Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  He didn’t know who was wearing the shoe. The idea of connecting the shoe to the person who was wearing it required such an immensity of effort, there was such encumbrance and complication that he could only bend his head to the weight of the room. Maybe the shoe looked sinister because all its meanings and connections and silhouettes were outside Matty’s faculties of knowing.

  And maybe it looked sinister because it was the left shoe, on the left foot, and this is what sinister means of course—unlucky, unfavorable, leftward—and the word was asserting its baleful roots, its edible tubers and stems, through the medium of someone’s shoe.

  Eric was still there, talking in a normal voice interrupted by stutters. He seemed to be in another time frame, Eric did, cut and edited, his words in stop-start format and his position frequently altered in relation to the background, and here he was again on the sign for Deming, his name floating out of the soft dawn as Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future.

  3

  * * *

  The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and calves of a man, a man’s bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.

  And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event. Klara wandered through the grand foyer, among the early arrivals, and what a happy buzz they generated, mostly men in fact, and this was interesting. Look at the lean sleek geometry and gunmetal surfaces, the draped mirrors and long chandeliers, it was an art deco palace, burnished steel and chrome, a sense of machine-age completion, and fairly refined in tone except for the mural.

  The lobby crowd loved the mural. An enormous mystical vision, sixty feet by forty, with a sort of Lost Horizon motif, situated above the staircase and contoured in a gentle curve so that the craggy peaks of the painting were captured in the towering mirrors, extending the enchanted effect over much of the lobby. Amber mists, a cloaked old man with a staff, a cluster of flamingos standing in the alpenglow—a vision so steeped in kitsch you could die just by buying the postcard.

  Yes, this was Radio City Music Hall, a place Klara had last visited when she was thirteen probably, about a year after the doors opened—showplace of the nation. She remembered the soaring walls and carpeted stairs. She remembered the powder room, that’s what she remembered, downstairs, in the grand lounge.

  She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.

  “Where are we, in a model room at Bloomingdale’s?”

  “We’re in 1932, that’s where we are.”

  “It’s sort of I-don’t-know-what, isn’t it?”

  “Jazz moderne,” Klara said.

  “Can you believe I’ve never been here?”

  She was surprised to see that Miles had dressed for the occasion. Many people had and so had Miles, to the extent that he dresses. He wore his scuffed boots and jeans but also had a leopard shirt and mustard tie and a black corduroy jacket with an Edwardian flare.

  They watched a man come down the grand staircase, feigning injury as he went past the mural. Miles had a package of cigarettes for Klara. While they waited he gave her further background on the event.

  The event was a showing of the legendary lost film of Sergei Eisenstein, called Unterwelt, recently found in East Germany, meticulously restored and brought to New York under the aegis of the film society Miles belonged to, a remarkable coup for the group. After a period of maneuvering, infighting and hard bargaining they managed to reach an agreement with several rock impresarios and arranged to cosponsor this one-time screening, with orchestral accompaniment, in a house seating nearly six thousand people.

  “How do you explain the turnout?” Klara said. “A lot of gay men in this lobby.”

  “I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I’ll only tell you that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now.”

  Probably shot in the midthirties, sporadically and in secret, during a period of acute depression for Eisenstein. Ostensibly idle at the time, goaded by fellow Soviet directors to discard his theories and conceits. Called eccentric, called myth-ridden and politically unsound, accused of being out of touch with the people. Stories began to circulate that he’d been executed.

  Esther Winship showed up waving her handbag and saying, “I don’t need to see the movie. I already love it. This hall is so wonderful. I’d forgotten it was here. Miles, you look like a mod-and-rocker reunion.”

  “Where’s Jack?” Klara said.

  “Where could he be? Is it your shirt or tie that gives me vertigo?”

  “Thank you, Esther.”

  “He’s having a drink around the corner,” she said.

  There was an ambivalence that vitalized the crowd. Whatever your sexual persuasion, you were here to enjoy the contradictions. Think of the relationship between the film and the theater in which it was showing—the work of a renowned master of world cinema screened in the camp environment of the Rockettes and the mighty Wurlitzer. But a theater of a certain impressive shapeliness, a breathtaking place, even, for all its exaggerations and vanities, with roundels of enameled brass on the outer walls and handsome display cases in the ticket lobby and nickel bronze stair rails here in the foyer, a space that resembled the hushed and sunken saloon of an ocean liner. And possibly a film, you’re not likely to forget this, that will be riddled with mannerisms whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn’t Ivan the Terrible contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?

  “Nobody, practically, has seen the film up to this point,” Miles said. “Four of us have seen it in our group and half a dozen promoters and theater brass and that’s about it on this side of the Iron Curtain.”

