Читать книгу Camera Phone - Brooke Biaz - Страница 8

two

Beauty and the Beast

1991, 84m, Color

Animated/Musical/Romance, G/U

Walt Disney Productions/Silver Screen Partners IV (U.S.)

1

Phone facts, some interesting differences of opinion:

The rapid changes in cellular and wireless technology combined with the large number of phone available means it is more important than ever to review cell phone comparisons and ratings. The comparisons show differences in mobile phones, including information about different phones’ features and capabilities. With so many new features available, it is easier to observer the differences between various models when they are placed side by side in a chart.

(http://www.cellphonefacts.com/ Last accessed: 25th December 2008)

Alternatively:

•An estimated 250 to 300 million cell phones are being used in the U.S.

•The average American cell phone user owns three (3) or more expired cell phones.

•The average US consumer only uses their current cell phone for 12 to 18 months.

•Over 70% of Americans do not know that they can recycle their old cell phone.

•In a recent survey, only 2.3% of Americans recycled their old cell phones and 7% threw them in the garbage.

•Cell phones contain precious metals such as gold and silver.

•A total of 500 million cell phones weighing an estimated 250,000 tons are currently stockpiled and awaiting disposal.

•Cell phones contain numerous substances that need to be disposed of in a safe and efficient manner.

(http://www.earthday.gatech.edu/Cell%20Phone%20FACTS.pdf, accessed: 1 January 2009)

2

I’m still thinking I can get to The Roxy before seven where they’re showing The Last House on the Left, which is probably my favorite Wes Craven picture and, to my mind, far better, structurally, than Deadly Blessing and certainly better than Scream (because it’s based, he says, on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Ingemar Bergman, that is). I believe strongly in occasional stylization. How else can subjectivity be established?

At the Roxy the experience is strictly of the old school. One “screen.” “Stalls.” “Dress Circle.” Screenings SE7EN ’til DAWN. But The Roxy! Hell, it’s like Notre Dame. Like Notre Dame in Paris. Like?

I don’t know. Like the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Agrigento, Sicily (?). In the foyer (which has on the wall near the ticket office a brass plaque stating OFFICIALLY OPENED BY MRS W. B. DAVSON, WIDOW OF THE LATE WILLIAM DAVSON, SCREEN ACTOR, WHOSE PERFORMANCES IN FILMS SUCH AS MY LITTLE DARLING DELIGHTED THE WORLD, JULY 7TH 1947, which glitters as I close up on it and should, if I reshoot, be lensed with a polarizing filter) there is a bar which is long and made of genuine mahogany, with a real marble spill and brass railing. There is a chandelier the size of a double bed, made of eighteen hundred Viennese crystal drops, that turns the ceiling, filmed with me on my back on the mosaic floor spelling out the words LEGENDS OF STARS, into a night sky in which several galaxies have collided. On the wall are life-size photographs of everyone who ever was (Garbo, Flynn, Grant, Powell & Pressburger, Pickford, Ophuls, Welles, Streep . . . and, inexplicably, Nick Nolte!). Going down the stairs to the restroom I feel like I’m stepping down deep inside The Earth. The plumbing is strictly pre-industrial, pre-sound. The light is florescent. There’s cold creeping out of the sick green stucco. This is no place to take a crap. The hand-dryer sounds like a chain-saw. The atmosphere is pure noir. And the music, which is something by someone called Peaches and Herb, I believe,—“Shake Your Groove Thing” by Peaches and Herb—is literally being piped through the walls. The place looks over the beach and the movies run all night.

Meanwhile, into the bar comes Karen, flanked by Helena who has arrived straight from work and, dressed in mid calf height boots and animal print stretched jeans, walks like she’s bungee jumping.

“Ciaran!” she cries out, literally. “Ciaran. I don’t believe it. You are incredible! So tell me: what happened?”

“Come on,” she says, lowering her voice and stretching right across the table towards me with her lips glittering in pearl and her earrings a full 1/2 carat each, “I mean, what fucking happened?”

“Calm down,” I suggest.

She eats me with her eyes.

Naturally, I have no choice but to lie. I am obliged to do it (I am Kevin Costner in No Way Out; Marco Leonardi in Like Chocolate for Water), and joke to myself (though it is only half a joke) that because Helena is Miss Marpley in Accounts she will respect me for this.

I say to myself, referring to a part of the plot which amounts to nothing and is, in itself, absolutely uninteresting: “There wouldn’t be some poke auditor about to go through the Festival of the Waters Film Festival accounts if office feeders like you, Helena dear, hadn’t practiced a little truth ping-pong, a little financial hide-the-puppy, a little computer fraud. Now would there?”

Karen is asking: “So how did he do it, anyway?” But for the moment, though I’m aware of Karen hanging on my next word, but pretending not to, kind of weirdly doe-eyed up against my shoulder, I’m still concentrating on Helena. I’m thinking that without her clothes on she would look like a seagull. Her neck craning thick and white. Her chest out. I am sitting in El Monkey, the decor a jungle of potted palms and stuffed brown monkeys in cages and Vox posters and blackboard menus, the music of Portishead, and a gull is trying to make my two-shot into a big close-up, demanding: “Come on, Ciaran! Come on!”

“With a razor blade,” I lie. “Very traditional.”

“God!”

“That’s crazy,” says Helena who, of course, knows Milroy from her early, amateur film days.

