The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (31 page)

Hawk-Nose smiled; I got the feeling the two of them argued like this all the time, and that both of them enjoyed it. “A thousand pardons, Joseph.”

“I still say what this picture needs is a couple of good sight gags.”

“Anything more would distress your director,” Hawk-Nose replied.

Porkpie shook his head. “And you wanted
me
to be in
Godot
. Half the time this Existentialist stuff makes me want to jump out a window.”

I laughed at the way he said it—“win-duh,” his froggy voice cracking—and he gave me a hug while his wife took some more pictures.

“You take good care of that this,” he said, placing a hand on top of the hat on my head as Mom and I were leaving. “This’s one of my magic ones, and I might need it back some day.”

“I will, sir, I promise.”

Hawk-Nose smiled at me, then touched his index finger between my eyes and said, “
Esse est percipi.
”

“Thank you very much for the pictures, sir.” Still having no idea what he’d said.

It wasn’t until fifteen years later—when we were studying Absurdist Cinema in my college film class—that I figured out Porkpie had been Buster Keaton and that Hawk-Nose had been Samuel Beckett.

The course instructor had managed to track down a copy of
Film
, a 22-minute short black-and-white movie written by Beckett and starring Keaton. It was a little past the midway point of the movie that I began recognizing some of buildings from the Upper West Side, and was so stunned by the realization that I missed most of what happened for the rest of the movie.

Afterward the instructor was bemoaning how no filmed record of the production itself existed, and how “. . . invaluable to film history” such a record might have been; I was about to raise my hand and say, “You’re not going to believe this, but . . .” when it occurred to me that I had never seen the home movie Mom had shot that day. Until that moment, I’d all but forgotten about it.

By then both Keaton and my dad were over a decade in their graves (Dad from a heart attack, Keaton from lung cancer), and while the college-me thought it was kind of cool in a for-shits-and-giggles way, it would be another ten years before I genuinely understood just what an honor it had been to meet the Great Stone Face in person—not only that, but have myself on film with him.

Somewhere
, at any rate.

Still, actually having that film in my possession might do wonders for my final grade in Film class, so I went back to my dorm room that night and called Mom in Florida (where she’d been living for the past six years).

As soon as she was on the phone, Mom said: “I did it. I went wild and bought myself a Betamax. A Sony SLC9. I even bought a couple of movies, too. I got you
Apocalypse Now
—you liked that one, right?”

I admitted that, yes, I might have liked it, considering I saw it nine times in the theater.

“Does this mean you’ll come down here and visit me on Spring Break?”

“I’ll skip out a week early.”

“You’ll do no such thing. I already bought your plane ticket. You’ll skip out
two days
early. Yes, I know, I’m the greatest mom in the history of moms.”

“You sure are.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. Now—what’s going on?”

“Why does anything have to be going on? Why can’t I just call my mom to see how she’s doing and chat?”

Mom sighed. “Because,
hon
, you’re not a phone-chatter. If you call someone, me included, it’s because you’ve got a specific reason. You’re just like your dad in that way. So what is it?”

I told her about what happened in Film class, and asked her if she still had the home movie she’d taken that day.

“Not only do I still have it,” she said, “but I just had
all
our home movies transferred onto videotape so we can watch them on my spiffy new Beta-max—did I mention that I bought myself one?”

“Rub it in.” At the time, the C9 was
the
state-of-the-art machine. I was so envious I could have bitten the receiver in half.

“You can play with it all you want while you’re visiting.”

And you bet I did just that.

Three days before Spring Break ended, Mom and I were watching the transferred home movies in her condo (part of a retirement community in South Florida, a really nice place, actually) when she popped in the videotape of that day in New York. I’d forgotten that the Cine-Kodak had sound recording capabilities, and it was amazing to both see and hear the five-year-old me, as well Keaton and Beckett.

“I tried reading some of that Beckett’s plays,” said Mom. “Either I’m dumber than a mud fence or he doesn’t know how to write.”

She started going on about
Waiting for Godot
, how all that happened during the entire play was that two bums sat by the side of the road waiting for some guy who never showed up.

I was only half-listening, having just spotted something in the background that was there only long enough to attract my attention and then vanish. I picked up the remote control, re-wound the tape, let it play, then pushed the “Pause” button.

Mom leaned forward. “What is it, hon?”

“Do you see that, to the left?”

“See what?”

“
On the left
. Look at Beckett’s right shoulder, then look past it.”

“I don’t see any—oh, wait a second. Do you mean that guy with the big camera?”

I nodded, saying nothing, because it was most definitely there: half-sphere metal horse-eyes on each side of its square head, and a jutting lens from the front that from this angle looked like some kind of beak.

I leaned closer for a better look, slowly advancing the tape frame by frame.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” said Mom. “The instructions said you could break the tape, doing that too much.”

I pushed “Play” and let it run. I’d seen what I was looking for; the camera was exactly in the place where a head should have been; I distinctly saw a human neck connecting the camera-thing to the body.

Of course it made sense
now
;
Film
was a piece of Absurdist Cinema, so it wasn’t any great suspension of disbelief that in an Absurdist film written by Samuel Beckett, there’d be some extra in the background wearing a camera for a head—albeit one that was deliberately constructed to resemble that of a living thing, a horse or maybe bird.

