The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

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  It’s difficult picking up the pieces of a life previously abandoned, seeing what fits, what doesn’t, like sifting through boxes of old clothes. Adjusting. Moving on. For the first few months after you walked out on me it was like I was running in place. My heart was a freight train of rage and hatred and pain-in-my-ass indigestion, and I was standing still, not working, not talking to anybody. Not doing anything at all but saying to myself – lying to myself – that I was healing, and that this was all a part of the process and really fuck all of that, because it’s not.

  This right here, this blog is my process. So let’s get started – let’s go right back to the beginning of this mess and do some good old-fashioned investigative healing.

  Do you know what I did before I got started in the business? No, of course you don’t. You never let me tell you about that part of my life – or, really, any part of my life, now that I sit here and take the time to think about it. “Be with me now,” you said on our first real date, when I tried to tell you my name. When, that day, working together on The Scorpion and the Frog, you had to leave suddenly in the middle of our moment so they could shoot the corpse of Charlie the Chin from another angle, you left the last bite of the croissant on the plate we’d been sharing, turned around and said, coyly, “So you’ll remember me.” Then you smiled again – spotless, again. Your inflection made it sound so romantic, the words falling out of you like an invitation and certainly not the impenetrable living-room fortress of couch cushions and throw pillows it turned out to be.

  Alas – digressions. An obituaries writer. That’s what I was before all this, before I got my big break in the industry, before you and I were us. Hilarious, right? Whenever you’d read about someone’s husband or wife or mother or father or sibling or child and how good and perfect and innocent they were? That was me. It was my job to put a life in black and white and leave the red where it belonged – between the lines and invisible. A person’s loved ones, those left behind, fed me whatever information they had about dear sweet [insert name here] and it was my job to craft from that usually messy assortment of notes and half-remembered stories of success a relatively succinct paragraph worthy of sainthood. Because no one’s a jerk in their obit – you’ve noticed that, right? If even a fraction of the goodness and innocence written into each small summary of the dead were true, our world would be a much different place.

  “Maurlice Slater [for example], 1960–2012, was a pianist, teacher and inspiration to her community and family in Ladera Heights, just west of Culver City, where she lived for thirty years. She’s survived by her husband, Tony, and their children, Franklin and Julia.” She was also a serial kleptomaniac and had spent a cumulative three years behind bars, including that time she got caught pocketing the funds from the bake sale at her local Presbyterian church. Not surprisingly, these details never made print.

  Then there was the case of Xian Mode, 1976–2011. I remember this one well. “Xian was a pillar of their community who worked hard and fought for equality and the rights of others.” That’s it. That’s all I got from their brother, and he didn’t want to elaborate further. Turns out Xian’s mother had disavowed their existence (and promptly hung up when I called), and all I managed to scrape together from a solid week of research that I didn’t have to do and probably shouldn’t have but wanted to anyway was a brief employment record from the cosmetics department at Macy’s and a half-finished Facebook profile with a blue silhouette for a profile pic. And that. Was. It. Still, I had to do what I could. Solidarity in parental fuckery and all that. Even if no one did remember them, I had to fake it like they were missed all the same. I had to make you, dear reader, browsing the obits with morbid fascination, checking to see if anyone you know or loved had up and died, believe that this person left behind a crater when all I could find was a footprint.

  In the end, everyone wants to be a hero, or a martyr to a cause, or just … loved, widely and without equal. It was my job to clean up their loose ends and force their lesser devils into memory.

  I never imagined myself doing that for a career, though, not long term. I really wanted to write and make movies. True story: there is an oversized plastic bin buried somewhere in my sister’s Vancouver condo filled with more than three hundred horror and slasher flicks – triple-A theatrical releases and New French Extremism all the way down to the shittiest bootleg I could find of Ken Russell’s 1971 nunsploitation classic, The Devils. Think I’ve even got a copy of A Serbian Film in there somewhere. Most of it’s trash – but, you know, the good kind of trash. Scattered between art house flicks like Eraserhead, Eyes Without a Face and everything Guillermo del Toro has put his name to are box sets of every Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th film. Child’s Play, Candyman, even that piece of shit Deadly Friend. Actually that’s not fair. That scene where Kristy Swanson whips a basketball at Anne Ramsey’s head and pops it like she’s the world’s biggest zit stuffed with cow brains bought from a butcher’s shop? That’s the sort of cheesy, over-the-top ’80s gore that I can really get behind. This is what I love about horror – the core of it, the gore, it’s real, even if everything surrounding it is bullshit of the highest order. The blood and pain and viscera, it’s all grounding; everyone’s got a little bit of horror inside that they can tap into. Most of us would just rather pretend it’s not there.

