IGMS Issue 49 (19 page)

Many films in recent years have employed the sudden, ambiguous cut-to-black as well (the Coen Brothers'
No Country for Old Men
and
A Serious Man
* come to mind, as well as
Martha Marcy May Marlene, Jindabyne
and
Inception
, among others). It speaks, perhaps, to a small but growing tendency to handle traditionally cut-and-dried narratives in more oblique terms. Consider the prevalence of apocalyptic cinema, and how so many recent examples have transformed apocalyptic events into abstractions -
Take Shelter, Children of Men, Time of the Wolf, Perfect Sense, Melancholia, Blindness, Vanishing on 7
^th
Street, The Happening, Southland Tales, Kairo, The Road.
None of those examples provide all (and in some cases, provide very few if any) of the kinds of explanations and hard answers we would normally expect, and not coincidentally several of those films count among the most noteworthy of the last decade or so. With an apocalypse of its own - the existential kind -
The Leftovers
follows suit.

* The Coens have masterfully demonstrated my point for years. They, and their characters, have constantly probed for meaning in an absurd world in which that meaning is, and remains, elusive. And in doing so they've back-doored their way into a more profound understanding of life than most, if not all, of their contemporaries.

Still, I realize the impulse to demand cold, hard answers will continue to persist. And while I would never criticize more straightforward narratives as a whole (after all, most movies qualify in that regard), I'll never quite be able to fathom the
need
many people have for every story to be so open-and-shut.

Citizen Kane
famously ends with the dramatic reveal of the meaning of its title character's final words, "Rosebud." That it's a sled representing his lost childhood is pop-culture lore, but as is so often the case, that "answer" obscures the real power of the film's ending. Psychologically, the lost-childhood idea on its own is rather elementary; but more importantly, it does
not
explain Charles Foster Kane as a character. A detail like that does not, and cannot, explain away an entire person or an entire psychology. The reporter in the film has spent the whole movie probing Kane's life, operating on the premise that discovering the meaning of "Rosebud" will truly get to the bottom of the man. That he never discovers what the audience does is an ironic joke, of course - but big-picture, it wouldn't have served his purpose anyway. People are mysteries. They, like the stories they inhabit, cannot be explained with simple answers. And yet we have a hard time accepting that mystery.

Consider all the speculation over the last decade about Bill Murray's final, whispered words to Scarlett Johansson in
Lost in Translation
. Even there, in a situation where the artist (Sofia Coppola) is making it
abundantly
clear that we are not meant to know what is being said (otherwise, y'know, she would have let us hear it), countless people, online and otherwise, insist they've "solved" it. As if anything needed to be solved. As if finding out what he said has any point.

These tendencies extend beyond just movies, of course. Just look at the way we deal with real-life events. My mind goes back to situations like Columbine and Virginia Tech - mass tragedies that couldn't possibly be fully comprehended or explained (especially not right away), a fact that didn't stop people from doing exactly that. With Columbine, people settled on the narrative that it was two boys who were bullied and who then took out their aggression accordingly. Once that narrative stuck, people moved on and stopped thinking about Columbine - never mind that the bullying angle turned out not to be the case at all. With Va Tech, it was somehow decided that the killer's violent fiction (plays and short stories he submitted in classes) were a smoking gun of some sort. In both cases (and countless more), the most simplistic explanations stood in for incalculably complicated truths and circumstances. And then everyone felt better about it, because we'd "gotten to the bottom of it."
Now we know why they did it.

Except we didn't.

Gus Van Sant's great accomplishment with 2003's
Elephant
- loosely based on the Columbine massacre - was in the way he took apart exactly that type of nonsense. He introduced, and then disregarded, every made-up reason that we heard about "why" they did it. Surely there are things that
can
be understood about that event and others like it. But the events themselves are surreal, inexplicable and random. They cannot be resolved with manufactured narratives. A lesser film would have gone out of its way to (falsely) explain everything that cannot be appropriately explained.

We're conditioned to think of things this way - the justice system itself relies on a singular motive and a very linear path for every crime. But in reality, that's not necessarily how human behavior and decision-making operate. Attempts to construct "meaning" or reasoning are generally applied externally, and we try to make them stick - or find something that will. This makes it easier to digest the narratives we consume, but it's inherently dishonest, isn't it?

To be clear, when I talk about the inadequacy of answers, I'm not talking about scientific answers or demonstrable facts of any kind - those are the keys to understanding, but in a completely different category than what I'm talking about here. It's our storytelling that gets cheapened by an emphasis only on manufactured motives and conclusions. Focusing on the
what
is so inherently limiting; as for the
why
... well, whether we're considering true crime or a sci-fi television show, we tend to gravitate toward that tidy answer. Doing so gives us the impression that the world is rational and easy to digest. I get that; I do. We want to make sense of life, even when - especially when - it doesn't seem to make any. It's good that we keep searching for answers, even to unanswerables. Maybe we shouldn't expect to find them, though; ultimately, maybe the search is good enough.

When Dugli, the most powerful and feared food critic in the galaxy, invited me to join him at a restaurant so exclusive even billionaires like me have to wait two years for a table, I didn't stop to ask why. I packed a bag, scooped up my buffalo dog, and headed for a planet so far off the trade routes that Dugli had sent his private shuttle to ensure I'd come.