“Sure,” I say. “Sure it is.” Even weirder, I think, because in actual fact he did it in exactly the same way that Michael Hutchence from that ’80s rock band INXS did it. And because, of course, no one was quite sure if Hutchence had really meant to commit suicide or if he had, in fact, been engaging in some kind of bizarre sexual game, something borne in the angst that the corporate mentality of the ’80s, the terrible dissolution of that period, produced in the young that grew up amongst it. Or whatever.

“But he’s alive, is he?” asks Helena, lighting a cigarette, inhaling.

I start doing this great voice-over (in the tradition, actually, of Adrian Lyne’s Lolita. “O gentlemen of the jury,” that kind of thing), but Karen stops me, almost distraught:

“And then what? You went in, and then what?”

So now I’m explaining to her how it happened, though I’m lying of course. How I cutaway from the corridor into his office. How it is difficult to know whether the books, many of which have glossy covers, will reflect comet tails through every phone shot. How the background music is “Solved” by Unbelievable Truth, playing out on the front lawn. And his office walls, “Which are plastered,” I lie, “with Def Squad posters, pictures of Bill Murray” mask the set, as does the stippled ceiling, and slowly, panning, the colors “like something out of Hairspray,” hitting the first sunlit aspects of his desk, until my lie somehow finds its way back to the truth and I’m describing the doctor with his head in a plastic bag and the way his face had turned a deep shade of red and his flickering bulging eyelids and the clutter on his desk, at which point I am tempted to freeze frame but instead I’m lowering my phone so it’s recording just Dr Steven Milroy’s mouth, his now gaping mouth, and the spot effect of sirens (off) tells everyone that the ambulance is arriving, the police also, one of whom turns out to be some character actor whose name escapes but looks a bit like Mel Gibson if not for having absolutely no chin, and the other is Jamie Lee Curtis, taking a statement as Steve Milroy, now revived (because he had clinically died), and conscious again, is crying something like “Tell Leesa . . . ,” by which I figure he means Leesa Kennedy who lead for him in Judgment Nights, and works for the Film Festival.

“Oh, God, tell Leesa will you, please?” he’s yelling as they wheel him out (they’ve bought a chair) and just at that moment there’s this clatter and murmuring (off) and from along the corridor (pan slowly right), the whole freshman cohort is being shown into the building as part of their introductory library tour, it is Orientation Week after all, and they prop at the sight of him being wheeled out. The whole set falls silent. There’s an old wall clock (you know the type) and it clocks out the seconds like a drum beat as Milroy is wheeled right down the corridor past them (me not letting him out of left frame for ten, twelve beats; the corridor checkered black and white, receding busily away), and I know exactly what the undergrads are thinking? They’re thinking:

“Hey, I want to make movies. There is nothing else.”

“And the thing is,” I say, “later the police wanted to know if I had anything ‘on tape.’” (?)

Helena is silent, inhaling, exhaling. Karen is clenching her fists over her eyes.

“Tape? ‘Film?’ I said. . . . Well, I’m not going to tell them, am I?”

“I don’t believe this,” says Karen, her face suddenly annoyingly hidden by the rim of her cup.

3

It doesn’t stop there:

Baked Sultanas and Red Cabbage with Yogurt and Honey

(Serves 2) For this recipe you can use bulk sultana buys. If Red Cabbage is unavailable, ordinary cabbage will do. Plain yogurt is best; but sometimes this is expensive. So, flavored yoghurt is okay, as long as you use some of the less powerful flavors, such as applesauce, peach, guava, custard or caramel.

1.5oz caster sugar

2lb Yogurt

4lb ripe sultanas

4 tbsp wine (such as red wine)

1 Red Cabbage

1¾oz unsalted butter

freshly ground black pepper

6 tsp honey

4oz peanuts

crème fraîche, on top

Cooking time: 20–25 minutes

1. Place the caster sugar and yogurt in a saucepan and stir over the heat until the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat.

2. Preheat a normal oven to 400F. Prick the sultanas all over using a fork and place them on a baking tray.

3. Swiftly heat the wine in a dish or, if necessary, in a kettle. Poor into a bowl and add the butter, six tablespoons of honey, and black pepper. Bring to the boil, in a microwave, and then add the sultanas and the honey.

4. Transfer to the oven for 15 minutes, basting the sultanas every 2 minutes with the liquid.

5. Meanwhile, take the cabbage, place it in a pan, sprinkle with peanuts. Bring to a boil. Then place on tray in the oven for 8 minutes, until golden-brown.

6. To serve, arrange cabbages on plates and drizzle the sultanas onto it. Serve with a crème fraîche.

4

I don’t follow Karen. I don’t understand what she’s saying. This whole Milroy thing has thrown her into this mighty fine fit. Even though she does not know the full truth of what happened, because I figure that’s something she doesn’t need to know, won’t benefit from, and I don’t want to tell her. She’s actually dissed Helena because of it; won’t talk to her about it, stormed out of the Plexus, though it was her that had arranged to meet Helena there and her that had insisted on speaking to Helena alone, after I had revealed to them the full extent of his injuries, and her then who even refused to let Helena come home with us, though Helena stays with us regularly, when it’s too late, or too . . . whatever, to go home to her place at the marina.

