Authors: Owen King
Either Brooks was brainless, or he was hiding something, or he was a complete madman. Sam wanted to poke him with a sharp pole for being so unfathomable. “Let’s try this another way, Brooks. Name one normal movie that you like.”
“What do you mean by normal?”
“A movie you saw in a goddamn theater. And not a theater where everyone had their hands inside their raincoats.”
The younger man dropped his head into his hands and made a noise as if a doctor were sticking a tongue depressor down his throat. A minute or two elapsed. The gagging noise continued. Sam reached his arm out from under the blanket to fish around on the floor near Brooks’s bed. He found a balled-up white sock and hurled it at him. The sock sailed over the AD’s head to strike the wall with a soft thud. Sam fished again and came up with a box of kitchen matches.
Brooks glanced up. “I’m sorry. I’m blanking. I mean, you know, like—I like pretty much all of them. You know? Because it’s just—It takes you away. They take you away. The movies do.”
Sam, arm cocked, box of matches in hand, hesitated.
■ ■ ■
In a film theory class, Sam could sit at a seminar table and highlight the intertextual fatuousness of
E.T.
with the best of them—could chortle at Spielberg’s (frankly colonial) infantilizing of his spaceman, who is dressed and bathed and plied with candy and even jammed into a mound of stuffed animals—but what truly bothered Sam about the movie was that it was simply
dishonest
. No living being, in this galaxy or any other, was entirely good.
E.T.
was as fake as Jesus.
His own cinematic predilections began—and nearly ended—with that single negative criterion: dishonesty.
Of course, fraudulence abounded across cinema. Anyone who had ever been privy to a relationship between truly opposite personalities, for instance, had to be aware that most romantic comedies were utter horseshit; and if you’d ever spent more than a layover in Europe, you recognized that behind every “prestige” picture set in the golden French countryside or on the verdant Italian coast was hidden the actuality of rank plumbing, apathetic service, ambient anti-Semitism, and very few nonsmoking oases.
B movies, however, were the worst. These beacons of untruth—not only the stock and trade of Booth Dolan but also the breeding ground for Spielberg, Lucas, and other brokers of the meretricious—were composed of everything that Sam abhorred: characters who are absolutely good; characters who are mindlessly evil; otherwise retiring female
characters who turn into unstoppable killing machines whenever children are endangered; black characters whose sole attribute is nobility; characters who say funny things while being held at knifepoint or gunpoint or facing some other existential threat; characters who are wholly defined by their sexual traits—like horny females deserving of death and impotent venal males; brilliant preadolescents; brilliant serial killers; attractive streetwalkers; tanned scientists; God and heaven; the devil and hell; people with magic powers—“superheroes”—who dress up in costumes and fight crime but never use their magic in a sexual context, which would be the first thing that a normal person would do (and definitely the first thing Sam would do); spaceship control panels of unlabeled, colored lights; canted—“dutched”—shots used to suggest the presence of the supernatural; extreme wide-angle lenses—“fish-eyes”—to suggest first-person intoxication or disorientation; shots that dive, swoop, tornado, or otherwise behave as though the viewer is a fussy toddler in a high chair who needs distracting, and the camera is a spoonful of mashed peas coming in for a landing; and (excluding a handful of special cases) sequels.
By the opposite token, the movies that Sam considered exceptional were varied, artful, and—centrally—true. There was the icily beautiful and terrible childhood of Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander;
there was Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
and the meticulous hearing it gives to the existence of a resoundingly unspecial boy; there was Lumet’s
Dog Day Afternoon,
a tragedy about two hopeless men—the first hopeless in love, the second hopeless in his loyalty to the first—that was disguised as a bank robbery caper.
The single take in all of cinema that Sam loved best was in
Dog Day Afternoon,
when Al Pacino’s Sonny asks John Cazale’s Sal if there’s a country where he wants to escape. Sal replies, “Wyoming.” It’s a simple two-shot: Sal to the left, Sonny to the right. Lumet doesn’t try to highlight the moment with a cutaway to a close-up. The line should be a gut-buster, but the laughter never slips past your lips. Because, as the two men look at each other, as the viewer sees that Sonny sees that Sal doesn’t understand, we realize that these criminals threatening murder are basically children, and there’s nothing amusing about that, it’s heartrending and awful. Sam could remember, at age fourteen, watching a rented DVD of
Dog Day Afternoon,
alone in the house—Allie out,
Booth far away—the pitch black of a northeastern winter night pulled over the living room window, the pulsing, weeping bullet hole of a zit on his neck forgotten in the rapture of the film. When Sal said “Wyoming,” Sam—all by himself—cried out to the empty house, “Oh, God! Will you guys please just give up? They’re going to kill you!”
