Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  After the second showing, Meadow thought about it but didn’t call Carrie, didn’t want to talk to anyone. She took the midnight bus back upstate, in and out of sleep on the way. Now she wanted to share Barry Lyndon with Carrie, had been waiting to share it, and had rented a print for them to watch. She wanted their silent films to use music the way this film did, to entrance the audience. And their films wouldn’t have the usual typical silent-film look of flickering light and too few frames per second speeding up the action. They would have a Barry Lyndon–like devotion to slow, slow time, a languid moving into a painting-like scene, but in twenty-second pieces. So they set up scenes as almost unmoving compositions: a girl at a table with a young man. A boy feeding a kitten. A girl in bed waking. Everything long and slow, but with odd jump cuts every twenty seconds that returned you to the exact same scene. A jump cut out of technical necessity, the camera’s limits, but somehow that worked and made all the difference. It was odd: kinetic and static at the same time. Carrie played pieces of music as they worked (just as Sergio Leone used to so that his shoot-outs felt like ballets), the actors expressing the music in odd ways in their bodies. Carrie used only music of the lost-films era or earlier: she found a gramophone and a stack of 78s at a local antiques store. So they invented films out of titles and technical restraints and found records. Made one, made another, then another. All of them acting and operating the camera, taking turns. They double-­exposed the film and made slow-moving ghosts of themselves. They used a filter to render everything a pale lavender. There was a feeling that something good could be happening, a sense of deep possibility among them. This was happiness.

  Later, when editing these pieces together alone late at night and adding Carrie’s music, Meadow could feel how good they were becoming, how she made something good into something truly special, and this also was real happiness.

  In the last two weeks of Carrie’s visit, Meadow insisted on working on other reenactments, not of lost silent films but of iconic classic films. They would pick a scene from a famous American Western, and they would redo it as precisely as they could with Meadow or Carrie playing the hero. John Wayne’s part or Alan Ladd’s or Gary Cooper’s. All they needed was some Western gear, then they watched the scenes Meadow had decided on, over and over. It was fun: as Meadow redid the scenes, she figured out how they worked. As she acted, she felt the power of the men in her. The mysterious male of the West. It was so simple, and, well, so easy. She also suspected it was more interesting in idea than execution, like many of her ideas. Meadow knew she had a weakness for perfect geometries of concepts, theories, and images. She could feel how it lacked the happenstance magic of the silent films they made, the way the limits of the form had inspired them to do unexpected things.

  By the time Carrie left in August, Meadow had raw footage and months of editing ahead of her.

  “This is my favorite part,” she said. Carrie hugged her.

  “I can’t wait to see how they look,” Carrie said.

  “You can stay and help me, you know,” Meadow said.

  “School, I have school,” she said. “And Will.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  * * *

  In the end, the Alice Guy-Blaché reenactments were indeed wonderful: beautiful, old in feeling rather than in cliché representations of “old.” The films had some relationship to Guy-Blaché’s titles, but they also had evidence of Meadow and Carrie’s noticing everywhere. Kubrick and the found music and a summer in Gloversville. Reimaginings rather than reenactments, they had found a way to collaborate with the history of cinema.

  The Western reenactments, however, were as bad as Meadow feared: silly, obvious, and smug. The idea never went anywhere unexpected. Meadow had hoped that you would move to a different place once you got the initial joke. But it didn’t happen. She couldn’t make it interesting in editing, because the concept was to replicate the editing of the original films. Formally it felt too schematic and dull, and she couldn’t think of it as anything but an exercise. Meadow grew frustrated with all of it. She quit doing anything movie-related for three weeks. She slept late and then lay on the couch and read the paper. So bored was Meadow that she had sex with Deke three times a day.

  “What’s wrong?” Deke asked. She shrugged him off. At the end of the three weeks, she woke up and went for a long run. She ran through Gloversville until the main street suddenly gave way to farmland. She could see the long view of the horizon where the peaks of the Adirondacks were visible. She could breathe, and she could shake off all the sitting in the dark looking at shadows. Stupid, boring shadows. She ran faster until she had to stop, breathless. She bent over and waited to catch her breath. A wave started in her stomach. Her mouth moistened and she felt that she might vomit.

  It sickened her. Some of her ideas would fail no matter how hard she worked. She couldn’t always figure it out ahead of time. She could fail.

  CARRIE GETS A GIFT

  Will’s band was the second to last to go on. It would be midnight before the set started. Carrie waited, sipping a beer at the bar, trying to bide her time.

  “This is Carrie. Carrie, this is Mike,” said Will. All night he had introduced her to his music friends. She had been with Will for months, and still there were new friends to meet. They were at a place called Enid’s in Greenpoint, and everyone knew Will. They looked at her closely, not unkindly, as though they thought it was great that Will had found someone. Will was six years older than Carrie, and he hadn’t had a serious girlfriend since a big breakup three years ago. Despite being in a band, he was not rock-star handsome. He was a little heavy, and he was losing his hair. Carrie didn’t find him attractive at first, but he quickly grew on her. He was very funny, and, most appealingly, he was attracted to her, every inch of her. The more she knew Will, the sexier he became.