Now Karen’s the most obvious person in Candia by far—even though the place is getting pretty packed now with a whole lot of us from Langford, with other students from Southport, with city workers from NEXT, COLLINS SHOES, EXCALIBAR, RUFUS FOR MEN, APPLEYARD KIDS CLOTHING, WOOLWORTHS, WATERSTONES, GO SPORTZ, THE HEART FOUNDATION, VIRGIN MEGASTORE, THE HALIFAX, RIVER ISLAND CLOTHING, HMV, HABITAT, FOODLAND, RAGWEED, PEPE, PROVOCATEUR’S T-SHIRT, MOTHERCARE, with the guy from DIABLO CLOTHING who gives discounts for holders of concessionary rail cards, with assorted space cadets from Machin College, with people I don’t know but who are probably here in Southport for the forthcoming Arts Festival, maybe even for the Film Festival, though frankly they don’t look like it, they’re too “well, gee whizz,” they’re too “well, shucks, is that a special effect or what?,” they’re too . . . too un-film.

Still Karen goes on, her voice pretty much ruining anything I’d want to do with the ambient sound.

“You should have just left him there, Ciaran. It was none of your business.”

“What”—I zoom in on her face in full blank stare, placing my phone at an oblique angle of, I guess, 30º—“is your problem?”

She tries to smoke and drink her Indonesian Java au lait at the same time and the ash of her cigarette falls on her new white Diesel top and she dumps the coffee cup on its saucer, spilling the Java, shouting “Shit!” at the top of her voice, wiping off the ash with one of the Candia napkins, which are thick and soft incidentally, while Monika (who works in Pencils, the Student Union stationary shop) tells her:

“It’s okay. Karen, it’s okay” sounding like someone right out of Singles.

So there’s a big problem, apparently, with how I dealt with finding Steve Milroy, how I called Emergency, maybe even how I shot the whole thing in a steady doco flow so that not one minute of his rescue was missed, not one reaction left to the viewers’ imagination (who knows, maybe even that). Frankly I can’t get a handle on this being a problem, or why Karen won’t shut up about it. Now she is getting other people involved.

“You really shouldn’t go near that guy,” says Alice (Social Work, third year).

“O?” Me shooting in high shot over Alice’s neatly blue-tipped hair.

“No,” says Cole (Archaeology, from France originally, parents some kind of mountaineers or engineers or something, doing a dissertation about runes, or ruins is it? Whatever).

“Why’s that?” I say, circling the table as a guy from RUFUS FOR MEN checks out the menu nearby, plumbing for the Kamaboko which, had he asked, I would have recommended anyway.

“There’s other people who do film,” says Colleen. “What about Dr Hallam?”

“Poke,” I say.

“Keith Negus?”

“Poke. Po-ka!”

“Hey, Bronwen Rainey is supposed to be brilliant. Didn’t she direct that animated film about the . . . the mice? You know The . . .”

“The Mighty,” I say. “And, poke. Pokella! Pokofsky! Poke!”

“Listen,” says Kevin Lewin, who is studying American . . . Studies I think, going out with Grace (seated next to him), who knows Goody, the projectionist at The Roxy, who gets both of them in at all the Roxy’s late nighters for nothing, and who is a limey light in both the USP Sail and USP Climbing clubs.

“There’s issues here, Ciaran,” he says, “which you don’t seem to get.”

He sweeps a look around the table and, by their pouting half-interest, I figure the whole of our building actually agrees with him. At which point, it all becomes perfectly, achingly, sickeningly clear to me: Kevin is far too distant shot from the far end of the booth like this.

I scramble up to my feet and lean on in. He almost jumps out of his seat.

“Look, you jerk, just leave it alone!” he screeches.

“O, this is great, Kev!” I say, tilting my phone to catch his left ear reddening, his giant John Candy head swaying back and forth. “Keep going!

“To Hell with this!” he screams and pushes himself up from the table.

“I’m out of here, Grace,” he says, pushing along the booth past Alice and Colleen and Monika and Cole and Grace, who tells me she is absolutely not named after Grace Kelly, though I doubt very much that this is true. Kevin leaves the booth, heading home to Langford. Grace follows.

When they’ve gone and the place seems to be returning to normal I suggest that maybe we can order one of Candia’s excellent all-you-can-eat Llaningachos and share it between us.

“I got this idea,” I say, “where I shoot these ten friends, who all live together in a terrace by the beach, right, as they start a meal and their whole lives kind of spin out around the food so that for every potato cake there’s a story, you know?, for every baked egg there’s a little anecdote captured on film, for every spoon of orange salad there’s . . .”

At this point Karen, who for no apparent reason has been gently spooning more and more sugar into her now cooling coffee, simply loses it and, grabbing her string bag from the floor under Monika, tears now forming like great glue balls in the corners of her eyes, sprints for the door.

I follow her into the street and catch her on the corner of the Halfmarket and Beach Street; propping there against a litter bin and the signpost pointing south to “The Southport Toy Museum.”

“You don’t love me, Ciaran,” she says.

“That’s not true,” I say, catching her three-quarter profile against the mock graystone façade of RAGWEED. “I do, but . . . I just don’t get you anymore.”

She goes to speak but doesn’t. Begins wandering instead down the sidewalk toward the escarpment, her head thrown back a little, swinging her string bag in slow Ferris wheel circles.

“Look,” I say, catching her up, “what about we head out to Ras’s. He’s just downloaded a full copy of Bats off this new site he found and it’s . . . flawless!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” I say, “how about we don’t. That’s fine. How about we just go home.”