“Can I take this tape back with me?” I asked.

“You sure can. After your call, I figured you’d ask me, so I had an extra copy made.”

I looked at her and smiled. “You really are the best mom in the history of moms.”

“Nice of you to notice,
finally
.”

I watched Buster Keaton put his porkpie hat on my head, then turned to Mom and said, “Whatever happened to that hat?”

“I put it plastic-wrap and stored it in one of my old hatboxes.”

“Can I take that back with me, too? My Film professor would get a big kick out of seeing it.”

“The man gave it to
you
, it’s yours. But you’d better take good care of it. That’s a real piece of movie history.”

“I promised him I would.”

“Then how come I was the one who found it on the floor in your bedroom when you were seven?”

“Because I was
seven
.”

“Good point.”

I turned back to the television and watched as Keaton and Beckett, dwindling into the background as Mom and I walked away, stood waving good-bye. “I thought the Kodak took color film.”

She nodded. “It did.” She nodded toward the screen. “Colors look fine to me.”

The movie was in black-and-white . . . except for the extra wearing the camera-head costume; admittedly, it was far into the background by now, but I could have sworn that its half-sphere eyes were bright gold and its lens-beak a shiny silver. I dismissed this as the result of an old 8mm home movie having faded over the years.

Around ten p.m., after Mom had gone to bed, I popped open a bottle of Coke and went outside the lounge under the stars. I thought about how much I missed Dad, and how lucky both Mom and I were that he’d had such great insurance, and how grateful I was that she’d gotten such a good price on the house. She was a thoughtful woman, Mom was; half of the insurance settlement and the house-sale money was in a trust fund that I had barely touched since turning twenty-one. One more year and I’d be out of school, my Journalism degree qualifying me to flip burgers somewhere until (or if) I decided to enter a graduate program. I considered it money that both Mom and Dad had spent their lives working for, and I was damned if I was going to spend it frivolously. I figured—

—
shnick!

I sat up, looking around, trying to see what—

—shnick!

I knew that sound . . . or
thought
I did, anyway.

I stood up and scanned the nearby trees and bushes, and once thought I caught a glitter of moonlight reflected off of something old, then—

—
shnick! Shnick! Shnick-nick-nick-nick-nick!

I figured one of the neighbors must be taking pictures of the moon; despite how bright it was outside, the trees and bushes surrounding the condo building created deep, elongated shadows all around the back area of the condo, so if they were behind me, I wouldn’t have been able to spot them.

“I hope they turn out,” I said, gesturing toward the moon. “It
is
a helluva sight to see, isn’t it?”

As if to answer me in the affirmative, a last
shnick!
echoed from the shadows. I toasted the moonlight, then went back inside.

Film
is a strange and difficult movie. Shot in black-and-white, it has no sound (with the sole exception of one character delivering a sibilant “
Shhh!
” early on). In it, Keaton plays a character called “O” (as in Object) whose face is never seen until the final moments of the movie. “O” is moving through the streets, sometimes walking very fast, other times running, always hunched down so that all we see of him is the back of his coat and the top of his porkpie hat (and for much of the 22-minute running time, that hat is the only indication that it’s Buster Keaton we’re watching.) It’s obvious that he’s being pursued, but by what or whom we don’t know.

“O” passes several people during his flight; sometimes these people look at his face, sometimes they look past him, but in every encounter, these people end up shrinking away in horror. The more this happens, the more the viewer comes to understand that what “O” is running from— and the thing that elicits such horror from passersby—is the second main character, named “E” (as in Eye, as in Camera-Eye): “O” is running away from the camera; he does not want to be seen.

Upon entering his cramped apartment, “O” immediately shoos his cat and dog out into the hallway, closes the door, and begins ripping apart every family photograph in the room—he doesn’t even wish to be seen by the faces in the pictures.

Once this is done, once he has isolated himself from all things that could perceive him or be perceived
by
him, only then does “O” turn around to reveal his face.

He has only one eye, the other covered by a heavy black patch.

“O” sees that all of his efforts have been for nothing, because “E” is right there in the room with him, and the movie ends with “O” releasing a silent scream and anguish and horror. The expression on Keaton’s face when he turns to face the camera is right out of a nightmare: the look of unparalleled horror will sear itself into your memory.

Beckett’s explanation (according to his published journals) is that he has sundered his main character in two: the character “O” who is pursued by the subject “E.” As long as “E” stays behind “O,” “O” will avoid being perceived. The camera is designated, in Beckett’s phrase, an “. . . angle of immunity” of 45 degrees, which it must not exceed at the risk of causing “O” to experience the “. . . anguish of perceivedness.”

My Film professor argued that the reason “O” has only one eye is because “E” is the other one, thus keeping the equation of perception continually split—“Because in order for ‘O’ to have full perception, he must also possess
depth-perception
; since he does not, full perception cannot be achieved.” It is
the film’s audience
that causes the final coalescing of the separate perceptions into one; it’s not the presence of “E” that causes “O” to scream in horror, it’s the presence of the audience (whom “O” can theoretically see when he turns around); by watching both “O” and “E,” they force full perception to occur: the cinematic equivalent of the Observer Effect.

When asked during an interview what he thought
Film
was about, Keaton answered, “What I think it means is that a man can keep away from everybody, but he can’t get away from himself.”