The Film Club

by David Gilmour

  “So the rehearsal ends, the other guys take off, and I’m sitting in the car with Arthur. Finally I turn to him and say sort of breezily, ‘So did you see Sally this weekend?’ And sounding downright upbeat, he goes, ‘Yeah, I did,’ as if it’s an interesting question to which he has an interesting answer. So I say—and here the words just tumbled out all on their own—‘Is there some kind of a thing happening there?’ And he says, all solemn, ‘Yeah, there is.’

  “I’ll tell you, Jesse. It was as if somebody sped the movie up ten times. The world just raced by. I could hardly get out a croak. He said, ‘Here, have a cigarette.’ Which somehow made it worse. I started talking, like super fast, how it was ‘all’ okay with me but wasn’t life strange, didn’t things change really fast.

  “Then I asked him to drive me over to Sally’s. He dropped me off in front of her apartment on Brunswick Street. I still remember the number. I went running up the stairs like there was a fire and knocked, rap, rap, rap; Sally came to the door in her dressing gown, looking, how shall I put it, cunningly timid. Like, Oh, was there a bomb in that package I sent you?

  “So I ended up in tears, telling her how much I loved her, that I’d ‘seen the light.’ All that stuff. I just spat it all out in a torrent. I thought I meant every single word, too. You get the picture, right?

  “So now I’m back with her. I made her throw out the bedsheets and tell me everything that happened. Did you do this, did you do that? Disgusting questions; disgusting answers too.” (Here Jesse laughed.) “It took me about a month to remember what a drag she was and then I left again. For good this time. But I made damn sure Arthur was out of town when I did it. I had a feeling she was going to get up to her old tricks and I didn’t want him around.”

  “Did she?”

  “She did. She looked up my nutty brother and screwed him. She was bad news, I’m telling you, but that’s not the point. The point is sometimes you just don’t know how you’re going to feel about these things till it’s too late. It’s not something you want to be rash about.”

  Eleanor came out on her porch and slipped a wine bottle into the recycle bin. Looked down the street in a pained way, as if she saw something down there she didn’t like, rain clouds or vandals, then caught sight of us a few feet away.

  “Oh”—she jumped—“hello there, you two. In your office, I see.” A furious toothy smile.

  Jesse waited till she was gone. “I don’t think any of my friends are going to go out with Rebecca.”

  I said, “The thing is, Jesse, she’s going to go with someone and trust me, she’s going to make sure you know about it. Have you thought about that?”

  In that adult voice of his, a tone lower than usual, he said, “I think it’ll be bad for a couple of weeks, then I’ll get over it.”

  I persisted. “Okay then, this is the last thing I’ll say and then I’m going to shut up about it. You can undo this. You can get on the phone this second and you can get her back here and you can save yourself a lot of discomfort.” I let that sink in. “Unless you really don’t want her anymore.”

  Moment’s pause. “I don’t want her anymore.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He looked hesitantly over at the church, at the figures moving around its base. I thought he was having second thoughts. Then he said, “Do you think it was unmascu-line for me to have cried?”

  “What?”

  “When we were breaking up. She was crying too.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But you don’t think I was a baby or anything?”

  I said, “I think there would have been something wrong with you, something cold and rather unpleasant, if you hadn’t cried.”

  A car drove by.

  “Have you ever cried in front of a girl?” he asked.

  “The question is, is there a girl I haven’t cried in front of,” I said. When I heard his laughter, when I saw, if only for an instant, the unhappiness vanish from his features (it was like a wind blowing ashes from a beautiful table), it made me feel lighter, as if a mild nausea had passed from my body. If only I could keep him like this, I thought. But I could see, way down the road, images of him waking up at three in the morning and thinking about her, a cement wall toward which he was blindly speeding.