. . .

“Karen, I don’t know what to say here. Help me out.”

“Ciaran, you are not listening!”

“What?” I say. “What?”

“Would you just turn that thing off?”

I stand propped against a white convertible as a truck the size of a house passes, and I catch the huge tail lights in a full elongating phone shot away to north and it just looks great as a slight but maybe even slightly red dust whirls up behind it and the cars parked on either side of the road rock a little and the load, whatever it is, train wheels or cogs or huge buttons or something, rattle, and clink against each other.

Then I turn around again, but Karen is gone.

5

Ras Bregendahl, my closest friend, who is famous for once running Jacob’s Ladder from dusk till dawn every night for a whole week, worked as an assistant projectionist at The Roxy over summer (three evenings, SE7EN—MIDNITE). Ras is a biophysics MS (now in his second optional extension year), and an absolutely first rate Horror freak.

Catching the landline as I come in, I agree to meet him this evening at eight at Plexus, the student union bar, and I swear he says in a breathy voice: “Come alone.”

“What?” I say. “What did you say?”

But he laughs and is gone.

Still, by five, Karen has not come back to the terrace and I’m forced to watch DVDs of Ricki Lake alone. Tonight a longstanding friend’s partner reveals her intentions while Ricki acts as a mediator. I eat a Greek salad that we bought on special from New World because it was near its date, and also a tuna mini-pizza, a Granola Bar, and drink some Evian, then I set the DVR to record Jerry Springer and, with my phone now charged, head out of Langford onto the Halfmarket where the street lights are now lit and there is a mist rolling in from the sea. Now this, I think to myself, takes the cake.

Soon I’m traveling down The Promenade in the direction of Chester Circuit and shooting without a corrective screen, despite the lag effects. I suppose I could have shot this during the day with a night filter but I’m thinking “Honesty and integrity,” I’m thinking “You can fool some of the people some of the time” Also: with coming of high speed film no one much does it anymore. I think it will pay off. Bladers pass me, heading along the beachfront wearing black lycra cycle shorts and red stretch sateen jeans, their bodies absolutely piped. The sea is black and sketched with neon DIABLO CLOTHING, TATTOOOS, REXUS HOTEL and M in several colors. Outside the Lobster Room, which is notoriously gay and charges blood to get in, four lush undergrads wait for the doors to open, wearing white stretch lace dresses and ankle boots and watching kids skateboarding up the bandstand steps, doing floaters and hi-backs. Across the road two old bottle hounds, total wastes-of-space, are drinking white cider on the bench.

In a moment of inspiration, I phone zoom in on one of them and he cries out:

“You from MTV?”

“That’s right,” I say. “Newsnight.”

At which point he (yellow t-shirt, elasticized draw-string jog pants) gets up and steps out into the road in my direction and is nearly hit by a convertible (possibly a Mazda, an MX6 I mean), whose driver (insurance professional: INCREMENTS) hits the horns. But the hound’s saying: “I used to be in show business. You know? I used to be in films.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Really?”

I’ve got him in the most incredible deep phone focus with the whole promenade behind him flaring like an oil fire. He’s nothing more than a silhouette swaying left and right and blubbering:

“I was in The Guns of Navarone.”

“Really,” I say, noticing now that the lush four, having been alerted by the car incident, are now tuned in on this. I prop down on one leg and put my elbow on my knee to keep my phone steady. “Which one were you . . . Captain Mallory or Colonel Stavros?”

“Mallory,” says the hound.

“Nope,” I say, “couldn’t be Mallory. That was Gregory Peck.”

“Well,” he says, looking for his bottle, “the other one then. . . . Staverros.”

“That was Anthony Quinn.”

His face, which is asymmetrical, now falls to his neck.

“Maybe it was the sequel,” I say. “Maybe it was the sequel you were in . . . with Harrison Ford.”

“What?” he says. “No. The what? Hey, I’m talking about the film The Guns of Navarone.” He staggers over close, unbalancing my picture. “You’re doing that wrong . . . Here! Here, give it to me!”

He’s coming at me now with his arms out, grinning like a chimp, waving his hands about.

“Listen,” I say, standing up and stepping back. “It’ll be on the news.”

“Alright?” I say, starting to walk away. “Ten o’clock. Okay?”

“You’re doing that wrong,” he screams.

6

Ras puts this month’s Black Heat on the table between us and he reads aloud as follows:

“What is wrong with The Institute Benjamenta: Or This is What Dream People Call Human Life is what is wrong with all the Quay Brothers films. It’s a question, you know, of making the morbid detritus of life into some kind of psychic substance and these days these two guys, terminally attached at the hip, seem to take this to mean an endless cycle of repetitive scissor shots. I didn’t even like Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies that much. If they’d just get back to existential dread they managed to dredge up in Street of Crocodiles we could all go back to not sleeping at night. As to The Institute I’d rate it a “don’t even think you’ll get a hand-job after this one.” I suggest you rent Body Chemistry 2 again instead.”

“Justin Madden,” says Ras. “I mean: how can you take that complete poke seriously?”

There’s about half a crowd in Plexus, but there’s at least several people I recognize, and I film Neve Campbell and Liv Tyler from Supa-Video tonguing their drinks in a booth to the right, and Gary Oldman, I think, no I’m sure, in the corner. But still no sign of Karen.

