The Camera Always Lies

by Hugh Hood

  “What is it?” said Rose excitedly.

  “It might be a wild turkey.” They could see the bird quite plainly at the edge of the water. “There’s a nest around here, and she’s drawing us off, and she probably feels safer on the other side.” They didn’t disturb the nest, though they looked for it for a minute or two before they followed the blazes another mile or so to where their path mounted towards the highway and the height of land above. When they came out into open sunlight on a slope fifty yards above the riverbank, they sat down on a log and gazed at each other. Their gaze deepened and they involuntarily moved closer.

  The log they sat on was old and rotten in places, split open by successive winters, studded with fungi. It smelt strongly and sweetly of organic matter in decay and was full of congregated insect life. Rose stared down between her legs at a column of ants trailing through the grass. The sun was hot on her neck, the grass green and yellow in a complex, bewildering pattern. Her vision blurred.

  “How long are you going to stay here?” she asked.

  “Till I finish a draft of a script; a month, two months. I’m beginning to lose interest in American financing, which just means that I haven’t been offered any.”

  “What’s the script called?”

  Jean-Pierre shuddered instinctively, in a spasm of self-mistrust. “I think you’d like it. It’s called Les honnêtes gens.” They leaned towards each other, but this time didn’t quite touch.

  3

  August now, high summer. Jean-Pierre stayed in his lair, away from her, trying to collect his ideas and decide exactly what he meant, the possibilities of victimizing her a second time being so real and present. He went on a movie bender, going to three or four a day, looking for images to steal. He’d seen King Kong at the Museum of Modern Art last night, and remembered a joke from somewhere.

  “You see, all you want to do is marry this girl and settle down, but you can’t because you’re a gorilla.”

  And besides, he was too tall for her. They’d had trouble with the special effects in that movie; of course they’d been inventing as they went along, pioneering, and generations of filmmakers had learned from the movie.

  The gorilla had kept changing size, relative to his surroundings. Sometimes he wasn’t much bigger than a human being, sometimes he was able to grasp an airplane in his hand and hurl it from the top of the Empire State Building. Such a creature would be quite wrong for Fay Wray because too big, too aggressive, too enormous a sexual threat.

  Jean-Pierre was staying on East Eighty-seventh on the edge of Yorkville in a small apartment which he’d taken for the summer from a very peculiar rental agent.

  “You’re gonna love this place, Mister Fauré.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Yeah, you will. This is what we call a two-and-a-half-room apartment, the only vacancy in the building. We have a uniformed attendant on duty day and night; there’s a closed-circuit monitor in the elevator.”

  “Why?”

  “In case of anything . . . anything, uh, well.”

  “Is this a violent neighbourhood?”

  “Not the people who live here. James Thurber used to live around the corner, the cartoonist, you know.”

  “I know Thurber, yes, but what’s wrong in the elevators?”

  The agent writhed. “A certain amount of trouble,” he mumbled.

  “Killing?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Perhaps I should go elsewhere.”

  “It’s the same all over, violent, everywhere in the city.”

  “What about the suburbs?”

  “You’d have to go a long way out, to get away from it. They have trouble all over Westchester, hubcap thefts, break-ins.”

  “That’s not killing, though. What happens in the elevators?”

  The agent said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I might as well be honest with a foreigner. They work in pairs. One waits till a single person takes the elevator from the ground floor; then he signals the man upstairs, who stops the elevator and gets on at the second floor. He stops the elevator between floors with the emergency button and mugs the passenger.”

  “Mugs?”

  “Sorry. Grabs him by the throat and half-strangles him. Usually hits him on the head with a sap, rifles his pockets, goes back to the ground floor and beats it.”

  “How do they get in if the front door is locked?”

  “They push all the buttons and somebody always buzzes, thinking its the drugstore, or a pizza coming. They get in any time they want.”

  “So you have an attendant.”

  “Three of them, twenty-four hours a day. Ex-cops, big guys. They don’t look like doormen, but they can take care of themselves.” He sighed. “And at that they’re beginning to say that they should work in pairs. Can you imagine what that will do to our overhead?”

  “Don’t you just pass it on in the rent?”

  “Not immediately. A lot of our tenants are on leases, which reminds me, do you want to take the sublet?”

  “After what you’ve told me?” Jean-Pierre burst out laughing. “As you’re doing me a favour, letting me have it till the end of September, I think I’d better take it, mugs or no mugs. This is wonderful material, real American violence. I’ve always been interested in it, but I’ve never been this close.”

  “We’re not all that way.”

  “I was exaggerating slightly. I’ll take the sublet through the end of September, and I promise to keep my front door locked.”

  “Double-locked please, building regulation.” He pointed out the locks.

