All we can see is Ward’s back. Jenny screams.
CUT TO BLACK
Scene 3
FADE IN
Ward’s frowning face fills the screen. The camera tilts back and forth as he shakes it. “Damn thing. I should never buy used equipment. You missed some great stuff.”
He steps back. Jenny is slumped in the chair. Blood trickles from her mouth and nose. Her arms and legs are bruised. “Say it,” he says. “Say how a lot of great stuff just happened. Tell the me in the future just how goddamn magnificent I am.”
“You’re the worst,” Jenny screams. “You’re a monster!”
Standing beside her, he tousles her short hair. Jenny lurches for his hand, trying to bite him. Ward stays just out of her range. Finally, he takes the circular saw off the table and walks behind Jenny, turning the saw on and off. She cringes but can’t move away. Leaning over her, he whispers in her ear, “What should I cut off first, I wonder? Should we start with a leg?”
Jenny sniffs and says, “Wait! What kind of medical supplies do you have?”
A puzzled expression spreads across his face. “For you?”
“Of course,” she says. “Cut off my leg and I’m going to go into shock and bleed out. Trust me. My sister-in-law is a nurse. It’s not like in the movies. You hack off too much too soon, there’s no more fun for you.”
Ward walks around her and lowers the saw. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Jenny cocks her head at him. “I thought you’d done this before.”
“It was always quick. Not like this.”
She leans back in the chair, a faint smile on her lips. “Holy shit. You’re a virgin. You’ve never killed anyone.”
“Yes I have,” he shouts.
“Then you should have thought this through better,” says Jenny. “I bet you hear that a lot at home.”
Ward slaps her hard across the face. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“My mom had me young and she said it screwed up her whole life. She had to settle down. Take any shitty job. No more fun for her. Did you have a kid young?”
“Well, aren’t you little miss know-it-all?” Ward says. “You’re not as dumb as I thought you’d be. After I’ve had some more fun, I’m going to cut off the top of your head and scoop out your brains.”
“I love that idea,” says Jenny happily. “But don’t get excited and finish too quick. Do you have that problem with your wife? Finishing too quick?”
Ward balls up his fist and swings at her.
CUT TO BLACK
Scene 4
FADE IN
Jenny hangs from the overhead hook by her bound wrists. She’s stripped down to her panties. Ward hits her repeatedly with a heavy flogger. Jenny screams and squirms with every blow.
Finally, Ward lowers his arm to his side. He slumps into one of the chairs, breathing hard. He flexes and rubs his flogging arm.
From the hook, the bruised and sweating Jenny says, “You okay?”
“Shut up,” says Ward.
“Look, if it’s any consolation, if you die down there, I don’t think I can get down. I’ll probably starve or freeze. Isn’t that comforting? Even if you stroke out, I’ll die.”
Ward flexes his arm. “A little, I suppose.”
“You should exercise more.”
He nods, sweat on his brow. “I know. Like I said, that’s why you’re going to die. I’ll be too old and used up before long.”
Jenny wipes blood off her face onto her arm. “Don’t feel bad. Lots of older people do great things. Henry Miller didn’t publish Tropic of Cancer until he was forty-two. Ray Kroc didn’t start McDonald’s until he was fifty-two. Grandma Moses was seventy-seven before she started painting.”
“I’m going to gag you,” says Ward.
“Don’t you want to hear me scream? Here. Listen.” Jenny shrieks at the top of her lungs. Over and over again.
Ward clamps his hands over his ears. “Stop that!”
CUT TO BLACK
Scene 5
FADE IN
Jenny is back in the chair, but this time she isn’t bound. Ward holds her in place, weakly, slapping and punching her. She laughs the whole time.
CUT TO BLACK
Scene 6
FADE IN
Ward is sitting on the chair next to Jenny. He’s sweating heavily and softly crying. She has an arm around him. Gently, Jenny says, “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“I was fibbing earlier. Remember when I said I was a pain freak?”
Ward drops his head into his hands. “Oh shit. You really were getting off the whole time?”
Jenny shakes her head. “It’s worse than that.”
“How could it be worse?”
“Have you ever heard of CIP?”
Ward lurches away from her. “Oh god. Is that like AIDS? Did you infect me?”
Jenny laughs. “No, stupid. CIP is congenital insensitivity to pain, aka congenital analgesia. I don’t feel pain. All your so-called torture was a joke. I know it’s sad, but you’re a failure, Ward. A complete and total failure.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t say that.” Ward reaches for her, but Jenny shoves him away. Exhausted, he falls back in his chair and weeps quietly.
“Remember how you were afraid of being old and useless one day?” says Jenny. “I’m afraid today is that day.”
“This is so humiliating.”
Jenny puts an arm around him again. “Don’t take it so hard. There’s still someone you can kill.”
He pulls away and looks at her through narrowed eyes. “Who? Not you. The moment’s over. I blew it. All the money. All the planning. Worse, it’s all on video. Shit. I have to destroy it.”
Ward starts to get up, but Jenny grabs his hand and pulls him to the tool table. “You don’t have to go out a failure. Think about it. There’s still time to go out a winner.”