I mention this to Ras. And then I try to give him some idea of how my relationship with Karen is panning out since she left Roeford, moved in with me into the terrace, registered at USP, but now has turned her back on film in favor of “literature.”

“I mean,” I say, “what is she doing? I direct, she acts. It just doesn’t make sense. I mean, when she finishes here, what? Look how Julia Stiles started, right? Mena Suvari? Patricia Arquette? In In . . . dee . . . pendents. Independent labels.”

For reasons I guess I understand well enough, Ras looks awkward and pats his coat pocket, looking for a cigarette.

“She’s got things on her mind,” he says.

“Sure,” I say, “medieval literature.”

He hesitates to agree, but finally, in a hard, stiff nod of his head, he does—then, turning away, picks up his magazine again.

“I just get really pissed off when I read shit like this,” says Ras, flicking through Black Heat with his head to one side, sucking from a bottle of Beechams, which is part vodka, part Frangelico and part pineapple and comes in at 33%.

“No talent,” he says, looking up at me. “You know what I mean. Pokes like Madden have just got no talent.”

I notice Ras is dressed in a black t-shirt and an embroidered carpet bag waistcoat. He wears his hair long, in a pony tail, and amazingly still carries a pager, rejecting all talk of a WAP, cellular or mobile system (it’s apparently something called a Mynilta TX101 which has, he proudly, pokeshly, tells me, nine musical alerts). He’s been at USP four years now and, although his MS degree was only supposed to last a year, he has extended twice and now has no more possible extensions and must finish before the summer.

Because Ras works at The Roxy a lot of people passing stop to talk. One guy, pure Neanderthal, possibly a gymnast or something, a weightlifter, is wondering why they never show Prime Cut. Why anyone would want a Michael Ritchie Film starring Sissy Spacek is beyond me, though Gene Hackman does his usual admirable Popeye Doyle and the thing is held together by a bunch of completely deviant hicks who inhabit a country fair in the Midwest. There’s also a respectable wheat field chase scene; but isn’t that just a little too North By Northwest? Hardly original is it?

“So,” says Ras, “Milroy tried to top himself? A friend of mine—Gary You know? Works in the USP Staff Club?—says that he personally always thought the guy was a full blown soup kitchen. From my experience, I gotta agree with that. You know, he used to have these regular film parties at his place and . . .”

I prick up at the sound of this, but Ras won’t go on.

“Fook-hit, I shouldn’t talk!”

“I didn’t hear about that,” I say, interest severely piquing. “About those. His film parties. When was this?”

Ras, shaking his head in a weird kind of circular fashion, seems lost on this. “A month or two back . . . I don’t know. A month ago maybe. He sure used to do some heavy gear. Hyoscine and thiorpropazate mostly, I think. Anyway, you should know that. He’s one crazy pup.”

I have known Ras since July when he was a USP peer guide on a postgraduate induction tour and we spent two hours together being bussed around the Harbor Zoo while a guy called Louth described his alstroemeria aurantiaca, or whatever, and the commitment that all the Southport teaching staff have to transferable learning skills. Dr Francis Louth, who apparently is a world specialist on amphibians, toads, newts, their slime and slimy habits, and just to prove this point was dressed in a toadish charcoal blazer and amphibious taupe twills.

“Anyway, forget that. You played Outwars yet?”

“No,” I say, closing in on him, still wondering about these film parties that Milroy was supposed to have had.

“Frankly,” Ras says, looking into my phone, “if he don’t put my name in the credits I’ll be telling everyone you’re actually remaking Klute.”

“What, and you’re Jane Fonda?”

I notice now that he’s ridden his bike because his helmet is under my seat. Meanwhile, the place is filling up and the singular narrative (one section neatly slotting into the next like a fishing pole), which I hoped would hold my film together in a way that a film hangs around a certain set of recognizable motifs or images (such as the whores in Interview With A Vampire or the 1961 Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, in Karen’s case, in my film about her which is suffering from her complete detachment from things lately, the battle between good and evil which could, in fact, go either way) is slipping away into something more like a concert film and, to be honest, I’m getting annoyed.

“Are you ready for this?” asks Ras.

But seriously, I really am getting annoyed. I can’t help it: I’m thinking about Steve Milroy lying their naked with this head in a bag, the bag steamed up like some kind of Chinese take-out bag, his eyes rolled back in his head and the slim-line venetians closed, and I can smell his office (though it is probably really the smell of nachos which they do here, or the potato skins, veggie-burgers, seafood platters) and I want to shout out:

“Excuse me, my film is not a genre film!

“This is not some formulaic studio film that you can manipulate and ruin!”

On the other hand, it really is a unique achievement to have phone-filmed an attempted suicide (if that’s what it was?), to have caught on film the moment at which one ordinary guy was, let’s face it, out-of-here. I feel I know the guy a little better at least because of it. In that sense, I’m even more concerned about Karen’s new, weird attitude. Not least, because I have a genuine moment of life and death in front of me and, because of her attitude making me wonder about my own life, my own steady, unrelenting march toward death, I play it again and again. At will.

“You know,” I say, “I have an idea.”

“Wait a minute,” says Ras. “I was trying to tell you something. Guess what?”