  But not for the moment. For the moment we were on the porch, his spirits temporarily lifted from their coffin to which they would return, like ghosts, at sunset, I knew. I was going to show him Last Tango in Paris again but it didn’t seem like a good idea. The butter scene might lead to all sorts of unhappy imaginings. What then? Tootsie (1982), too romantic, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), too Russian, Ran (1985), too good to risk him not paying attention. Finally, I got it, a movie that makes you want to take a shotgun and pump a few rounds into the door of your own car. A fuck-you movie.

  I slipped Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) into the DVD like it was a nine-millimetre clip. The title sequence rolled (one of the best ever, two guys cracking a safe). Music by Tangerine Dream; a soundtrack like water running through glass pipes. Pastel green, electric pink, neon blue. Watch how the machinery is shot, I said, the love with which blow torches and drills are lit and photographed; the camera focuses on them with the eye of a carpenter viewing his tools.

  And James Caan, of course. Never better.Watch for a wonderful moment when he goes into a loan shark’s office to get some money and the guy pretends not to know what he’s talking about. Watch the pause Caan takes. It’s as if he’s so furious he has to take a breath to get the sentence out. “I am the last guy on earth you want to fuck with,” he says.

  “Buckle up,” I said. “Here we go.”

  Rebecca returned the next afternoon. She had dressed with great design, black silk shirt, tiny gold buttons, black jeans. She was giving him a last look at dessert before she locked it away. They sat on the porch and talked briefly. I slammed pots and pans in the kitchen at the back of the house, put the radio on loud. I think I even hummed.

  The conversation didn’t go on for long. When I crept into the living room (“just dusting”) for a peek, I saw an odd spectacle. Jesse was in his wicker chair in an attitude of physical discomfort, as if he were waiting for the last seat on a bus, while below him, on the sidewalk, an animated Rebecca (clothed now, it seemed, like a black widow spider) talked to a cluster of teenage boys, all friends of Jesse’s who had dropped by. Her manner suggested a graceful and happy ease, not the face of someone who had just lost an appeal, and I realized that there was something dangerous about her. Jesse had sensed it and tired of it. He was, I found myself thinking, a healthier specimen than me. I could never have walked away from a girl that beautiful, from the cocaine-like pleasure of having a girlfriend prettier than everyone else’s. Petty, dreadful, pitiable, I know. I know.

  Soon the porch swarmed with teenage boys. Rebecca was gone. I called Jesse inside and eased the door shut. Quietly I said, “Watch what you say to these guys, all right?”

  His pale features looked at me. I could smell the sweat of excitement on him. “You know what she said to me? She said, ‘You will never see me.’”

  I waved it away. “That’s fine. But promise me you’ll watch what you say.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said quickly, but I could tell from the way he said it that he’d already said too much.

  8

  We had a horror festival. Thinking back, it may have been an insensitive choice—Jesse was probably more fragile than he claimed to be—but I wanted to give him something which would not permit the casual, occasionally saddening introspection that less compelling movies allow.

  I began with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), a gothic nightmare about a New Yorker (Mia Farrow) impregnated by the devil. I said to Jesse, “Watch for a famous shot of an old woman (Ruth Gordon) talking on the phone. Who’s she talking to? But most important, check out the composition of the shot itself. She’s half obscured by the door. Why can’t we see all of her? Did the director, Roman Polanski, make a mistake or is he trying for a
n effect?”

  I tell Jesse a little about Polanski’s painful life; his mother’s death in Auschwitz when he was a little boy; his marriage to Sharon Tate who was pregnant when she was murdered by Charles Manson’s followers; his eventual flight from the United States after a conviction for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl.

  Jesse says, “Do you think somebody should go to jail for having sex with a thirteen-year-old?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think it depends on the thirteen-year-old? I know girls that age who are more experienced than I am.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s against the law and it should be.”