  Louise said in her last, very short, very curt email to me, dated a couple months ago, that she’d rescued my horror bin from the house after Mom died, before putting the place up for sale. If I wanted it back, she threatened, I just had to come and pick it up. It was the most I’d heard from her in over a year, and still somehow too much.

  In some sense, I’ve always appreciated the cleanliness of death. On film, no matter the cause, once the victim or victims are dead it’s finished, immediate. In reality, the act of dying is a slow, sometimes agonizing stutter to the end – a messy trail of unfinished thoughts and fears and failures that gum up the process. Death itself, however, the part that follows the dying, that’s nothing more than a period at the close of a sentence – or perhaps in the middle, fracturing the thought midstream, leaving just a little bit of mystery. It’s simple. Elegant, when you think about it. All that’s left after death is white space on a page. What that space tells the world, how it’s filled in, well, that’s up to you and what you decided to do with your life.

  Death had always hovered around me – a persistent, invisible spectre that from an early age I just could not shake. Dad died of cancer when I was sixteen and Louise had just turned twenty-five. We’d known his end was coming for close to a year, but one year with that man was like ten – which, funny story, was about how old I was the time I entered my room and found him sitting on the edge of my bed, flipping through the notebook of story ideas I kept in my nightstand, behind the back of the drawer where no one would find it unless they were snooping.

  He let out small grunts as he read; he wasn’t a silent reader. Flipped another page and looked up and said, simply, “What’s this?” I tried to answer but stammered instead. It happened every time. I knew that whatever he asked, whatever answer I gave, it wouldn’t be enough. Eventually, I managed to reply, “It’s a story … it’s mine. I wrote it.” He stood up, towering overhead; he seemed so much taller then. He had my notebook tucked under one arm and walked over to me. I moved out of the way and he continued on as if I hadn’t been standing right there.

  “It’s disgusting,” he said softly, heading downstairs. “And it’s a waste of your time.”

  “I can do better,” I blurted. “I can try.”

  “Don’t,” he said, and continued walking away, disappointed. “Why can’t you just behave like your sister.” It wasn’t a question, and I can’t imagine he expected me to answer. I never saw that notebook again. In the end I don’t know what he expected from me, or wanted me to do with my life. I just know it wasn’t that – this.r />
  We’d never really gotten along, Dad and I, but that doesn’t mean his death didn’t mess with my head. For weeks I couldn’t sleep; I just kept repeating our last conversation over and over again, remembering the way his pale, waxy bottom lip quivered when he tried – unsuccessfully – to pronounce the word disappointment. The worst part was how much of a defeatist he was over the whole thing – being a doctor, he knew how many people made it out the other side of chemo intact. How few of them went on living “normal” lives, like there’d never been a shadow metastasizing over their entire left hemisphere in the first place. The odds were enough that he felt justified in giving the fuck up. And I remember seeing him then, seeing how frail he’d become, and getting so furious that here he was, throwing in the towel, and still I was the disappointment. I was the fucking tragedy of this family. The one who hated sports and cars and didn’t dress like they were supposed to. That didn’t fit the “plan” Dad always talked about – whatever the fuck it was supposed to be.

  A few months after Dad died, I got suspended for writing spec obits for the entire senior class – small single-paragraph prognostications: so-and-so was going to get drunk and trash their car at grad; someone else was going to OD behind the bleachers at prom. Motherfucking Chris Taggert, who didn’t discover deodorant until he was old enough to grow a beard and spent the better part of five years trying to dunk my head in the toilets of the boys’ change room, was going to accidentally cut his dick off in shop class. He wasn’t going to die, though, not right away. I was pretty specific about that: he was going to continue to live, dickless and in pain, until his death many years later, penniless and alone. It was after this, and several weeks of quiet opposition and resentment (during which I started going out on longer and longer runs, whatever the weather, and lost weight at a pace that did not go unnoticed), that Mom finally decided to put me in therapy. And I got kicked off the yearbook committee.