Now at this point I can either say “What?” or ask him why he didn’t mention that he’d come on his bike which means we won’t be staying here tonight because when he bikes he always wants to ride somewhere, usually out to the western suburbs to the Lizard Lounge which used to be, I’d guess, a pinball parlor in, maybe, the ’70s, perhaps there was even eight-ball!, but now has racing simulations and infantry strategy games, graphic platformers, tank strategies and the newest arcade Toonstruck. But instead, because I’m annoyed that I’m going to have to cut most of this out and then there’s the question of how to distil a dramatic premise from Karen’s extremely notable big-fit absence, and because I have an idea which maybe will solve everything if Ras would just shut up, I don’t say anything, just sit back in my chair and focus on the blackboard menu which features, this evening, a Special Fruit Fool.

“Okay, then,” says Ras, “this is it. If I fail my degree, I’m going to Honduras.”

Hell, I think, if I was just shooting this with an Aaton 8–35 or a Mitchell BNC I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I’m going to suffer generational losses when transferring tape to tape, and possibly color shift in the direction of red and, if I’m out of luck, picture break up.

“So?” says Ras.

“What?” I say, though I heard the first time and I’m simply wondering how this fits with my plans, the film I’m making, where it came from, what it means and so forth.

“Why’s that?” I say.

But Ras won’t answer. He just repeats in a strangely rushed and high tone. “Honduras, yeah. It’s one remote fook of a country, Ciaran, that’s for sure.”

I figure this idea has got to have come about from his study of plants in sub-tropical regions, or from his loving avocadoes, or from how many times in Candia he’s ordered esquites or ensalada de jimcama, or from the fact he is the only person I know that knows anything about the work of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (Confidencias, Dona Herlinda and Her Two Son,s etc) and over the years here at USP has championed his films.

“You don’t know anything about Honduras,” I blatantly lie.

Two lush girls from the Halfmarket, who I think actually want to move into Langford Terrace, and who work in NEXT, have noticed I’m shooting them and they pucker up like Monroe or Mamie Van Doren (or so they think) and I give them the thumbs up because if you’re that stupid you need some attention. I zoom in on Gary Oldman, who’s having a bad hair day, but what does he care, he’s a hard man (as his performance in Sid and Nancy proves).

“Manzanillo,” says Ras. “Chihauhua. Guadalajara.”

“You’ve got to be joking!” I’m saying this while drinking a Lilli, which is part calvados, part cherry juice, part Angostura, and comes in at 37%.

“Why?” Ras seems, genuinely unknowing.

“Because,” I say, “you’ll lose your job. And what are you talking about anyway? When would you go, spring term? Honduras, in spring, for Christ’s sake!”

“No,” says Ras, looking dreamily into his drink, “I’m talking about now. I’m talking about tomorrow, next week. Before my ol’ man turns up and . . . Just leaving, Ciaran. . . . you know. Everybody behind.”

I close up on him as he’s putting on his helmet. “Groovy,” I say, him filling the frame, “you should have told me. You’re actually Peter Fonda, right?”

7

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno says this:

Picture-book without pictures.—The objective tendency of the Enlightenment, to wipe out the power of images over man, is not matched by any subjective progress on the part of enlightened thinking towards freedom from images. While the assault on images irresistibly demolishes, after metaphysical Ideas, those concepts once understood as rational and genuinely attained by thought, the thinking unleashed by the Enlightenment and immunized against thinking is now becoming a second figurativeness, though without images or spontaneity. Amid the network of now wholly abstract relations of people to each other and to things, the power of abstraction is vanishing. The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quality of material processed, which has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience, ceaselessly enforces an archaic retranslation into sensuous signs. The little silhouettes of men or houses that pervade statistics like hieroglyphics may appear in each particular case accidental, mere auxiliary means. But it is not by chance they have such a resemblance to countless advertisements, newspaper stereotypes, toys. In them representation triumphs over what is represented.

(Library Shelf: P044448. Professor’s Notes. Z. L. LaTroal. “Politics of Popular Culture” 35:077 Adv. From Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso: New York, 1994, 140)

8

We’re riding up into the hills with Southport beach behind us and the terraces giving way now to allotments, farm shops. What this would look like in widescreen you’d never believe, with the night so clear that, as we ride, it feels like it’s taking my skin off. Like an ice loofah scrubbing away. We’re travelling at what?, sixty miles an hour, which is not even half of what this thing can do. Ras is down low and his helmet, which he’s proud to say is an Arai Quantum E, shoots black and red. I’m pulled up behind him with my hands round his waist and my phone, which I cannot operate, tucked into my jacket. I’m trying to imagine Honduras but I can’t. Hondurans. Lluvia de Peces (Fish Rain). Cheap sandals. Shrimp sizzling right through summer. But all I can see, all that is suddenly visible to me, apart from the rush of scenery which blurs into blacks and browns unless I look upward to the sky which is lined and shot with low white cloud, is Karen.

Voice absent: Karen. Joan of Arc: Karen. Ingrid Bergman: Karen. Karen: SupaVideo: Karen. Close up: Karen. Karen. Karen.

I can’t believe that in just a few weeks she has completely abandoned her love of film, replacing it with some unexplained new belief in literature, when it was film, and film alone, that brought us together. She and I studying American Cinema with Professor Pullman at Roeford and Karen acting in five undergraduate productions in that term alone. And I could see from her total devotion to performing for the camera that she loved cinema as much as I did. When she topped Pullman’s class that only confirmed what I already knew. We got together properly heading to Southport on the train, for pre-registration, and I shot her in full profile across the carriage, reading (come to think of it) The Great Gatsby and she said that she loved Francis Ford Coppola’s work, and I pointed out that Coppola had directed You’re A Big Boy Now when he was just 26 years old, as part of his UCLA graduate thesis, and we talked about how a movie camera can be an eye, an insightful eye on our world, and about how much our graduate studies would equip us for this very world, which was rolling out so rapidly in front of us, even though the cost of graduate study, she pointed out, was phenomenal.

