The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (33 page)

I darted down alleys, around the square, through an abandoned lot, and back around to where I’d parked my car, all in an effort to lose them.

It did no good.

I finally got in my car and drove home, taking several detours and side streets along the way.

When I came inside, I all but slammed the door behind me, then leaned against it, gulping air.

Dianne called from the kitchen: “Did you find what you were looking for?”

I almost said:
No, but it found me
. “Everything’s good,” I said, lying.

And felt someone watching.

That was less than a week ago.

Since then, the dogwoods’ red spots have turned gray; as have many of the leaves on the trees in our back yard; as has most of the grass. The blue of the sky is fading. The colors of our life are going away. My wife and son are lessening in my perception, as I am in theirs.

How fast the process takes depends on how perceptive you really are
, Keaton had told me.

Well, so much for being proud of having a perceptive family.

I keep wondering who or what the Onlookers really are, but I suppose their true nature and form won’t be revealed to me until I—like “O”—turn to fully face the Camera-Eye.

How do you un-see something?

Tonight, after Dianne and Brian had gone to bed, I dug around and found my wife’s medical bag. I rummaged through it. She has hypodermics, vials of morphine, sutures, bandages . . .and a scalpel.

I keep thinking about the final image of
Film
and my professor’s explanation for the patch worn by “O.”

Shnick! Shnick-nick-nick-nick-nick!

They are filming something on the street, in front of our house, very close to the front door.

I remember the patch, and the perception equation, and my Film professor’s explanation, and as I turn the scalpel from side to side so it reflects the light, I think of my family, and how much I love them, and whisper to myself: it will be only
one
eye. . . .

WE WOULD BE two larks winging

our way through the Master’s

best, you said. I’d be your Grace

Kelly, your Audrey. Your eager eye

documenting our recreation, old-style

eight millimeter, hand-cranked.

I don’t remember Grant getting naked

as he fled the marauding sky, flat

fields, drab motels, but a true auteur

is no script-slave. Spellbound, I shed

my retro dress, hit the marks you ordered,

amateur heart fluttering in its dark cage.

But you’ve stopped wearing your tie,

your ring. You’ve switched to digital

video, the cost of the darkroom too dear.

The trunk of your old green Ford is filled:

coils of rope and plastic sheets. The shower

scene is tomorrow, you smile. I’m silent,

skull-rehearsing my own altered script

as I lie beside you in the feather bed.

“When I started using dynamite, I believed in many things. . . . Finally, I believe only in dynamite.”

—Sergio Leone,
Giu la testa

IT’S 6 A.M.

DO YOU KNOW

WHERE YOUR BRAINS ARE
?

YOU ARE NOT the kind of zombie who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. You are not a zombie at all: not yet. But here you are, and you cannot say that the videotape is entirely unfamiliar, although it is a copy of a copy and the details are fuzzy. You are at an after-hours club near SoHo, watching a frantic young gentleman named Bob as the grooved and swiftly spinning point of a power drill chews its way through the left side of his skull. The film is known alternatively as
City of the Living Dead
and
The Gates of Hell
, and you’re not certain whether this version is missing anything or not. All might come clear if you could actually hear the soundtrack. Then again, it might not. The one the other night was in Swedish or Danish or Dutch, and a small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of this stuff already. The night has turned on that imperceptible pivot where 2 a.m. changes to 6 a.m. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of bullet-blown heads and gobbled intestines, and now you are trying to hang onto the rush. Your brain at this moment is somewhere else, spread in grey-smeared stains on the pavement or coughed up in bright patterns against a concrete wall. There is a hole at the top of your skull wider than the path that could be corkscrewed by a power drill, and it hungers to be filled. It needs to be fed. It needs more blood.

THE DEPARTMENT

OF VICTUAL

FALSIFICATION

Morning arrives on schedule. You sleepwalk through the subway stations from Canal Street to Union Square, then switch to the Number 6 Local on the Lexington Avenue Line. You come up from the Thirty-third Street Exit, blinking. Waiting for a light at Thirty-second, you scope the headline of the
Daily News
: still dead. There is a blurred photograph of something that looks vaguely like a hospital room. You think about those four unmoving bodies, locked somewhere inside the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. You think about your mother. You think about Miranda. But the light has changed. You’re late for work again, and you’ve worn out the line about the delays at the checkpoints. There is no time for new lies.

Your boss, Tony Kettle, runs the Department of Victual Falsification like a pocket calculator, and lately your twos and twos have not added up to fours. If Kettledrum had his way, you would have been subtracted from the staff long ago, but the magazine has been shorthanded since Black Wednesday, and sooner or later you manage to get your work done. And let’s face it, you know splatter films better than almost anyone left alive.