  Therapy was fine, I guess. Doctor First-Name-Basis was pretty chill about writing me scrips for Diazepam when asked, which I turned around and hawked to kids at school as ecstasy. It was fun, watching eighth graders blow several weeks’ worth of allowance on a prescription-grade sedative thinking they were going to get high on E, watching them slur their way through pretend hallucinations, talking about all the wicked cool shit they were seeing. Of course, none of them were seeing a goddamn thing, but fuck it. I needed the money to fund my film obsession, among other things, and they wanted to tell themselves they were anti-establishment rebels who could take on the world.

  Mom, though, she wasn’t happy with my progress reports. She wanted Doctor First-Name-Basis to fix me up, get me eating properly again, make me right like Louise who wore blazers and slacks to job interviews, and carried a zippered leather folio filled with copies of her CV under her arm everywhere she went. I wasn’t exactly relishing the idea of staying home another year with either one of them, so I stocked up on scrips, sold what I could and dropped out of school before the end of the next year, busing my way south across the border. It didn’t take me long to find a place to crash on the second floor of a pest-infested low-rise in Culver City, and I immediately started harassing the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times – sending out email blasts, showing up unannounced at his office with coffee, gluten-free blueberry muffins and a carefully pieced together portfolio mourning Elgin Park Secondary’s entire 1999 graduating class.

  “Fine. Bloody all right,” he said, exhaustedly, three weeks into my campaign and snatched the portfolio from my hands, as well as the slice of German chocolate cake sitting on top.

  And I stood there, in his office, watching as he glanced through my portfolio between bites, muttering not-bads and this-has-potentials with his mouth full. He seemed to not want to make eye contact again until he’d finished scraping what he could from his plate.

  People tell you a pretty face will open all kinds of doors in this world, but never underestimate the value of slowly crushing some poor overworked shlub’s resistance. And there it was: three months after I’d made my escape from home with a forged American passport bought from an artist and Diazepam addict – the older brother of some kid in my year – I was surviving, working the obits section of the Los Angeles Times and thinking about that next step: how to cram my foot in Hollywood’s door.

  6. A War to Remember

  Posted: 11/21/2013

  EXT: SNOW-COVERED FOREST -- NIGHT

  LIEUTENANT JAMES HILDEBRANDT pulls himself from the wreckage of his CURTISS SB2C HELLDIVER, shot down during a reconnaissance mission. His right arm is BROKEN and small dots of BLOOD mark the snow beneath him like a bright red bread-crumb trail.

  He crests a small hill, coming to a break in the trees. In the distance, under the light of the full moon, he sees a WARMLY LIT CABIN. A soft plume of smoke rises from the chimney.

  QUIET FRENCH WOMAN (V.O.)

  It was early April when we met again. A month had passed since we'd said our goodbyes to Malorie and Charlie, and in that time Studio H had been transformed -- buried, as it were, under several hundred pounds of fake snow.

  (Beat)

  It was 1944 and you were Lieutenant James Hildebrandt. A pilot, shot down on a mission in Northern France. You'd lost so much blood in the crash you could barely stand. How you survived at all was a miracle of modern screenwriting and quick work with an editing suite.

  HILDEBRANDT starts down the hill, STUMBLING DRUNKENLY after one or two steps. At the bottom of the hill, only a few yards from the cabin, he FALLS to his knees in the snow.

  Movement is seen from inside the cabin -- a shadow walks past the WINDOW and OPENS the front door.

  QUIET FRENCH WOMAN (V.O.)

  I dropped my knitting and went to the door when I noticed you kneeling half-dead in the snow. You lifted your head, looked up at me as if you were staring into the eyes of an angel.