Jenny puts a box cutter in Ward’s hand. He wraps his fingers around it and sighs. “Thank you,” he says wistfully.
Slowly, his eyes on the box cutter the whole time, he walks to the camera and kneels so that his upper body fills the frame.
“My name is Edward Thomas Jensen,” he says. “And I’m a winner.” He puts the box cutter to his throat and slashes himself deeply from ear to ear. His body shakes as blood pours onto his white Tyvek coveralls. He gurgles and his hands claw at his throat as he chokes. Soon, Ward’s eyes roll back in his head. A few seconds later, he collapses onto the concrete floor.
For a minute, all that’s in the frame is the plastic-covered room. One of the chairs has fallen over. Then Jenny’s face fills the screen. Her EAT THE RICH T-shirt is back on. She lowers her head, then looks up. “I have one more confession.” She looks around, as if making sure no one is there to hear. Then, beaming at the camera, she says, “Hi. My real name is Samantha. And I always wanted to kill someone.”
She moves out of frame. All we see is Ward on the floor, then Samantha’s hand as she turns off the recorder.
CUT TO BLACK
INSANITY AMONG PENGUINS
Brian Hodge
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.
—WERNER HERZOG, Grizzly Man
IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS that can stick with you the longest…the fates of small and seemingly insignificant creatures lost beneath the vault of heaven.
If I’d seen this when I was a boy, I would’ve cried. To my father’s shame, I was a sensitive one growing up. Bambi left scars. But the documentary isn’t that old, so I just take in the scene and feel sad in my grown-up way.
The on-screen world is all white ice and rocky ground and a milky sky dissolving into the haze of the horizon.
It’s populated by little tuxedoed characters. The documentarian has come to Antarctica to chronicle the lives of various weirdos and misfits who have rolled down the globe to work at the bottom of the world, in one of the harshest environments on the planet. He’s found some avian researchers, but the camera is mainly interested in the penguins. They all have someplace to go: colony and penguin society toward the left, open water and bountiful feeding on the right. Life is good.
Except there’s this one lingering in the middle. He? She? It’s a he to me. We all see ourselves in the penguin.
The moment is preceded by the most absurd question in movie history: “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?”
This one spends awhile refusing to move. He could be contemplating his options. He could be listening to a call beyond the hearing of humans and microphones. He could already be fixing his gaze on his distant goal.
With his back turned on the life-giving sea, he eventually sets off waddling toward the mountains of the interior.
There’s more disturbing footage from polar regions, but it’s the implications that needle at me. The penguin’s journey is certain death. Were they to catch him and bring him back, the biologist explains, he would only head for the mountains again. It sounds like the voice of experience, as if they’ve tried and failed. The penguins refuse to be saved.
“But why?” the documentarian asks.
Nobody asks why like Werner Herzog in Encounters at the End of the World.
Nobody else could sound more resigned to the fact that there is no answer.
* * *
Even deep into the age of Netflix and On Demand, once or twice a week I visited the Video Maven. Because it was still there, and a part of me refused to let go of what places like this once meant to me.
By now, with the name of Blockbuster a joke, synonymous with extinction, the Video Maven shouldn’t have existed. You couldn’t even call it the last of a dying breed, because the breed was dead already, chain stores and independents alike, their wares clogging landfills and gathering dust on the loneliest shelves of charity shops.
Lydia Appleton was its founder, owner, curator, and, for the past decade, sole employee. She stayed in business through stubbornness and an iron will to refuse to surrender. Plus she’d moved from the original location to where the rent was cheaper, holding on behind a steel door in a sheer brick wall, inside a windowless rectangular space in a renovated factory off Belmont currently rocking 25 percent occupancy. Here, there was no pedestrian or drive-by traffic for impulse stops. To come here, you had to know about the place—you had to mean to.
Outside, it had the look of someplace you weren’t supposed to be. Inside, it was a time capsule, with walls of purple-painted brick and exposed pipes. It was crowded the way submarines are crowded, every cubic foot stuffed with movies and memorabilia, and just enough room to walk the rows.
I waved hello to Lydia at the front counter and made the dive. Something would call to me. Something always did, a fresh discovery in a stale wrapper. This was the magic that kept me coming back, along with just enough other nostalgia fans to keep Lydia hanging on. Those of us Of A Certain Age for whom picking out a movie meant inspecting an artifact on a shelf before it ever meant clicking a thumbnail on a screen.
I wasn’t alone, which was good to see. A subsegment of the hipster crowd kept her going, too. They’d rediscovered vinyl and cassettes, so who was to say they couldn’t spearhead a resurrection of VHS tapes? The Video Maven was just retro enough to lure them in to ogle the packaging on movies made before they were born, back when the special effects were cheesy and Be kind, rewind was our code of honor.
A pair of corporals from the man-bun-and-beard army was scrutinizing the empty DVD case for…I strained to see…Revenge of Billy the Kid. Nice. Deformed goat-man seeks his gory retribution. They were in the deep end of schlock, playing along in the proper spirit of it all.
