock. It isn’t happy.
Parker strips free of a mitten and there are pills in the palm of his hand. He feeds me the pills.
I clear my throat and say, “Somebody will be along. The posse can’t be far.” Lord, the aspirin is bitter. A slug of lukewarm coffee from Parker’s thermos helps. “John got a Mayday out, didn’t he?” But what I recall is John with both hands on the wheel while the rest of us yell and pray. Nobody touches the radio in the eight or so seconds before it all goes black. “Sonofabitch. Tell me it’s working.” I know it’s not working, though. The radio was smashed on impact along with Pilot John’s body. That’s how this tragedy is unfolding, isn’t it? After making a career of fucking over others, finally we are the ones getting the screw job. O. Henry or Hitchcock should be on the case.
Parker says, “I wonder if you can walk.”
While he struggles to extricate me from the ruins of the plane, I’m thinking not only is it a damned shame Pilot John failed to transmit a Mayday, he didn’t even file a flight plan that accounts for our detour to this wasteland of tundra and ice. We’re at least two hours southwest of the original destination. That potentially lethal blunder is on me. I’d gotten greedy and tried to squeeze in an unscheduled stop. Thanks to me we are all the way up shit creek.
A storm is moving in off the sea. Blizzard conditions will sock in search and rescue craft at Bethel. That means three, possibly four days of roughing it for us. If we’re lucky. How lucky we are remains to be seen.
I cough on the raw taste of smoke.
“Heck.” Parker glances over his shoulder. “Guess she’s on fire.”
Yes, Virginia, we’re in trouble—
—Professor Gander invited me to lunch at the Swan Club in Ballard and laid it all on the table. Entrusted me with a withered valise stuffed with documents and old-timey photos. He endeavored to explain their significance through suggestion and innuendo. Two things I dislike unless we’re talking romance, which we weren’t. I disguised my fascination with a yawn.
He lighted a cigarette and set it in the ashtray without taking a drag first. “The papers were written by R. M. Bluefield, allegedly a mysterious Victorian fellow Stoker based the Renfield character upon. Bluefield was an avowed mystic, a fascination he acquired abroad in Eastern Europe and Asia. He possessed training in medicine, also from his world travels. He was obsessed with the concept of immortality, but then, so were many others of that era. His particular interest lay in the notion that it might be obtained through certain blood rites or the consumption of animal organs. Stoker, it is thought, perused the fellow’s papers and mocked Mr. Bluefield’s eccentricity.
“The journals changed hands, most recently belonging to an actor from the 1950s and ’60s named Ralph Smyth. Where
he
acquired them is a matter of conjecture, although it’s of scant consequence. For our purposes, we simply need to locate Smyth himself.”
“Ah, the royal we. There’s a booster, I presume. Got to love those guys. Richer than rich if he’s going through you.”
“Yes, Mr. Cope. I represent a patron. One with very deep pockets.”
“God love ’em. And what does this patron want with Smyth?”
“You will locate him and ask a single question. Return with his answer, whatever that may be.”
“A question?”
“One question. I’ll even write it down for you.” He produced a fancy pen and indeed did write it on a coaster. He also wrote his home address and a set of numbers that represented the payment on offer. A nice plump round figure, to be sure.
I lingered over the coaster and then put it in my pocket. “This is a little weird, professor. Not exactly my normal brief, so to speak. I take it this Smyth character is missing, or else you’d go ask him yourself.”
“It is possible the fellow’s dead, although we suspect he’s very much alive. In hiding, we think. Took a powder into the Alaskan wilderness during the spring of 1967. There are more recent accounts, multiple sightings of a man matching Smyth’s description.”
“Seven years is a long time to be on the lam. The cops want him?”
“The authorities don’t possess evidence to implicate him in any nefarious dealings, such as the disappearance of my patron’s daughter. My patron suspects otherwise, naturally. That’s where you come in.”
“Maybe Smyth’s got an aversion to overly aggressive film buffs.” I smiled, but he didn’t seem amused. “So, I’m going to put together a team and fly all over the ass end of Alaska, hunting for some guy basically nobody’s ever heard of. . . .”