  Changing the subject, I mention the curious fact that when Polanski drove in the gates of Paramount Pictures on the first day of shooting Rosemary’s Baby—a major Hollywood film production with real movie stars, Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, proof that he had “made it”—he felt a strange letdown. I read Jesse this passage from Polanski’s autobiography: “‘I had sixty technicians at my beck and call and bore responsibility for a huge budget—at least by my previous standards—but all I could think of was the sleepless night I’d spent in Krakow, years before, on the eve of making my first short, The Bicycle. Nothing would ever match the thrill of that first time.’

  “What do you make of that story?” I asked.

  “That things don’t turn out like you think they will?”

  “But what else?” I prodded.

  “That you may be happier now than you think you are?”

  I said, “I used to think my life was going to start when I graduated from university. Then I thought it’d start when I published a novel or got famous or something silly like that.” I told him my brother had said this astonishing thing to me once—that he didn’t think his life was going to start till he was fifty. “What about you?” I said to Jesse. “When do you think your life is going to start?”

  “Mine?” Jesse said.

  “Yes. Yours.”

  “I don’t believe any of that stuff,” he said, rising to his feet in a gust of excitement, the excitement of ideas. “You know what I think? I think your life begins when you’re born.”

  He stood in the middle of the living room floor, almost vibrating. “Do you think that’s true? Do you think I’m right?”

  “I think you’re a very wise man.”

  And then, in a gesture of uncontrollable pleasure, he clapped his hands together, wham!

  “You know what I think,” I said. “I think you belong in university. That’s what they do there. They sit around talking about stuff like this. Except unlike a living room where there’s just your dad, there’s a zillion girls.”

  At that he cocked his head. “Really?”

  And like that first day—it seemed like ages ago—with The 400 Blows, I knew to leave it there.

  Next I showed him The Stepfather (1987), a small-budget film with a silly subplot; but wowie zowie, just wait for the scene where a real estate agent—he’s just killed his own children—takes a buyer for a tour of an empty house; watch his face as he gradually understands it’s a cop he’s talking to, not a customer. Then The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), very poor execution but an idea of such resonating terror that only the subconscious could produce it; then David Cronenberg’s very early Shivers (1975). A scientific experiment with parasites goes bad in a bland Toronto high-rise. Sex maniacs stalk the hallways. Shivers was the prototype for the exploding stomach years later in Alien (1979). I alert Jesse to wait for the final, disturbing shot of larvae-like cars creeping forth from the apartment to spread mayhem. This very low-budget film, curiously erotic, announced the arrival of Cronenberg’s unique sensibility: a smart guy with a dirty mind.

  We moved on to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). One of the things about a profound experience at the movies is that you remember where you saw it. I saw Psycho at the Nortown theatre in Toronto when it came out in 1960. I was eleven and even though I hated scary movies and felt them with an immediacy which alarmed my parents, I went along this time because my best friend was going, a kid with skin as thick as a rhino’s.

  There are times when you are so frightened that you are paralyzed, when electricity shoots through your body as if you have stuck your finger in a wall socket. That’s what happened to me during a couple of the scenes in Psycho : not the shower scene itself because I had my head buried in my arms by then, but rather the moment just before, when you can see through the shower curtain that something has come into the bathroom. Emerging from the Nor-town theatre that summer afternoon, I remember thinking that there was something wrong with the sunlight.

  On an academic note I mention to Jesse that the film was shot in 8mm to give it a sort of porno-film feel. I also suggest that Psycho is proof that a masterpiece can be flawed. For the moment I don’t say how. (I’m thinking of that terrible, talky ending but I want him to spot it.)

  Then on to a rare film, Onibaba (1964). Set in a dreamy world of reeds and marshland in fourteenth-century feudal Japan, this is a black-and-white horror film about a mother and her daughter who survive by murdering stray soldiers and selling their weapons. But the true subject of the film is sex, its manic lure and the violence it can set off in anyone even close to it. While I’m talking I can see Jesse’s attention not so much fade as go inside. He’s thinking about Rebecca, about what she’s up to; with whom; and where.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “About O.J. Simpson,” he said. “I’m thinking that if he’d just waited six months, he wouldn’t have cared who his wife was with.”