You didn’t come to the Video Maven for the latest plug-and-play module in the Marvel universe. No, you came for the goods Netflix would never touch. You came for vintage splatter and cyberpunk and vigilantes. You came for Italian zombies and Asian creature features. You came for Terminator rip-offs and Rambo clones.
Iron Man 3? Get the fuck out. Tetsuo: The Iron Man? Welcome home, brother. The Pumaman? Welcome, sister. You’re among friends.
On a random glance up I caught Lydia, still behind the counter, staring at me with exasperation, like, when was I ever going to notice? She twitched her finger in a come-hither waggle.
We’d known each other forever, from my perspective. Back when she’d first opened the shop, Lydia was a girl geek before girl geeks were cool, out and unrepentant decades before her kind became an affront to territorial manbabies and neckbeards. At the time I was halfway through high school, and girl geeks seemed as rare as unicorns, even though late-blooming dorks like me dreamed of them just the same.
Now? Now she’d reached that stage where women with strong enough features start to get called handsome. Her hair had turned a magnificent shade of gray, still long, still lustrous, just not as poofy. Beneath a tailored thrift shop jacket, she wore a Cramps T-shirt that somehow still looked as fresh as it had twenty-five years ago.
“I could’ve texted,” she said, “but I wasn’t going to miss seeing the look on your face.”
At the moment, the look on my face had to have been wholly blank.
“Your white whale? I have it on good authority…it’s not a myth.”
“I’ve had lots of white whales. Which one are we talking about?”
She pause-blinked, summoning patience to deal with the slow kid. “Come on, Troy. There are all the others, and there’s this one,” she said. “Todestriebe. It really does exist after all. Wanna be my date?”
* * *
Wait a minute. How old are you? Experience matters.
If you grew up with the Internet, every musical and cinematic desire just a few clicks away, then you have no working concept of how things used to be. Today, if you have an itch for the latest lo-fi obscurity by some band of misanthropes recording in an Oslo basement, or a prerelease peek at the new superhero epic, or the dregs of adult-baby-diaper porn, it’s yours for the taking. You stream it. You pirate it. You order it. You lack for nothing, you spoiled brat.
And you love it that way. I love it that way.
At the same time, there’s a primal hunter-gatherer inside me, fresh off the savannas, who still hungers for the thrill of the hunt. There’s an entire content-satiated demographic of you who’ve never experienced this. Never ordered a rare bootleg from a cheaply printed catalog and hoped what arrived wasn’t a total con job. Never known what it was like to haunt dingy labor-of-love shops, flipping through racks of new and used with a weary, wary prayer in your heart, figuring yeah, you’ll probably leave disappointed…but just maybe, this will be the place where your fingers freeze and your pulse quickens and, hardly daring to believe it’s finally happened, you pull out the elusive quarry that’s obsessed you for months, maybe years. Vinyl. Tape. CDs and DVDs, before ripping software. Japanese laser disc. Whatever—the old ways.
But when it happens? My god, the triumph, a fanfare of choirs and trumpets in your head. The endorphin rush, as for a few rapturous moments time and space have folded just right, to bring you and your prize together. Snap it up quick, before the universe changes its mind.
I missed that.
I’ve always missed that.
But she brought it back. With her enigmatic grin, Lydia brought it avalanching back…and through the chaos, hostility, and murder, I thought I caught a glimpse of some divine underlying harmony.
* * *
A week later, I arranged for three days of personal time off from the courier warehouse I managed. Lydia left the Video Maven in the hands of a trusted barnacle from back when she could afford to hire employees. Respon
sibilities cast aside, we plunged into the kind of impulse craziness neither of us had indulged in for twenty years: flying across a continent, from Chicago to Vancouver, to see a film most people didn’t believe existed.
Given the fate of brick-and-mortar outlets, no one would’ve blamed her if she’d opted to spend the last decade sitting on her existing video stock, eking out a living from the shrinking pool of nostalgia fans who didn’t mind paying $1.99 to rent the likes of The Evil Dead for old times’ sake. But that wasn’t Lydia. She cared too much about her tribe to neglect them, or take them for granted.
Instead, she never stopped refreshing her shelves. She scoured the world for rarities and lost gems and releases that had never had North American distribution, so she could give them, like kittens, a forever home. She performed eBay searches with righteous diligence. She subscribed to collector newsletters. She had contacts at home and abroad. You want The Terminator in a Tamil dub, or a no-budget Nigerian rip-off of the original? She knew a guy who knew a guy who—you get the picture.
She’d never stopped putting out feelers for Todestriebe, the rumored lost documentary by Werner Herzog. I hadn’t known this until she got a legitimate hit. As always, a guy who knows a guy. Supposedly, a print was in private hands, with rare showings that might pop up anywhere in the world. It wasn’t a commercial endeavor. You couldn’t buy your way in. You just had to be invited. And another was coming up. A bit of back-and-forthing with some anonymous gatekeeper, and Lydia managed it.
In the world of Willy Wonka, we would’ve been waving a couple of golden tickets. Instead, what we had was…well, I wasn’t sure.
“On a scale of one to ten,” I said somewhere over Minnesota, “how weird is this?”
“I’d give it a five-point-five.”
Final Cuts Page 18