  “I’ll keep my door double-locked and stay home nights. Do you think I should carry a gun, like a cowboy?”

  The agent saw the joke. “I don’t think that’s absolutely necessary, and anyway it’s against the law unless you get a license. Just stay off the darker cross streets, and get out to Eighty-sixth and Third quick as you can. Don’t loiter.”

  “It’s very small. Could you point out the two rooms and the half?”

  “Living room-sleeping room, that’s one.”

  “Pretty damned small too.”

  “You’re right. Bathroom is another one, makes two.”

  “Oh, you count the bathroom?”

  “Sure we do. The kitchen is the half.”

  “I can see that,” said Jean-Pierre. It comprised a small sink and serving counter and two cupboards on one side, and on the other a small refrigerator, stove, and two more cupboards, these components separated by a kind of runway not much more than two feet wide. Frail swinging doors concealed this cubicle. He smiled at the agent.

  “It’s much worse in Paris,” he said boastfully. The agent’s jaw dropped. “Oh yes, much worse; this is nothing to it. In Paris you have to buy your apartment if you ever want to get one, and it’s necessary to apply for it months, years, before the building is begun. Then you wait five years while it’s being built; they send you plans and pictures to tease you, and allow you to come in sometimes during construction. It’s much worse.”

  The agent looked slightly crestfallen. “You’ll take it?”

  “Till the end of September.”

  And now it was August and his ideas were still confused, and his purposes too. Until last night he hadn’t been anywhere near East Sixty-first Street for ten days, because he just didn’t know what to do. He loved Rose, unquestionably, but this came so pat, was so convenient for his purposes, that he was continually prey to self-doubt.

  He’d been getting up in the middle of the afternoon, going to an evening feature, then perhaps sitting in a bar for an hour watching the late show, then coming home, locking himself in, and watching the late late show, to fall asleep in his chair at four a.m. The New York channels were a mine of film technique from the early thirties onward. He saw Lyle Talbot and Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray and Helen Tw
elvetrees, Richard Barthelmess, the early films of Howard Hawks, Warner’s musicals with Ruby Keeler; he saw Jannings and studied Lubitsch and Lang, and as he stared, rubbing his eyes, he understood why the title of his first film had been Feu ]ames Dean. Violence, rebellion, tenderness, innocence, a peculiar blend of moral qualities not to be found elsewhere, associated with the easy purchase of guns and the assassination of great and unsuspecting public figures, the American violence. Who had tried to assassinate Rose?

  He sat in the dark, in the oppressively tiny living room, and felt the walls press down on him. It was past four o’clock in the morning and the last of the night’s movies had just gone off. The blue light in the screen flickered fitfully before announcing the dawn. Cold light began to filter into the apartment through the slanting Venetian blinds. Jean-Pierre tried to remember if he had snapped the burglar locks on the windows into place. He decided that he hadn’t, ignored the chance of an attack, and sat on in front of the television, which now began to tell of startling events at discount clothing stores in Jersey. Crossing the room to turn the sound down, he felt dizzy. When he saw a lot of movies, he often forgot to eat; the experience had something in common with an alcoholic debauch, and with a period of fasting imposed on himself by a hermit in the desert.

  The light grew more bleak, and the edges of the furniture took on a hard line. He sank into meditation, and as he went under he saw that he would have to resolve all his dilemmas alone; there was no easy girl here to help him out. In Paris there were always women who wanted to be kind to men like himself, and he had taken his share of their help. Now he felt sorry.

  Images swam in his brain, of rape, murder, betrayal, of King Kong at the top of the tallest building in the world, swatting biplanes out of the air like flies. You want to marry the girl and settle down, but you can’t because you’re a guilty beast. This coupling of monster and innocent woman was a staple in the slick American cartoons, a comic theme or a grotesque one, not tragic.

  If he were to seize Rose and carry her off, would he do it like a gorilla, simply violating her, and so subjecting her again to the role of victim? He searched himself, and tried to fend off the foolish images from the old movie, which was simply laughable in the situation. What was the way to treat horror in the movies and in life? The plain fact was that Rose had tried to kill herself in spite of her clear daylight desire to live. Treat horror comically, he thought; that is what they do. King Kong, Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s creation, the Addams cartoons, the Teen-Age Wolf Man, the Munsters, the sting drawn progressively with each step towards the trivial—the monster was really lovable and just like us. Mr. Munster had settled down and married the girl.

  And in a certain sense the monster was innocent, simply wishing to be left alone in his wilderness, idolized by pygmies, crushing a hostile tiger from time to time. Men from civilization had brutalized him, and half-consciously offered Fay Wray for the sacrifice. He laughed; there was no other way to take it. He stood up and unfolded the couch, revealing the crumpled bedclothes. Without pausing to straighten them, he undressed and fell on the bed, sleeping intermittently, with frequent disturbing dreams, until late afternoon.