“Ralph Smyth, Ralph Smyth, surely you recall. . . .” Professor Gander buffed his signet ring and waited for the light to dawn in my presumably Neanderthal brain. Fucker wore a cardigan and rimless glasses. He’d gone prematurely white like Warhol.
“Surely I do not.” I took a gulp of Redbreast. Glass number three. I’m not a heavy drinker, but suffering the good professor required extreme measures.
“A poor man’s Lon Chaney who eked a career from getting violently offed in a dozen Hammer films. What he’s famous for, however—”
“Nothing, apparently,” I said, a teensy bit drunk already.
Gander bared his mismatched and silver-capped teeth. He wanted a taste of my blood, it could be assumed. He said, “Bravo, Cope. The man is famous for nothing. What he’s
infamous
for is his final role in a French Canadian art film.
Ardor
. An exceedingly liberal interpretation of
Dracula
. Ten years ago this spring,
Ardor
premiered at a Quebec festival, then sank into obscurity. It is reviled by critics and forgotten by the public. Have you seen it? Amazing work.”
“Oh, by art, you mean smut, eh? I dig.”
“Yes, a pornographic movie. Rated triple-X for sex and violence. A notorious piece of cinema, even by genre standards. Banned in many countries. Only a few copies rumored to survive, et cetera, et cetera.”
“I’m sorry I missed this one. A porno retelling of
Dracula
. What will they think of next?”
“The forces at work in the world are endlessly inventive. Artistic autocoprophagy is here to stay.”
I studied him through the haze of his untouched cigarette, preferring not to dignify his comment with a response. I made a mental note to look up autocoprophagy.
He said, “Why don’t you come by my place tonight and I’ll show you the film? I’ve got a bootleg reel. A few colleagues and some friends of the university will be in attendance. You can mingle, make new acquaintances. A fellow in your line can always use new connections, and a better class of them, too.”
“You and your cronies going to gather around the campfire to watch a stag flick, huh?” I said. “A banned stag flick. That’s a relief. I prefer the company of miscreants.”
“There’s another item we’ll need to discuss,” he said. “The client is a dear friend of mine. That’s why he’s come to me in the wake of the law’s failure to rectify his concerns. Nonetheless, I’ve reason to believe Smyth went to Alaska on a specific mission. He’s a bibliophile and an antiquarian. His home, which he abandoned, was stuffed with extraordinary . . . items, shall we say? By all means extract the information my patron requires, but if you can bring home any significant papers or relics, or lacking that, photographic evidence of said, you’ll be generously compensated.”
“Well, in that case, here’s another coaster.”—
—I drove over to the professor’s house around nine. Late enough that people would’ve settled in, but before any craziness had gotten started, or so I hoped. Gander struck me as a buttoned-down freak.
The address he’d scribbled on a coaster led me to an old mansion in the U-District, set back from the street. Parking is hell in the U, so I left the car in a likely spot and walked three blocks. The windows were dark and I wondered if it was the right place until Gander’s housemaid answered the bell and greeted me by name. More of a gasped epithet, really. Her face was pale. She held a candle in an ornamental bowl.
The maid led me to a study eerily illuminated by a silver screen on the far wall. She fled. I got the impression of antique furniture and lots of bookcases. A throng of silhouettes was backlighted by the screen. I whiffed cherry pipe smoke and fancy cologne, a hint of marijuana.
A film played for this crowd of rustling shadows. Its frames jumped, were poorly spliced; the scenes were muddy and marred by frequent cigarette burns; the color flickered. Tiny subtitles and a strange, scratchy orchestral symphony accompanied the grunts and cries of the actors, all a half-beat offset from the action itself. Somebody was fucking somebody. Somebody was murdering somebody. Cocks everywhere, thrusting into every opening. A guillotine blade dropped through the neck of a devil clown. Gore splashed the thirteen dancing brides of Dracula and flecked the camera lens. Darkness flooded in. For an instant the gallery dissolved and I became dislocated, a bullet shot into the vacuum of deep space.