I phone shot her there in that crowded carriage with the windows reflecting her back at me, the scenery passing blurred behind her, the passengers trying to stay in their fixed, unfocussed lives and she, who seemed to easily drift off into trying to calculate how she would survive at USP, the cost of a room in the college, the cost of meals, the cost of books, the cost, cost, cost of education, she said, that in all this tremendous turmoil me with my camera phone at least made her feel kind “special,” her eyes clouding over as she said this, Roeford now behind her, Southport rolling bright and shiny out in front, and me loving her cheesy overplaying of this, her almost cheese-shop Cameron Diaz playing of this scene as she described a job she’d lined up in Southport already, with a guy who was both a film maker and a teacher.

Now this! Just to add insult to injury, Ras is talking about this crazy Honduran thing of his. And nobody is fully explaining to me how this could be happening, or where it fits with me or my plans or the whole gamut of relationships which my existence entails and which make up my film. I want to know how Cole feels about all of this. About what Monika thinks. What David Duchovny thinks. And Nic Cage. And John Cusack, whose range and versatility show him to have insights beyond the ordinary. How Drew Barrymore would read it, being a child of the Hollywood system who has endured both hard times and ridicule.

The fact that Karen is still missing, has not been back to the terrace all day and, though I have called her phone who knows how many times, is still entirely uncontactable, only confirms that whatever is coming between us is growing larger by the minute. Like the black star in The Fifth Element or the rats in The Watcher or . . . maybe, I’m thinking, like the surging evil which fills, and then expands, in each and every frame of End of Days.

Before we left Plexus Ras mentioned his favorite Honduran film-maker, Paul Amador, and I had to admit I had never heard of him. Now I feel awful. My head is aching and I think the cherry juice in the Lilli may have been off or something. I do know as follows: Buńuel lived in Mexico City in the 50s and 60s and the films from his middle period were shot there, including Los Olvidados. Likewise Eisenstein filmed Que viva Mexico! in 1931 but that is thorough trot, having no story to speak of and no great characters, and I can’t understand why anyone would go some place that was so visually claustrophobic. Meanwhile, Ras is giving the bike some.

The corners seem to be coming up now increasingly fast, one after the other. Increasingly fast. I hang on, right hand holding left, and I feel him moving in front of me, his waist rolling up and down in the circle of my arms and his shoulders, which are broader than mine, shifting up and down into right bend then left. And I go with him. Ras’s parents live out at Stoneycroft, in a 19th century barn conversion on 3.5 acres, freestanding, own a Lexus, because they don’t believe (I’m guessing) in being ostentatious about their wealth, and spend three weeks in summer in Kos, Greece, picking oleanders and drinking ouzo. His parents are paying for his science degree and he is guaranteeing them that he’ll finish it—which strikes me as a dubious deal, given the remote subject of his degree (centipedes or centrifuges or something). But each, I say, to his own. He says that Karen is the best thing that could have happened to me and that I should go away with her for a while, shoot maybe a surf movie and get things into perspective, but I don’t see how or why. So he just doesn’t mention it any more, only mutters something about if his father turns up before he leaves for Honduras, or gets a first term grade on his MS project, then his whole life will disintegrate before him.

Now, with the houses gathering again, we’re picking up the outer ring road. The bike’s an Aprilla, foreign, new (2-stroke, reminds me of my pop cutting our front lawn in summer, kids in the street being Jedis: I imagine my strong but graceless ol’ pa replacing the spark plugs. I see him sharpening those blades with a flat file on his bench which never is uncluttered but is always purposeful. I picture the tools he has pinned out on a white peg board which says, wordlessly, out from the shed: “Get a Life, dad!”) and Ras can ride. Suddenly now there’s a Burger King, a Happy Eater, an F&M Superstore. The road is turning into a highway and the lights have become yellow and there, finally, is the sign for the hospital.

When we pull up into the bike bay Ras, taking off his helmet, says (only half, I believe, to me): “I want to get a big bore piston kit. Then it’ll go.”

I use an objective establishing shot, wide hard angle, and then tilt (subjectively, into our realm) toward the hospital doors, to move us through the glass. Therefore, my phone is now our eyes and if I catch, to the farthest right, the blue of Ras’s sweatshirt I’m giving the sense of us both moving together. The corridor is packed either side with shops and, just to really make my night, each one of them is headed by a gold promo strip, lit from behind, so it seems like I’m flying through the Milky Way. There’s everything here from 7-Eleven that sells mostly soft toys, to a (quote) “unisex” hairdresser (Quuaint! Sounds like it’s composed by Sonny and Cher), an insurance agent, a florist, of course, and an antique shop (no idea). We take a right at radiology and walk along through the Eye Center, past Dialysis and the Red Cross until we can either take the lift (a choice of seven) to Male II—XI or go straight ahead through Oncology and Immunology. Ras suggests, however, that we take a left and go instead through Accident and Emergency (A&E).