And it was just a two-shot. The director hadn’t intruded, the actors hadn’t seemed like actors, and it was so authentic, so recognizable; the exchange was the sum of every dismayed realization ever shared between two men throughout history. It wasn’t too much to say that until he saw that moment in that film, Sam had never come close to comprehending how agonizingly difficult it was to explain yourself to another person, to make him see you as you really were. It was like trying to explain Wyoming.
The few films Sam loved were the antithesis of dishonest. There was often humor in them, and sometimes romance and adventure, but in each case the directors steered them to a conclusion that was resonant—undeniable—and spared no one, certainly not the audience.
■ ■ ■
“You can help yourself,” said Brooks. “I’ve got, you know, a whole box of boxes under the bed.”
Sam was still holding the box of matches, pulled back to his ear, ready to throw at the AD. “You really can’t think of a movie you dislike?” It was a genuinely mystifying notion. Even Booth proclaimed some perverse standards.
The AD seemed to sense what Sam was thinking. “Sorry,” Brooks said. He scratched his cheek, wrinkled his nose, scratched his nose, and rubbed the top of his head. He made another swipe at the air again, as if to ward off a fly, but there was no fly.
“Whatever, Brooks. It doesn’t matter. Forget I asked.” If the AD wasn’t on something, he should get on something. Sam dropped the matchbox on the floor and pulled the blankets tight to his chin.
On the laptop, the half-shaved chef drags a hot plate the size of a truck tire over to the bathtub and slides it underneath. The lonely person, the young woman in the purple bathing suit, does nothing, just lies in the tub. “And now,” says the chef, the dubbed voice becoming slightly wistful, “there is nothing left but to wait until you have brought the mixture to a great boil. There will be a stink. Sorry about that. And do not be
surprised when the pitiful creature commences to beg. That is the most regular thing of all, essential to the flavoring of my dear grandmother’s soup. Okay. I’ve had a nice time cooking with you.”
Brooks rocked back and forth.
The coils of the giant hot plate begin to glow brighter and brighter, and the credits begin to roll. The chef sits on the edge of the tub, crosses his legs, and digs at his neck bandage. The lonely person stares ahead.
Sam dragged the blanket higher, over his head.
■ ■ ■
Other nights, from the apartment, Sam called Polly at her parents’ condo in Florida. Once he thought he heard her shush someone in the background. He didn’t say anything about it, but after that he called her less.
■ ■ ■
For months he relentlessly revised the script, paring away dialogue, simplifying transitions, doing everything he could to make the film operate like a flip-book moving forward on smooth dual tracks of narrative and time. Sam’s personal shooting script was spliced with hand-drawn diagrams of the camera angles and movements that he wanted. He knew precisely how it would go—each day, each setup, each scene.
In the winter months, he saw his movie a hundred times. Seated at the desk in his apartment, at the window overlooking the parking lot, he watched it scroll across the frosted panes and thought it was beautiful and perfect.
Who We Are
was going to give shape to something that had been nipping at him and his friends for their entire lives. It was the story of the generational burden they carried, their shared realization that nothing made sense until it was too late to be changed, that they were never given anything like a real chance.
His first movie,
The Unhappy Future of Mankind,
filmed on a VHS camcorder when he was twelve, had starred his Nukies, those bright red plastic children of the radiological apocalypse born with flippers for hands and melted faces like stretched bubble gum. The film was shot entirely in his bedroom, where Sam directed the Nukies on a doomed stop-motion wagon train from the door to the dresser. The quicksand rug swallowed some. A Stonehenge-like monument of textbooks quaked and fell, crushing half a dozen mutants. During one extended sequence, empty sneakers gave eerie pursuit after a few terrified stragglers and finally ground them out. But the remaining refugees strove on, though
they never seemed to get farther than the open space in the middle of the bedroom floor where everything was staged. Sam could still feel the deep ache from the hard rubber eyepiece of the camcorder digging into the bones of his eye socket as he reached around to shift a figure forward a quarter of an inch so he could press the red button, capture the twitch of movement, press pause, and repeat.
