Innocents and Others (21 page)

As for this rumor that Meadow and I had a falling-out, we did not. The truth is much less dramatic. We slowly grew apart over the years, but she is still my oldest friend.

Finally, why did she quit making films? I don't really know. Meadow stopped making films for her own private reasons. She had an accident in 1999 that I think had something to do with it. She stepped back, and now she prefers to teach film at a college in Albany
and live a very modest life. I respect her choices. But I miss her work and I miss her.

I will close with what Meadow once told me about being an artist. It is partly a confidence game. And partly magic. But to make something you also need to be a gleaner. What is a gleaner? Well, it is a nice word for a thief, except you take what no one wants. Not just unusual ideas or things. You look closely at the familiar to discover what everyone else overlooks or ignores or discards.

—Carrie Wexler 1/15/15

Carrie Wexler was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed six feature films including
Girl School
(1997);
WACs
(2001);
Lindy's Last Chance
(2003);
Making It
(2008);
We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About
(2011);
A Baby!
(2014). Her films have won great acclaim, including a Writers Guild of America award for Best Original Screenplay and two Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy).

Related links

Carrie Wexler,
A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8

Meadow Mori,
How I Began: Installment Number 32, 2014

Meadow Mori interview,
Sound on Sound, June 1999

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CARRIE TELLS THE TRUTH

Everything Carrie said publicly in her essay about Meadow was true, but she also knew much more about Meadow's breakdown than she said. Was that the right word for it? She would never say that to anyone else, but that was it, a breakdown. And it didn't start with the accident, it started with Sarah Mills and the film they tried to make about her back in 2001. Meadow came up with the idea as a way to exonerate her (exonerate Sarah, and in a weird way, exonerate Meadow). But it didn't work out that way. Carrie had called Meadow after a very hard article was published in
New York
magazine. It was titled “Handmaiden to Monsters.” It was about
Children of the Disappeared.
Meadow was interviewed, but her discussion of her own film was offset by comments from Argentinean survivors—most of whom hadn't seen the film but had heard about it. Meadow's subtle, uncomfortable film was “a defense of genocide.” Why didn't she include footage of the survivors, the few who escaped death in the cleansings? Or the families holding up pictures of the disappeared? Their agony was left out of this “bizarre” film. “I am interested in the perpetrators, not the victims. I want the audience to see the perpetrators as complex humans, to see that we are not all that different from the perpetrators. Not to let them off the hook, but to put us all on the hook.” But under her photo (black and white, Meadow's long legs in
jeans, her motorcycle boots on the table in the foreground making her look insolent and almost blasé at her “film factory” upstate) the caption read, “I am interested in the perpetrators, not the victims.” It was a creepy article that seemed to admire and revile Meadow for exactly the wrong reasons: here is this hot, privileged, brilliant woman, and don't we sort of hate her and enjoy hearing people say she's bad? The message being, who does this woman think she is? After Carrie read it, she called and left messages for Meadow at her apartment in Washington Heights and in Gloversville. “Hey, I need to see you soon. Did I mention I am pregnant? Call me back.” Finally Meadow called her back and they agreed to meet at a restaurant near Carrie in Brooklyn.

Carrie watched the door for Meadow. She probably had trouble parking, or did she say she was taking the train? Carrie shook her head at herself: she might be doomed to a hormonally induced dementia for the duration of her pregnancy. She had read a shocking number of books about it even though she knew that she tended to be highly suggestible. But she couldn't resist, and when she read about “milk brain” causing women to lose ten IQ points, she felt a logy veil of space-out descend on her. This even though milk brain was a product of nursing (“milk”) and not part of the actual pregnancy. For whatever reason, imagined or biological, Carrie not only felt out of it and forgetful, she had a placid affect: she didn't really care. She laughed into the empty seat and touched her swelling belly. She liked feeling slow and heavy, embodied. A world unto herself, and barely anything else mattered.

Carrie jumped. Meadow had bent over her and kissed her cheek.

“Hey!” Carrie said. Meadow smelled of mints and cigarettes. Carrie watched her sit on the bench on the other side of the thick-hewn butcher-block table and take off her hat and sunglasses.

Meadow's black hair was long and sleekly straight. At thirty-five she was already getting some gray strands along her face, which Carrie felt proud to think looked quite fetching. Carrie always gave herself a pat on the back when she found a sign of aging in a woman genuinely attractive, as in,
She has wrinkles around her eyes when she smiles, but they look pretty cool. They really actually do, at least on her.
But then it usually turned inward and backward to Carrie, as in,
But I hate the first tiny hints of a weakening jawline, no one looks good with it, and I catch it in photos now, my wavy jaw especially on the left, just like my mother, and there is nothing to be done, really.