  I cautioned Jesse to prepare himself for a horrible scene when the old woman tries to tear a devil’s mask off her face. (It shrank in the rain.) The mother rips and pulls and tugs, blood dripping down her throat, her daughter smashing, crack, crack, crack, at the mask with a jagged rock. I mention that that very mask later inspired William Friedkin in his physical portrait of the devil in the grand slam of all horror movies, the scariest thing ever made, The Exorcist. That was next on the list and it really finished us off.

  The first time I saw The Exorcist in 1973, it scared me so badly I fled the theatre a half-hour in. A few days later I crept back and tried again. I got to the halfway mark, but when the little girl slowly rotated her head, accompanied by the sounds of cracking sinews, I felt as if my blood had turned cold and I beat it again. It was only the third time that I went the distance, peeking through my fingers and plugging my ears with my thumbs. Why did I keep going back? Because I had a feeling this was a “great” movie— not intellectually because I’m not sure even its director cared about the ideas in it—but because it was a one-of-a-kind artistic achievement. The work of a prodigiously gifted director at the height of his artistic maturity.

  I also pointed out that William Friedkin, who had just come from directing The French Connection (1971), was, by many accounts, a bully and a borderline psycho. The crew referred to him as “Wacky Willie.” A director from the old school, he screamed at people, foamed at the mouth, fired staff in the morning and rehired them in the afternoon. He shot off guns on the set to scare the actors and played insane tapes—South American tree frogs or the soundtrack from Psycho—at nerve-jarring volume. It kept everyone nicely on edge.

  Single-handedly he drove the budget of The Exorcist— which was supposed to be four million dollars—straight through the ceiling to twelve million. One day while shooting in New York, he was reportedly doing a close-up of bacon cooking on a griddle and didn’t like how the bacon was curling; he brought the shoot to a close while they hunted around New York for some preservative-free bacon that would remain flat. Friedkin worked so slowly that a crew member who got sick came back to the set after three days to find they were still on the same bacon shot.

  The producers wanted Marlon Brando to play the role of Father Karras, the senior exorcist, but Friedkin was concerned, paranoid some might say, that that might make it “a Brando film” rather than his. (Ungenerous souls had s
aid the same thing to Francis Coppola about The Godfather, which had just come out.)

  There was a story going around for years that during one scene where he was using a non-actor to play a priest (the man was a priest in real life), Friedkin wasn’t getting the performance he wanted. So he asked the priest, “Do you trust me?” The man said yes, whereupon Willie drew back and smacked him across the face. Then they re-shot the scene. Friedkin got the “take” he wanted. You can see it when Father Damien is getting the last rites at the foot of the stairs. The priest’s hands are still shaking.

  Talent, as I had said earlier to Jesse, does indeed take hold in strange and sometimes undeserving nooks. Fried-kin may have been a cretin, I point out, but you can’t knock his visual sense. Every time that camera starts up the stairs to the child’s room, you know it’s going to be something new and horrible and worse than the time before.

  Jesse slept on the couch that night, two lamps on. Next morning, both of us mildly embarrassed about the horrors of the evening before, we agreed to suspend the festival for a while. Great Comedies, Bad Girls, Woody Allen, nouvelle vague, anything. Just no more horror. There are moments in The Exorcist, the little girl sitting on the bed, very still, speaking calmly in a man’s voice, when it feels as if you are teetering on the brink of a place you should never visit.

  9

  In reading over what I’ve written, I realize that I may have given the impression that I had little else going on in my life except watching movies and kibitzing at the side of my son’s life. That wasn’t the case. I was getting a little work by now, book reviews, a documentary that needed polish, even a few days of substitute teaching (dismaying by implication, of course, but not the vanity-smashing experience I’d feared).