  HILDEBRANT RISES to his feet and STAGGERS FORWARD. Upon reaching the cabin's porch, he FALLS OVER again, drained of all his energy.

  The QUIET FRENCH WOMAN crouches down and PULLS HILDEBRANDT over the cabin's threshold. She lets go of him and quickly closes the cabin door.

  CUT TO:

  INT: FRENCH WOMAN'S CABIN -- NIGHT

  Inside the cabin, the QUIET FRENCH WOMAN PROPS HILDEBRANDT against the ROARING FIREPLACE. He slips in and out of consciousness. She immediately TEARS OFF one sleeve and begins to dress his wounds.

  HILDEBRANDT

  (Moaning)

  M … Mary …

  QUIET FRENCH WOMAN (V.O.)

  You were like an infant, hallucinating, lost somewhere in a dream. My name was not Mary. Mary was someone else, someone far away, in whatever backstory had been written for your five-minute sacrificial lamb. Mine was a shadow part, a throwaway character scripted to help send you off in dramatic fashion.

  (Beat)

  But I could have been her. I remember thinking that at the time. Together we could have found ourselves a "Mary," skinned her, worn her life or a near-perfect simulacrum of it as if it were our very own. It was dangerous thinking like that -- I envied her and she didn't even exist.

  HILDEBRANDT'S eyes FLUTTER and he stares into the face of the QUIET FRENCH WOMAN.

  QUIET FRENCH WOMAN (V.O.)

  And that's when I saw it -- how much it all meant to you. The way you narrowed your eyes as you looked at me … You believed in Mary -- beyond the page. I saw it, that … that spark, or flame, or what have you. The director wasn't in a place to catch all that you were showing me right then -- he was watching you in profile, framing the shot from a low angle. No, that look in your eyes, it was meant for me, because you were Hildebrandt and you believed I was a quiet French woman living alone in a cabin in the woods, away from the war, and you were a wounded American soldier whose last glimmer of hope -- hope that you would see the woman of your dreams one last time -- died as you lay helpless in my arms.


  7. If Only for a Moment

  Posted: 11/22/2013

  Near the end of our scene together, as I delicately removed your burned and tattered jacket, hesitating just long enough for the camera to push in on the previously unseen bottle cap–shaped hole in your side, you let slip one last whisper of pain. You were like a plastic bag squeezed of all air, and in that moment you made a believer out of unnnamed Quiet French Woman, twenty-five, White, with light brown hair.

  When the director yelled cut, you sprang to life, leaping up out of my arms and stretching yours to the ceiling before proceeding to hop up and down and pop your neck from side to side, loosening up between takes. You turned and scanned across the set, waiting to see if they needed us to run the scene one more time, and you acted like you didn’t recognize me from before. Who knows, maybe you didn’t. I was beginning to sense our first encounter had left more of an impression on me than you. It had felt like, as Charlie the Chin, you put the very first cracks in my outer shell. But it was as Lieutenant James Hildebrandt that, in the course of a single afternoon, you successfully managed, with little more than a glance – a perfectly soul-destroying glance – to worm your way into my heart. Being together again only a few weeks after we’d first met on the set of The Scorpion and the Frog, this time in a three-walled cabin on the snow-covered floor of a studio lot in the middle of spring, I was struck fearing the worst: I was somehow, unexpectedly, falling for you. Or for the idea of you. The chemical fucking shock of you.

  It wasn’t rational, I knew that, but love doesn’t need to be rational, or even realistic – half of modern music is written to perpetuate this very notion. There’s no sense in love, or whatever it is that feels like love that we spend all our waking hours stressing about. As we waited for the next take to begin, makeup artists and crew positioning us for the cameras, spot-checking every detail to leave nothing to chance, I remember feeling strangely angry. Had none of them witnessed what I had just seen? Were they all so completely oblivious to the moment – to the art that had transpired between us only seconds earlier? It was almost impossible to fathom, that the tenderness you’d exhibited with just a flicker of your brown eyes had gone unnoticed by all but me. My frustration subsided, though, as we readied ourselves – you, in my arms, with still a breath or two to give – and I looked down at you and you smiled and said, rather innocently, “Ready to go again?”