  They had met when she was the crew for a short film made by her college classmate Lindsay. They all worked crew on one another’s projects. Will was a friend of Lindsay’s, and she had recruited him to act. He was really good, playing a kind of savvy loser, a role Will was born to play. Carrie and Will talked about music. Or rather he mentioned his band rather proudly, and Carrie told him she preferred opera and musicals. He invited her to a gig, and she surprised herself by showing up and even dancing a little. She bought all three of the band’s albums (released on a local indie label, but released), and she listened carefully to each one. Will was an accomplished songwriter, witty and poetic. But the thing she loved best about Will, what really struck her, was his lack of indifference. So many guys she met were cool and, well, uninterested. She always felt she had to hide her enthusiasm. Carrie just fell in love with people, that was her way. She knew it frightened men. Will: not frightened. Will met her enthusiasm and exceeded it. For instance, he collected vintage ephemera, and he would write her long notes in black ink on old ads or toy packaging that ironically played off whatever he wrote in his note. She soon had a collection of love notes, and all together they looked of a piece, like an art project.

  Carrie drank her beer and congratulated herself on her own instincts. She never understood the appeal of unrequited love. It was much healthier to love someone who loved you back. She liked being attended to. He called her every day. He met her after class and walked her home. He bought her dinner (albeit at a cheap Polish diner, but still). And after they spent a few weeks together, they both declared themselves in love. Loving Will made Carrie feel happy. Now she didn’t have to worry or guess. She had Will.

  The band finally went on at 12:45. Carrie rallied herself, and Will dedicated a song to her. They went back to his place, a one-bedroom railroad walk-up. In the winter, it was either freezing or way overheated from the clanking steam heat. When she complained, Will sang, “Oh my California baby,” which was part of a song he had written for her. But the apartment—god. It had mice and was very dark. There were gates on the five windows: three in the bedroom and two sma
ll ones in the kitchen that went to the fire escape. It was spacious, but the space was awkward. The middle “living room” section was full of band gear. She thought it funny that they both had so much gear; so much stuff was needed.

  Will made her a late meal of a hamburger with a glass of red wine. He handed her a wrapped box.

  “What’s this?” Carrie said, the first bite of food waking her and making her suddenly hungry.

  “A birthday present,” he said.

  “My birthday is two months from now.”

  “A Saturday night present, then.”

  She unwrapped the small felt box. Inside was a clear plastic heart on a chain. The heart had bent gold wire embedded in it that spelled the word Sweetheart.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Do you know what it is?” Will asked.

  “It looks antique,” she said.

  “It’s a piece of sweetheart jewelry from World War II. The Lucite heart is made from the windshield of a fighter plane. Handmade. Some soldier made it for his girl back home so she would remember him. Like trench art and love tokens.”

  Carrie put it on. “I love it.”

  Will smiled. “I will get you more.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him.

  In the morning she picked up the heart from the side table and watched it spin on its chain. She pulled the chain over her head and felt it bump against her breasts as she moved. When she got back to her apartment, she hung it over her desk so she would see it every day as a reminder of how strong love and longing could be. Someone made this by hand for his love as he waited for whatever fate held for him. He was far away but their love would endure. People need forget-me-nots and mementos so they remember they are loved.

  But the opposite idea was true too. That all love ends. Why was Will able to buy this cherished object, this marker of some long-past connection between two people, in an antiques store? At some point there had to be an ending, a death or a breakup, and it got tossed in a box to be given away or sold.

  PORTRAIT OF DEKE

  Meadow’s desire to make a film returned to her as she and Deke sat up one night. They’d had a couple of drinks, and Deke was smoking a cigarette. Young Deke was such a beauty that sometimes it was hard to hear what he said because his prettiness upstaged him. But talk he did: one of Deke’s characteristics was to be quiet and retiring during the sober light of day and to transform, Mr. Hyde–like, in the night. Meadow liked him this way: unspooling and unable to hold back as he told her everything about his young life. He smoked and drank and added another clause to a long endless string. Deke had a voice she liked to listen to, a face she liked to watch. After an hour of watching and listening (in-and-out listening, looking really), Meadow started to film him. Just picked up her camera and shot a three-minute silent film of him as he talked.

  “And then I go— Wait, are you filming me?” Deke said.

  “Yeah,” Meadow said.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “As you no doubt know, no face was ever better built for a viewfinder than yours,” she said, and Deke laughed.

  “So I go, are you going to pierce it? And he goes, it only hurts for a second, but there will be a lot of blood—”

  Deke moved his face a lot when he spoke, eyebrows furrowed, lips twisted. His drunkenness was making him silly, and with his large eyes he looked like an animated creature, a cartoon. Not the beauty she expected. She put her camera down.