“You look great,” Meadow said with a narrow smile.

“You haven't even looked at me, you phony bastard,” Carrie said and shook her head. Meadow smiled more broadly now. Carrie got up and turned sideways. Meadow looked her up and down.

“You do look very healthy and glowing and so on,” Meadow said. Carrie nodded at her. “Quieter too, huh? Peaceful? Content?”

Carrie snorted. “Yes, and smugly self-satisfied. Open doors for me, give me the right of way. I am my own reason, people. Because I am manufacturing a person in my freaking body, what are
you
up to?” Carrie said.

“Seriously, though, the maternal vibe is off the charts.”

The waitress came by. Meadow ordered a glass of wine and Carrie ordered a cranberry juice and club soda. The waitress brought the drinks and a basket of bread. Carrie took a piece and buttered it. She missed having wine, a little, but she liked that she could eat with near impunity, which she hadn't let herself do since she was maybe six years old.

“How's Will doing?” Meadow asked.

“Will is good,” Carrie said. “Did I tell you he applied to a bunch of creative-writing MFA programs?”

“I think so. I didn't realize he wanted to write fiction. Or is it poetry?”

Will had been having a hard time. When he turned forty, he decided a change was needed. He was tired of rallying his bandmates and sick of working as a waiter in a neighborhood restaurant. He was always a good songwriter, and then he started writing short stories as well. One day he came home very excited and told her what he had finally realized about himself. He believed it was a great idea for him to attend a fiction program. Somewhere funded so he could be paid to write for a few years. Carrie honestly found his stories wild and quite funny, and she supported the plan. But secretly she was hoping he wouldn't get in—she didn't want to move to Iowa City or Charlottesville or Syracuse. God, no. In fact she couldn't. They would have to be apart for three years. So deep down she rooted against him getting in, which was selfish and awful of her. He applied to all the top MFA programs, and in the end he was rejected by all of them although he was wait-listed at Michigan and at UVA. There was a time, not that long ago, when she would have gladly confessed all this to Meadow. But things were different now. She felt protective of her life with Will and maybe she didn't want Meadow to know that she felt the way she did.

“Fiction. His stories are excellent,” Carrie said. “Funny and dark, with lots of language jokes.”

“Like puns?” Meadow said with a rueful lift of an eyebrow.

“No, not fucking puns!”

Meadow smiled.

“Like Mad Libs,” Carrie said, and this made Meadow laugh hard enough to choke a little on her wine. “No, you know, like making fun of jargon, crashing various language systems together for absurd
effect, or exaggerating them, like New Age motivational speakers or corporate execs. Like that.”

Meadow nodded and looked at her food. She wasn't eating much, more pushing the food around the plate. She caught the waiter's eye and ordered another glass of wine.

“Anyway, he didn't get in anywhere. Those idiots. So he will be Mr. Mom for a while.”

“Lucky Will.”

“Yeah.”

Meadow drank her wine and looked around the room.

“So how are your folks?” Carrie said.

“Great. They said they saw you at your screening of
WACs
in LA. They loved it, thought it was very smart and funny.”

“Yes! It was sweet of them to come.” Carrie waited for Meadow to say more, to say she had seen the film, but she found something to stare at in the space behind Carrie, her mind clearly somewhere else. “What about you, Meadow? How's it going?”

Meadow looked at her, the narrow smile again. “Not great, Carrie.”

“Is it that stupid article?”

Meadow waved her hand as if to say “over it.” But clearly she wasn't. She stared into the space beyond Carrie's shoulder again.

“It was stupid and pretty outrageous what they said about you. They would never call Errol Morris a goddamned handmaiden.”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Why don't you ever call me?” Carrie could hear the scold in her voice.

“I've been very busy, crazy. I want to make this movie about Sarah Mills. She's serving a life sentence for arson, and I think she's inno
cent. But I have to put it together. Figure out how to approach it. Because everyone seems to hate my work now.”

“That's not true. You are so respected.”

Meadow shook her head. Then she sighed. “Everything is so easy for you, an unbroken line,” Meadow said.

“Really? It appears that way, maybe,” Carrie said. She couldn't really argue that she hadn't been lucky. She worked hard, but things often broke her way. She knew that.