We seem to be off the main route now: the corridors becoming narrower. I can smell metholated spirits, chlorine, Dettol. Nurses in green, and with masks hung around their necks, are replacing nurses in white and there’s none at all now in pink. There’s a chorus line of cleaners with mops doing a dance number from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (“we take a jump to the left. Then a jump to the ri-i-i-i-ight”), led by Dr Frank N. Furter (aka Tim Curry) chewing an ExtraMint and speaking into his mobile. The corridors are lined both sides with stainless steel trolleys. Someone’s preparing for launch. Flesh Gordon. Lost in Space.

Staying as steady as possible, I duck out from behind my phone to say: “I don’t think this is the right way, Ras.” But Ras, who is walking ahead now (great over the shoulder shot), only shrugs. His shoulders, narrow and bony, giving the impression of being two CGI arms, cranked up, made of stainless steel, just sharp and hard and pinned there on the pivot of his neck.

We pass Cardiography, all red lights and thick plastic curtains; CCT, REANIMATION (???). And then the corridor turns abruptly. At this point a whole shit load of zombies from Hell appear in front of us, their arms out in front, whistling the tune from the Bridge Over the River Kwai. When we turn to run the lights flicker and go out. Now, in inky darkness, the ever-present sound of a heartbeat, growing faster . . . okay, not actually, but suggestively. The first thing Ras does when the corridor ends is say:

“Hey Ciaran, I’m Jack Nicholson in The Shining” and he raises his hand over his head as if it’s an axe and brings it down on my shoulder.

Wox! We’re at the back of this building, overlooking the chimneys and boiler room, ambulance bay and some sort of office block that bears the coat of arms of the university (that is: Sigourney Weaver rampant on a crest of aliens). Ras is talking about the wonders of Science, the kinds of things that are possible in the scientific world with carefully encouraged transformations of certain types of cells, and the new achievements in genetic engineering and the combination of spores of vascular plants, and the complex molecular structure of lipoproteins.

I push through the plastic doors which slap behind me, and the waiting room for Emergency opens up in front us.

It’s a nightmare, naturally. There’s kids playing house in a broom cupboard opposite called The Fun House, a girl (12 maybe) is crying in the front row, the seats being arranged like this place is a Boeing. A guy with a tattoo on his neck (he’s maybe circa 20 years old, hair barbered in a Bavarian crop, eyes like a tortoise, the tattoo looks like the bear in a vice from the album covers of the Super Furry Animals), is holding his left arm across his chest and there’s just no doubt it’s shattered into two trillion places. He licks his fat lips, looks up at the NO SMOKING signs which wall paper the walls. There’s two lushlike nurses bent over trimming the plaster off a kid’s arm. Where there isn’t victims and mucus there’s whole families who look like they come here every day to stock up on quantities of this pure clinical quality borefest.

I prop beside the Coke machine and compose the scene this way:

Crying girl, Furries tattoo, plastic falling from boy’s arm, lushlike nurse adjusting her bra (turns out she’s got teeth like a keyboard), gorm-free family of three, mother missing, two little girls eating Cheetos, Registration window . . . and now, closing up on STANDARD CHARGES and ITEMS OF IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED.

If you, like the rest of the civilized world, have been re-watching ER (except, of course, the episode in which Dr Greene goes AWOL to San Deigo to save his parents, because that is utter dog shit) you’ll know that there are more ways to capture the sheer craziness of hospital environments than jump cuts and endless over the shoulder shots. Lens choice is an option, for one thing. I’m only sorry I don’t have an Innovision or a Cine Photo Tech because then, with a beak as narrow and full-on as that, I could slip between the Coke machine and the payphone and film the whole shebang in a series of angular cutaways. And a man-lift would be nice, because a high shot would really add much needed weight to the sequence which otherwise, to my mind, has the potential to become too static.

But now the nurse in Registration (she’s got badges on her hat, possibly a Gulf War veteran I figure) is calling out: “Hey, what are you doing there?” Followed by, inevitably, something like: “Do you have permission to do that?”

Fortunately, the elevator’s opening ahead.

When we’re in and the doors close, Ras peers down at the guy on the trolley beside us. There’s no elevator noise: just absolute silence. . . . and motion. It’s worse than The Night of the Living Dead. At least Russell Streiner, who plays the brother and also produced the film, moaned. But this trolley jockey, who must be 85 if he’s a day, just stares up at the white cork lift lining and the male nurse with him, no Samuel L. Jackson that’s for sure, is wearing headphones and listening to what appears to be the new Celine Dion album.

“Not feeling too well?” I say to the old guy, but he just goes on staring at the lift ceiling.

“Fine,” I think. “Have it your way.”

Instead of making dialogue in which I’m likely to be the only participant, I point to Ras and motion for him to move in close to the guy. I realize suddenly (and, frankly, I’m surprised) that this is the first time I’ve directly directed one of the actors in my film and, as if I’ve just put my finger in the wall socket and something absolutely extraterrestrial has come down the wire to me, I recognize that this might have been a mistake.

“Yes,” I say, “Ras. Yes. Good. Now shake the guy’s hand.”

The guy’s hand is buried under a hospital blanket and a sheet tucked in regulation (which no doubt is the handiwork of Tonto here in the green), but I tell Ras not to let that stop him. For a moment, however, it seems like he will not take direction—staring down at the guy with a half-grimace, lip-curling look.

“Ciaran . . .” he starts, questioningly.