The offices of the magazine cover a single floor. Once there were several journals published here, from sci-fi to soft porn to professional wrestling. Now there is only the magazine, a subtenant called Engel Enterprises, and quiet desperation. You navigate the water-stained carpet to the Department of Victual Falsification. Directly across the hall is Tony’s office, and you stagger past with the hope that he’s not there.

“Good morning, gorehounds,” you say as you enter the department. There are six desks, but only three of them are occupied. Brooks is reading the back of his cigarette package: Camel Lights. Elaine shakes her head and puts her blue pencil through line after line of typescript. Stan, who has been bowdlerizing an old Jess Franco retrospective for weeks, shuffles a stack of stills and whistles an Oingo Boingo tune. J. Peter and Olivia are dead.

What once was your desk is now a prop stand for a mad maze of paper. An autographed photo of David Warbeck is pinned to the wall and looks out over old issues of
Film Comment
,
Video Watchdog
,
Ecco
,
Eyeball
, the
Daily News
. Here are the curled and coffee-stained manuscripts, and there the rows of reference volumes, from
Grey’s Anatomy
to Hardy’s
Encyclopedia of Horror Film
. Somewhere in the shuffle are two lonely pages of printout, the copy you managed to eke out yesterday from the press kit for John Woo’s latest bullet ballet, smuggled through Customs between the pages of a Bible.

Atop it all is a pink message slip with today’s date: Ruggero Deodato called. Don’t forget about tonight. “And hey,” Brooks says, finally lighting up a cigarette. “We had another visit from the Brain Police.” You are given a look that is meant to be serious and significant.

You have spent the last five years of your life presenting images of horror, full color and in close-up, to a readership—perhaps you should say viewership—of what you suspected were mostly lonely, adolescent, and alienated males who loved these kinds of films. The bloodier the better. Special effects—the tearing of latex flesh, the splash of stage crimson, the eating of rubber entrails—were the magazine’s focus, and in better days, after a particularly vivid drunk that followed a screening of the latest
Night of the Living Dead
rip-off, you and J. Peter and Tony came to call yourself the Department of Victual Falsification.

That was then, and this is now. The dead came back, not for a night but for forever. Your mother. Black Wednesday. Miranda. Cannibals in the streets. The bonfires in Union Square. Law and order. Congressional
hearings. Peace, complete with special ID cards and checkpoints and military censors.

You remember, just before the Gulf War, reading newspaper articles about high school students who paged through magazines that were to be sent to the troops in Saudi Arabia, coloring over bras and bare chests, skirts that were too short, cigarettes caught up in dangling hands. You thought that this was supremely funny. Now each month you do something much the same. The magazine publishes the latest additions to the lists, recounts the seizures from the shelves of the warehouses and rental stores. At first the banished titles were the inevitable ones, the old Xs and the newer NC-17s and, of course, anything to do with the living dead. In recent months, the lists have expanded into the Rs and a few of the PG-13s.

You are detectives of the dying commodity called horror, and there are fewer places where the magazine is sold, and fewer things that you can say, and fewer photos for you to run and, of course, there are fewer people left alive, fewer still who care.

THE FUTILITY

OF FICTION

You see yourself as the kind of zombie who would appreciate a quiet night at home with a good book. You watch TV instead. Tonight there is the Local News, followed by the National News, and then, of course, the game shows begin and will continue on until the Local News, followed by the National News, and then, of course, the game shows again. There are 106 other channels on your television set, but all of them are awash in a sea of speckled grey and have been for nearly a year.

The path that awaits you is clear. You reach into the back of your bookcase, behind the wall of unread Literary Guild Alternate Selections, to slip out tonight’s first videotape, a pristine copy, recorded on TDK Pro High Grade at SP, of the Japanese laser disc of Ruggero Deodato’s
Cannibal Holocaust
. You waited months for your dealer to get this one, and now you wait patiently for the first real moment of truth, that glimpse of the tribesmen as they tear off and eat the flesh of their prey. Although you tell yourself that this is what you want, that this is really what you want, this is not what you get. There is a cornfield on your forty-inch television monitor. It is late summer, nearly the harvest, and there in the tall stalks is Miranda, walking with racehorse grace in her bleached jeans and turtleneck sweater, hair in golden braids and face shining with the sun. You turn your back on the monitor and you listen. For some time after Miranda died, you knocked on the door of the apartment before you entered. You would turn the key slowly in the lock and then pause here in the living room in the hope that you would hear her in the bedroom, that she had returned, that she was waiting for you, that none of this had happened, that none of this was real. The video plays on. “How could you explain what a movie is?” A voice calls to you from the screen: “They’re all dead, aren’t they?” You look back and the cannibals at last are feasting. You watch, and you wish. Nothing seems to be what you want to do until you consider horror. A random sampling of the titles hidden at the back of the bookcase induces a delicious expectancy:
Anthropophagus. Eaten Alive. Trap Them and Kill Them.
Little wonder that the Gore Commission should have found so many of these films so wanting. The covers of the video boxes are themselves a kind of foreplay, wet and bright with colors, most of them red.
Make Them Die Slowly.
Here the label reads: “Banned in thirty-one countries.” Make that thirty-two. You know so much about these motion pictures, about the stories that they have to tell. You feel that if only they had given you the camera back then in the eighties, back when such things could be, you could have given shape to this uncertain passion that nightly inhabits your gut.