  Miles knew Eisenstein inside and out. He knew more than was humanly healthy. He knew the shot sequence in Potemkin just about cold. The deadly cadence of black boots. The white jackets of the soldiers. The mother clutching weakly at her waist. The rear wheels of the baby carriage rolling out of the frame.

  But there were things nobody seemed to know about this movie. Where it was made. How it was made—he didn’t have official backing obviously. And why he didn’t use sound. One theory pointed to Mexico. The enormous amount of footage he shot openly for his Mexican epic was a cover for a subversive venture, went the theory, and this was it.

  “Actually I haven’t seen a single thing he’s ever done,” Esther said. “But I met him once, you know.”

  Miles turned his head slowly to look at her.

  “You knew Eisenstein?”

  It was a look of total reevaluation.

  “Met him briefly.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. I was very young, of course. New York. Barely twenty, I think. And he was sitting for a portrait and my parents knew the painter and I went along.”

  “We have to talk about this,” Miles said.

  “That’s all there is, I’m afraid. He asked me to call him Sergei.”

  “What else?”

  “He drank a lot of milk. He said it was breakfast.”

  “What else?” Miles said.

  “Actually he showed up with the milk, in a bottle. I got him a glass and he thanked me.”

  “What else?” Miles said.

  The other thing nobody knew was where the title came from. Eisenstein knew German and may have had a reason for choosing a title in that language. But it’s more likely the film acquired the title during its long repose in an underground vault in East Berlin.

  �
��Gnomelike sort of fellow, as I recall.”

  “What else?”

  “Large head. Sort of very high forehead. Milk came in bottles then, remember?”

  It became the movie people had to see. A nice tight hysteria began to build and there were tickets going for shocking sums and counterfeit tickets and people rushing back from the Vineyard and the Pines and the Cape to engineer a seat.

  Just a movie for godsake and a silent movie at that and a movie you probably never heard of until the Times did a Sunday piece. But this is how the behavioral aberration, once begun, grows to lavish panic.

  “But will we actually be able to sit through it?” Esther said. “Or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we’re in the presence of greatness but we’re really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi.”

  “You’re thinking of theater,” Miles said. “This is film.”

  Jack Marshall turned up with peanuts on his breath, Esther’s husband, and they went into the auditorium.

  Klara remembered it now, suddenly so familiar, the feeling of plush and mothered comfort, it felt like her mother hovering, a space soothingly wombed and curved, and the way the proscenium arch rayed out into the ceiling, about eight stories at its highest point, and the spoked rows of downy seats, and the choral staircases that softened the side walls, and the overvastness that seemed allowable, your one indulgence of this type, shrinking everyone in the hall to child size, heads turning and lifting, a rediscovered surprise and delight floating over the crowd, not the last such emotion that people would share this evening.

  It developed that the show had a pace and theme and it started with the sound of chase music, offstage, a tinny piano doing the familiar sort of ragtime score that used to accompany silent movies. Then the house lights went down and the great motorized curtain slowly lifted and the full orchestra appeared. A rustle in the audience. Moments after the musicians began to play, the whole unit commenced moving, sliding nicely in its band car to the front of the stage. How wondrously funny and odd. The music became suspenseful now, a series of diminished chords, perhaps a scary moment pending—and sure enough the orchestra reached the stage apron and dropped rather dramatically into the pit and then completely out of sight, elevatored down like so many geeks in tuxedos, a maneuver of a certain farcical bravado, greeted with cheers.

  Gone but not inaudible. They were playing patriotic music now, a medley of familiar marches with drum ruffles and sousaphones, and the curtain descended halfway, recontoured in flag format and starred and striped by colored floods, and just as the audience began to wonder what the point was, out came the Rockettes, what a toothsome shock—did anyone know there was a stage show in the works?

  They were wearing West Point gray and came out saluting, thirty-six women remade as interchangeable parts, height, shape, race and type, with plumed dress hats and fringed titties and faces buttered a christmassy pink but isn’t it odd they’re wearing bondage collars—saluting and high-kicking in machine unison and Klara thought they were kind of great and so did everyone else. Snapping into close formation, tap-dancing in a wash of iridescent arcs, all symmetry and drill precision, then fanning open in kaleidoscopic bursts, and she passed a question along the aisle to Miles, who sat at the far end of the foursome.

  “How do we know it’s really the Rockettes and not a troupe of female impersonators?”

  And this droll notion seemed to travel through the audience because isn’t it unlikely that the real Rockettes would be wearing slave collars and doing routines with such pulsing sexual rhythm? In fact it’s probably not unlikely at all, it’s probably what they do all the time. You don’t know for sure, do you? And if they are the real Rockettes, what you’re seeing are three dozen women in close-order cadet formation, or women done up like men and not the reverse—but it’s a cross-dressing event either way.