  “Why did you stop?” he said, looking at her, the animation now toward a frown.

  Meadow held up another pack of film.

  “Oh lord,” he said.

  “And no sound,” she said.

  “This will never do,” he said, his eyes rolling and his voice in some theatrical zone between joking and serious. He was imitating someone without knowing it. An imitation of some fake gay man in a bad movie. So an imitation of an imitation. Meadow loaded the camera and aimed it at him and when she began to film, he got back into telling his story. He had waited for her camera. The fakey theatrical element was still there, but it almost always is when you shoot someone in three-minute segments. It isn’t long enough to shake off the fake, but it is long enough to do something to the person being filmed. Depending on the person, of course.

  In high school when Meadow got her first real movie camera, she wanted to make films like Andy Warhol’s screen tests. She set up a tripod in front of a sheet in her garage. She lit it with three stark, hard lights so there were no shadows to hide in. Unlike Warhol’s, her tests would have color and sound. Still only fifty feet of film, or three minutes. It was a kid’s project, simple and derivative. Film various people doing nothing. Use the same background and precise setup each time. The person on a stool, the camera four feet away on a tripod. The exact same harsh lighting. Then press record and film them for three minutes. Meadow thought her big variation on Warhol—aside from the addition of sound and color—was that she wouldn’t slow the film down to four minutes the way Warhol did. She would show her faces in real time. It seemed a little like cheating to her to slow the film down, as if the audience must endure something the subject and the filmmaker did not. She wanted to experience time, and the discomfort of that duration would be the same for everyone. Three minutes felt long indeed, and she imagined that some people would get very uncomfortable. Being filmed doing nothing required composure that not everyone had. Which is why she was interested in the first place.

  Meadow knew what it felt like because she filmed herself first. She stared into the lens of the camera and did not move. She resisted the urge to entertain the camera, to do something. She would be a statue, like Gerard Malanga’s Warhol screen test, not a collection of twitchy fake emoting like Dennis Hopper’s screen test. She refused.

  She knew her screen test concept was a little too obvious, even for a high school kid, but it didn’t go as she had expected in a number of ways.

  First she filmed Carrie. Carrie smiled and talked to her the whole time (Is it on? Should I look into the camera? It’s funny, when I was a little kid I used to hate it when my mom would make a movie of me. Whatever I was doing I would stop as soon as I saw the camera . . .). Meadow did not respond but watched her closely, arms crossed, face neutral. It wasn’t a dialogue. This didn’t faze Carrie. Right away she relaxed into stories of her mother sneaking up on her. (I could feel the camera on me like a rash. I just knew I was being filmed . . .)

  “Okay, that’s it. Film is done,” Meadow said.

  “Three minutes up already?” Carrie said. “I can go longer if you want.”

  “Fuck you,” Meadow said. Carrie laughed.

  But other people were not as comfortable as Carrie or as stubborn as Meadow. Meadow’s mother, for instance, sat with a rigid smile on her face. Impossible to sustain, it melted away and she grew older in seconds. Her father fidgeted and did not hide his irritation (this stool is uncomfortable, you know). But he tried to be a good sport and gamely stuck it out.

  Meadow asked a few friends from school to do it, and to her surprise everyone she asked said yes. Many of the girls moved their heads as if they were in front of a mirror. The three-quarter turn of the face and the look back. The slide of hair in front of the eyes. It was a photo shoot, and they had practiced for the gaze of a camera since they were eight. Some of the boys she asked were the same way: actory, striking various poses. One sang a song a cappella. Then it started to happen. Kids she didn’t even know asked to be filmed. Everyone wanted a screen test. She shot two a day after school for weeks. She thought the volunteers were self-selected extroverts, so she sought out kids beyond the film and drama people: the punk rock kids, the skateboarders, the math nerds. Everyone said yes. Even one of the basketball players told her he wanted to be filmed.

  She also noticed that although many people readily agreed to be filmed or volunteered themselves, some o
f the subjects didn’t enjoy the actual filming as much as they expected. A number of them started out playing up to the camera and then appeared a little bored as they waited out the clock. They didn’t seem to experience the filming as something challenging the way Meadow did. It was more of a nuisance. A very small group hated it, and of these, one became very upset by the filming. Lisa Helprin had bad skin, but she was still fairly pretty. Her long hair fell in her face, and she kept playing with it as Meadow filmed. She looked down, and then she looked up at the camera with a wince. She looked at Meadow, but Meadow was behind the camera staring back, unmoving. Lisa’s eyes darted down again and then back up at Meadow. Lisa started to bite her lip. Her eye twitched. What was she thinking about? One minute was up, and Lisa looked a little sweaty. She breathed out loudly, almost a sigh, and put her hand on her head as she heavily breathed in.