You have always wanted to make films. Getting the job at the magazine was only the first step toward cinematic celebrity. You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer and director of horror films, biding his time in the Department of Victual Falsification. But between the job and the life, there wasn’t much time for the screenplays or even the short experimental films. That first, and only, Christmas, Miranda had given you the video camera. For a few weeks afterward, you would shoot Miranda as she walked around the apartment, Miranda with shampoo in her hair, Miranda and the new kitten, Miranda at the stove, Miranda at the fireplace, Miranda and Miranda and Miranda. Then, what with the zombies and everything, life started getting more interesting and complicated. You worked for the magazine and you had once met George A. Romero and you had your collection of videos, so chic now that the lists were out and the tapes were gone from the rental shelves. People were happy to meet you and to invite you to their parties. Then things got worse, and then came Black Wednesday and the bodies in the streets and the soldiers and the fires in Union Square.

You pull your video camera from its hiding place beneath the floorboards of the closet and set it up on its tripod. You have no blank videotape, of course. You take the cassette from the VCR and push it into the camera. You decide to start immediately with the film you have in mind. You aim the camera at the far wall of the apartment, bare and white. The autofocus blurs, then holds. Through the viewfinder you see exactly what you want.

You press the start button. You tape nothing.

A TOMB

WITH A VIEW

You dream about the Still Dead. You sneak down the corridors of the Center for Disease Control. Nobody can see you. A door with a plaque reading
C’est La Mort
opens into the Department of Victual Falsification. Miranda is spread-eagled across the top of your desk, her wrists and ankles bound with strips of celluloid, the censored seconds from the first reel of Deodato’s
Inferno in diretta
. Around her in white hospital beds, like the four points on a compass, are the Still Dead. You approach and discover that she isn’t moving. You touch her. She is cold. Quiet. One of them. Still dead. But then she opens her eyes and looks at you. You make a sound like a scream, but it is the telephone ringing. The receiver is hot and wet in your hand.

“I’m sick.” You expect the caller to be Elaine or, worse yet, the Kettledrum himself. Ta-dum, ta-dee, ta. . . .

“I knew that from the day I met you.” The voice is unmistakable. In his prime, he made the covers of
New York
and
Interview
and
Spy
. Now no one cares; but you never know, perhaps they will again. Sunlight is in your eyes. The clock says 10. You listen to Jay’s latest proposition. A duplication center somewhere in the Bronx. Edit onto one-inch tape, copies to VHS. Sales in back rooms, some bars, the private clubs, on the street. Money to be made. Fame. And, most important, screen credits. “Your name in lights.”

In this new world, there is no longer a place for dreams. Yet you have no doubt that he can do these things. It is the catch that troubles you, but only for a moment. You know you can be had. Jay says
ciao
, and he’s gone.

You’re not dressed and out of the apartment until 11. The uptown train pulls away just as you make the platform. Clutched beneath your elbow, the
Daily News
is screaming: bridge blown. This time it was the George Washington. You wonder whether the dead are being kept out or the living kept in. Now if you want to get to New Jersey, you swim. The Still Dead are buried on page five. No new developments: “Still Dead.” The CDC will issue another statement on Sunday. Billy Graham will lead a candlelight prayer vigil. The president has expressed cautious optimism.

It’s 11:30 when you reach Park Avenue South, 11:40 by the time you get a cup of coffee and an elevator. Kettledrum is waiting, and he holds his glasses in his hand. A bad sign. You consider saying something. An excuse, an apology. Just offering a smile. It is all a joke. The glasses start to twirl. You know you are in trouble.

Tony does not waste words. The magazine has had visitors again. The military censor took a hard look at the new issue and found not one, but two, discussions of the contents of listed videos in your article on Umberto Lenzi.

“What about the First Amendment?” Tony looks at you. You look at Tony. Tony is the first to laugh. You decide to nod your head and join in when you see the photo in Tony’s hands. Black and white and red all over. It’s Miranda. Her legs are spread wide, left hand fondling the rope of raw intestine that dangles provocatively between them, dripping wet blots of blood onto the headless body on the floor. You look again and it is not Miranda. Of course not. It is some actress from a splatter film, and this is a publicity photo. A still. Still life.