  Klara realized the flag curtain was gone. And when a camera in the flies took a live video shot of the dancers that was projected on a back screen she understood, you all did, how a crowd is reconfigured, teased into methodical geometry, into slipknots and serpentines. And it was funny of course because the routines were so impeccably smooth and serious, so nineteen-thirties in their dynamic alignments, and isn’t that when the movie was made?

  The dancers spread across the stage and in a single dexterous swipe, like unholstering a gun, they pulled off their tearaway trousers and went into a final rousing kick, gams flashing, and drew several waves of applause. Then they dissolved their kick line and formed a star, clearly depicted in the high-angle shot on the screen above them, and the footlights painted them solid red. They marched in place as the orchestra lifted solemnly into the pit and began to play, what—something Russian, Klara thought. And how strange it was to see a thing like this, a red star of such political and military moment, plunked down here, the grim signet of the Soviet Union, in the Music Hall of all places—think of all the Easter shows and Lassie movies.

  The dancers stood white-faced now, upstage, transfixed by beams of light from mammoth spots high in the rear of the auditorium. The curtain began to fall, covering first the video image of the dancers and then the dancers. The music grew weepy and frilled and then the curtain lifted to reveal the vast movie screen bearing a single word, Unterwelt, and finally the borders at each end of the curved screen folded in to accommodate the small squarish frame of the old movie, and images poured from the projection booth, patchy and dappled with age.

  Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to—you wouldn’t want it any other way.

  Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

  In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter—there’s a lot of opposition and conflict.

  It seems you are watching a movie about a mad scientist. He sweeps through the frame, dressed in well-defined black and white, in layered robes, wielding an atomic ray gun. Figures move through crude rooms in some underground space. They are victims or prisoners, perhaps experimental subjects. A glimpse of a prisoner’s face shows he is badly deformed and it is less shocking than funny. He has the sloped head, shallow jaw and protuberant lips of an earthworm—but a worm with a human pathos about him.

  In a scene that was extravagant, silly, off-kilter and technically impressive all at the same time, the scientist fires the ray gun at a victim, who begins to glow in the dark, jerking and dancing and then looking rather wanly at his arm, which starts to melt away.

  Other victims appeared, muscles and bones reshaped, slits for eyes, shuffling on stump legs.

  Klara thought of the radiation monsters in Japanese science-fiction movies and looked down the aisle at Miles, who was a scholar of the form.

  Was Eisenstein being prescient about nuclear menace or about Japanese cinema?

  She thought of the prehistoric reptiles that came mutating out of the slime and the insects with chromosome damage poking from the desert near some test site, ants the size of bookmobiles—these were movies for the drive-ins of the fifties, a boy and girl yanking at each other’s buckles and snaps while the bomb footage unfurls and the giant leeches and scorpions appear on the horizon, all radioactive and seeking revenge, and the fleeing crowds, of course, because in the end these creatures not only come from the bomb but displace it, and the armies mobilize and the crowds flee and the sirens wail like sirens.

  Eisenstein’s creatures were fully human and this complicated the fun. They humped and scuttled through the shadows, hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it’s okay to laugh at cripples an
d mutants if everybody else is laughing, it’s a way to play off your aversion, and it wasn’t just the twisted features and elaborate gestures and the curious sort of lip-gloss effect you’ve noticed on the faces of male actors in silent movies but the music as well, this was pretty broad too—string sections of soaring melodrama.

  A title now and then, in Russian, untranslated, not that it mattered—it made in fact for a giddy kind of total confusion.

  Jack said, “Getting claustrophobic, are you?”

  And it was true, the film was embedded so completely in the viewpoint of the prisoners that Klara was beginning to squirm.

  Jack said, “I bet you’d give a hundred dollars to stand in the rain right now and smoke a cigarette.”

  “Is it raining?”

  “Does it matter?”

  The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some netherland crevice. There was none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive—the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed, and this was disappointing to Klara. She loved the martial architecture of huge moving bodies, the armies and mobs in other Eisenstein films, and she felt she was in some ambiguous filmscape somewhere between the Soviet model and Hollywood’s vaulted heaven of love, sex, crime and individual heroism, of scenery and luxury and gorgeous toilets.

  All you have to do is think of the other Underworld, a 1927 gangster film and box office smash.

  Esther said, “I want to be rewarded for this ordeal.”

  Admit it, you’re bored. Klara tried to take encouragement from Miles. He was in a state of rapt elation, that pure surrender he undertakes, able to lose himself in the eye and mind of the movie, totally drawn and charmed—charmed at some level even when he doesn’t like what he’s watching. But she knew he liked this. It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along.