It struck Sam that
Who We Are
was essentially the same story, except with people instead of nuclear deformities.
Each time
Who We Are
played over the window, rolling from black to black, he loved it more. When it was finished and he came to himself, a groove cut across his elbows from where he’d leaned against his desk. He yawned.
The window was streaked with melt. Outside, the grass was greening and buds were popping on the dogwoods. The boys were back at the pothole, dropping pebbles into the darkness. Someone was on the phone. Rick’s deposit, said the voice at the other end. They hadn’t received it.
“Oh,” said Sam. “That’s strange. I’ll check with my bank right away.”
On a morning in May, Sam arrived at Rick Savini’s home in Westchester County with his tools and supplies. They were scheduled for a script meeting that afternoon, and he was several hours early.
The house was part of an upscale development, tucked away behind a stand of elm and pine. The main road described a lengthy oval linking all of the ten or so homes of the development, and exited onto a bustling suburban route. While studying the actor’s home on Google Earth a few days earlier, Sam had determined that Rick Savini’s driveway had no fewer than a dozen potholes. He planned to fill them all—and following that, to take a look at Rick Savini’s roof. In the Google Earth photos, Sam thought he discerned some discoloration at the eaves, a telltale sign of weathering.
Once he had unloaded the necessaries—bags of hot patch, bucket, shovel—Sam removed his shirt and set to work. First he used the shovel to round off the potholes, made them nice and clean. When that was done, he mixed his patch in the bucket and went from hole to hole, pouring up to the brim.
By ten o’clock, the sun was high and hot, and the work was done. Although the job had not been difficult, Sam was out of the habit of manual labor. He took a seat on Rick Savini’s steps to rest.
A sort of minified English manor, the house was planted in the center of an acre or so of greensward. The structure sat on a base of checkered brickwork, and the main body of the building was painted white with gray counterpoints. From one corner of the gabled roof poked a stubby turret. On his first pass through the development, Sam hadn’t been sure which house belonged to the actor. The other houses were similar, pulled from the same broad-shouldered mold. Only the accents varied—nickel plate on the front door instead of brass, trim in light blue or beige instead of white, a bell roof on the turret rather than a conical top, or sans turret completely.
While he leaned on his elbows, Sam observed a yellow butterfly as it drew a jagged line graph in the shadows of the front door overhang. When the butterfly passed into the light, it disappeared, swallowed by glare.
The scene dissatisfied him: the great, glossy house and same-y neighborhood, hacked out of a forest and screened from the hoi polloi driving past on the main road, the middlebrow affluence it broadcast. Compared to Tom’s ever growing LEGO castle, say, it was painfully bourgeois. He had expected better from Rick Savini. What made someone want to be like everyone else? He supposed there was a comfort in similarity, but wasn’t that like deciding that you didn’t want to be
anyone
anymore? It was like deciding to be less alive. He couldn’t figure that.
Wesley Latsch, Sam’s best friend, didn’t seek anonymity, but he did greatly prefer to connect via e-mail as opposed to face-to-face. Wesley estimated that at least 75 percent of the time the person you were talking to was simultaneously thinking about pleasuring him/herself. “E-mail is an antiseptic mode of communication, and that’s a good thing.”
(“Are you thinking about pleasuring yourself right now?” Sam asked, and Wesley said, “Oh, sure.”)
A thrush gargled. Marigolds bunched from a pair of trough-like flower boxes on either side of the porch. Flies circled and settled and crawled in the creases between petals. Drops of sweat slid down Sam’s spine like small, light fingers.
Or maybe the house was a kind of disguise; a McMansion was the last place you’d expect to find an independent
film star. Sam imagined his actor—and even as he thought of him as
his,
he could feel Polly lifting a satisfied eyebrow, pleased to see him conforming to her fantasy of him as a young DeMille, dressed in those dorky lion tamer’s pants and terrorizing a crew of dozens with a bullhorn—sitting on this very step, communing with the part that he had written. Savini would let the serenity of the morning lure him out of himself while the character came in, like a possessing spirit. Sam smiled to himself. Somewhere in the surrounding woods, a stream was flowing, hushing its way over rocks.