Bwill is not a tourist destination. The people smell, the air tastes funny, and the local language will make your ears bleed. But alongside other more common sea creatures, its oceans teem with 
lithic ichthus
, a species of silicon-based fish hard as corundum and ugly as sin. They thrive there. Imagine a swimming creature made of rock. Rock fins, rock gills, rock scales. The culinary masterminds of Bwill prepare them using a series of marinades that permeate the minerals of these creatures, and over the course of months render them as tender and delicate as meringue, and exquisitely safe to be ingested by us carbon-types.

Dugli's shuttle delivered me to Bwill, and a waiting sloop took me from the splashport straight to the dock of 
Stone Fin
, a restaurant created by master chef Plorm. A crowd of Bwillers -- with a handful of offworld foodies -- loitered in front, waiting for their reservations. I was probably the only human on Bwill and Dugli the only Caliopoean. A dark, otterish pelt covered him from crown to heel, with tiny flaps where humans would keep their ears and a whiskered nose that gave him an astonishing palate. We spotted each other at once.

"Conroy!" Dugli's webbed hand pulled me from the sloop and before I could say a word he had frogmarched me past the outraged stares of would-be diners and into the restaurant. Reggie, my buffalito, clattered after on tiny hooves, desperate not to be left out. We were expected. Plorm herself took us through the curtained maze typical of Bwill style and seated us at an elegant table of polished onyx and chalcedony.

I settled Reggie into a booster seat intended for Bwillian toddlers. Dugli waited for the chef to return to her kitchen before speaking. His dark eyes gleamed in the restaurant's candlelight. "So, Conroy, what's it been? Three years?"

"Life is good, Dugli. How's the galaxy been treating you?"

"Truth to tell, I've been despondent of late. But a few months back, I heard a whisper of a hint of a rumor that turned out to be true, and now I'm the happiest man alive. Or I will be soon. That's why you're here."

I smiled, waiting for the catch. "If feeding Reggie and me a fine meal makes you happy, who am I to argue?"

Dugli snorted. I knew he didn't approve of feeding fine cuisine to pets, particularly given that buffalitos were capable of ingesting literally anything. Moreover, he knew that I knew it, but he didn't bring it up. That should have been my second clue that he wanted something. 

"It won't be a good meal, Conroy. It will be a 
great
 meal. Plorm studied under Nery, the greatest chef this world ever produced."

"I know. I'm looking forward to her stonefish."

His head bobbed in agreement. "Exquisite. The second best meal ever found on Bwill. But... What if I said you could have the 
very
 best served alongside it? Nery's seven cheese cribble puffs!"

"That's crazy. The secret of Nery's cribble course vanished with him twenty years ago."

"I assure you, I'm completely sane."

"Then how? Nery's dead. Everyone knows that."

"What everyone 
knows
 is a lie. He's been lost all this time, not dead."

"Lost?"

Dugli grinned like an otter. "And I've found him!"

At dawn a groundcar waited to take Reggie and me from our hotel. We shared the road with pedicabs and bicycles but passed no other motorized vehicles on our way to the fish market. Picture a series of cracked and stained piers where the denizens of the local fishing industry -- which is to say every third person on Bwill -- had tied up their boats. I'm normally good at distinguishing among members of an alien race, but that morning I would have sworn my limo driver was the same Bwiller who had bussed our table the night before, having just changed clothes and gone on to his second job.

We arrived amidst a cacophony of scavenging seabirds and whirring cargoloaders. The pierworkers' shanties sounded to my ear like a orphanage's worth of two-year olds in a nursing home of cheek-pinching grandmothers. Even worse than the noise was the smell! The piers reeked of decay, the boats stank from a local sealant made with the rotting remnants of seaweed, and the pungent citrus scent of hardworking Bwillers filled in any olfactory gaps. The fisherfolk of Bwill have an ironic avoidance of bathing that has them banned from traveling offworld; imagine fermented limes and tangerines blended with the funk of human body odor and you'll get the idea. With Reggie trotting after me, I exited the limo reluctantly, limited by having only two hands and desperately wishing I could cover my nose and both ears simultaneously. Dugli strode toward me, one delicate, webbed hand broadly plastered over his whiskers. He had his aural flaps sealed tight.

"Conroy! Come on, if we hurry we can catch the last bit of the performance."

We rushed down the length of one of the older piers, its shattered and crumbling surface held together by layers of graffiti and little else. At its far end a group of Bwillers milled about with their backs to us. Dugli pulled me toward them.

The natives of Bwill are humanoid, same as you and me, but on average a head shorter. Their complexions are a bit craggy -- though many an adolescent boy on Earth has endured worse acne -- and range in color from sunset red to crayon orange. Dugli shoved his way through the throng of locals and yanked me after him. Reggie scampered underfoot, dodging shoes and the thorny toenails of bare Bwiller feet. I muttered apologies, but no one noticed. Everyone was focused on the old man at the edge of the pier who sat chanting in a voice as raspy as sea salt. I could see him easily over the heads of the others, but Dugli pushed us to the front with the determination of a man whose outlook on life includes the certain knowledge that his opinion is infinitely superior to yours.