“And you have everything you've ever wanted,” Meadow said, nodding at her belly. “Films. Family. Everything.”

“Okay, listen up. Things aren't as uncomplicated as they seem. Should I tell you about my life?”

Meadow shook her head.

“For instance, I'm about to have a baby and my husband doesn't seem to want to sleep with me anymore, and I'm pretty sure he is having an affair.” Carrie hadn't ever formed those words before, much less spoken them. She started to cry. Meadow looked away from her. “I am trying to finish this film, I am having a baby. I've had a very hard time.”

“I'm sorry Will is being a dick, but I'm not surprised. Every marriage is like that, isn't it? At a certain point?”

“God! Why are you so unsympathetic to me?” Meadow smiled as if this were a joke. Carrie felt herself getting really angry at her. “You told that reporter you haven't seen my movie. Even if it were true, don't you think it hurts me to read that?” In the same
New York
article, Carrie had read that Meadow said this:

“Most films just flatter their audience. Make them feel good about their moral compass. Reduce things. There are clear bad guys with a veneer of complication to lend it some sophistication.” When
asked if she felt that was true about her friend Carrie Wexler's new black comedy,
WACs
, she shook her head. “I haven't seen it. So I can't say.”

Carrie knew that the journalist had baited Meadow. But still it hurt. Meadow said nothing. She just looked at her hands. Meadow had sent Carrie a short, faintly positive email about her previous film. That's the most Carrie expected of Meadow as far as Carrie's films were concerned, and even that hadn't happened for this one.

“And you barely return my calls,” Carrie said. “Is it something that I've done or what? I want to help you if I can, you know.”

Meadow looked up at her, and her eyes were red. She said nothing. She wiped her eyes.

Carrie felt her anger melt to something else. She raced to figure out what she could do to soften the world for Meadow, make her happy somehow.

“I can help you make the movie about Sarah Mills. Your movie your way. With my production company. Let me help you.”

Meadow shrugged. Took a sip of wine. “I honestly don't want what you have.”

“When did you become like this?” Carrie said.

“I don't know.” Meadow shook her head. “I don't know. Maybe I'm not a good person.” Meadow's face crunched up and she put a hand over her mouth. Carrie had hardly ever seen Meadow cry.

“Jesus. Are you kidding? You're not different from everyone else, you know. Some good, some bad.”

“Maybe that's why I make movies about people who have done terrible things. An apologist for moral deformities. ‘Handmaiden to Monsters.' I don't even mind so much that I'm not good. I would just hate not to know it, to think otherwise. That seems important.”

Carrie put her hand on Meadow's arm. Meadow was still lean and hard, but now Carrie felt the hardness in a different way.

“That's one of the insights in your work. No one is pure anything. Bad people are still human.”

Meadow pulled out a cigarette. Carrie eyed it. “Of course I won't light up.” Meadow laughed bitterly. “The thing is, that's precisely what I'm talking about. If everyone is good and bad, if everything is complicated, then nothing matters. But I also don't think the answer is to just give people what they want, tell them what they already know. If people cheer at your films, what are you doing?”

“You're being ridiculous. You're just trying to push me away.”

“I'm sorry. It isn't just you. There's something sickening in what we all do. There is so much ego in it, and the rest is a veneer of something beyond self. A flimsy pretense that this isn't just self-aggrandizement. It is really an advertisement for my own intelligence and quality.”

Carrie had seen Meadow do versions of this in the past. She was a woman of extreme positions. Her renunciations. This time Meadow seemed more desperate than Carrie had seen before, more rattled. Meadow kept the unlit cigarette in her mouth.

“I have to go. I am just fucked up with everything.”

“Don't go,” Carrie said. But Meadow was up and gone.

* * *

Later that evening Meadow called to say she was sorry. Sorry she hadn't seen Carrie's last film, and sorry Meadow was so hard on Carrie when really she was angry at herself.

“I know,” Carrie said. She loved Meadow, and it would never change. She would find a way to the feeling she felt most comfortable with no matter what. The bad marriage made it all the more dire that her lifelong friend not leave her too. She would insist on the
friendship, on the “best” friendship, no matter how shabbily Meadow treated her. Aren't friends allowed to accept each other on any terms? Unlike a marriage, which must be fulfilling and a goddamn mutual miracle, a friendship could be twisted and one-sided and make no sense at all, but if it had years and years behind it, the friendship could not be discarded. It was too late to change her devotion to Meadow, even if Carrie hardly ever felt it returned lately.