  When he awoke, the first thing he did was look at the papers to see what was playing; then he looked at his watch, which had stopped. He considered going over to the Orpheum to see the new bill, and then decided that he might risk going a little farther downtown. Kiss Me, Stupid was playing as a revival at the York, only a few blocks from Rose’s house. He could risk it. He didn’t want to see her till he had something plain, truthful, and good, to tell her, give her, ask from her.

  My nerves never fail me, he thought gratefully, looking at his steady hands. Hunger doesn’t seem to affect me. Janine always used to make me eat, but I should have resisted the meal.

  He admired Billy Wilder immensely and hadn’t seen Kiss Me, Stupid when it was first released. He didn’t even know that the title was the tag line of a famous American sex joke. He went down to the York as innocently as could be, and what he saw when he got there intensified his depression and bewilderment terribly. He saw a story about a rich and famous lunatic satyriast, a rampant, eager cuckold, a wife who would comply with anyone for convenience or money, and a prostitute (but a nice girl really) called “the Pistol.” The whole conception oppressed him, it was so bitter.

  Once upon a time, this director had done light entertainment; later he had made Sunset Boulevard, a tale of murderous lunacy and fantastic self-deception. Finally he had added the lunacy and the self-deception to the recipe for light comedy, shaken well, omitted the murderous except here and there, and offered the result to his public, ostensibly as comedy: Some Like It Hot, Irma la Douce, The Apartment, and now this, and how should you react to this? He sat through the picture twice, marvelling at the technical dexterity, the way the director moved people through the principal set, from living room through bathroom to bedroom and back to bathroom. Wilder had chosen to spend thirty minutes showing the audience how easily he could have been a stage director if he’d wanted. Nothing to it, says Billy Wilder. No tricky angles, no stop-action gags, no overindulgence in low comedy close-ups, simply marvellously detailed black and white, and the unobtrusively speedy camera movement.

  Jean-Pierre found himself feeling pretty ashamed of the tricks he’d tried in comedy. He had parodied silent movies, used chases, wipes, iris-in, iris-out jokes, and in short had compiled a little anthology of tried-and-true devices. Wilder didn’t do that. He used no devices, or invented his own, and his camera was always working. When Felicia Farr walked away into the bathroom, the camera recorded the grain and feel of her slip over her hips and thighs with ferocious sensuality. It’s astonishing what can be done with black and white and gray.

  The movie was a drawn-out hymn to hatred, mutual contempt, and the use of other people as instruments for lust, conveniences. You use a woman as you do the toilet, to discharge offensive matter from your body, and you do this daily as a matter of necessity. There is some fleeting pleasure in the act, the excitement of two membranes brought together and rubbed, and that is all. Decent people. Decent music master, decent little wife, decent gas-station attendant, and Polly the Pistol.

  Smart talk, smart sex, smart low-cut cowboy costume barely retaining the star’s breasts, as a concession to decency. The prostitute is the good one, and all the rest are vapid brutes. If you sat too long over repeated screenings of this film, you would begin to feel profoundly unhappy. But nobody would do that, and Wilder knew it, and Jean-Pierre, and a few other people, not many. The movie had been damned when it came out, but afterwards played fairly successfully on its sex quotient. He got up to leave, feeling overstimulated and sick, and went out onto the sidewalk, where he paused and put his hand into his coat pocket. There were six small glossy shots of Rose in an envelope in his pocket, which he’d been carrying around for weeks; he’d begged them of her on a specious plea of research, but he really wanted them to gaze at lovingly when he was away from her. They were from each of the phases of her career, the dreadful ingénue, the clean-cut girl chum, the young married, and none of them were sex shots . . . he felt that he was getting closer to her.

  He leaned against the wall of the theatre, swallowed a mouthful of bile, remembered that he should eat. As he riffled through the pictures, he almost started towards her place, but restrained himself.

  “Why don’t you want to see me?” she’d demanded fearfully.

  “I want to think about you, to imagine you.”

  “You wouldn’t go away suddenly?”

  “I’ll see you in three weeks and I’ll have something definite for you, a story idea. I can do something with you. I want to do something for you. I want to decide what to do.’’

  “In the film?”

  “In both ways.”

  It was dark; he’d been in the theatre for five hours and had learned much, but not what he wanted. They meshed. Their needs and de
sires meshed too perfectly; she needed a director; he needed a star. He looked around him on the sidewalk and inadvertently swayed back on his heels, and a passer-by said suddenly, “What’s the matter, Mister, you sick?”

  “I’m all right, thank you,” he said, shrinking from the strange voice. I’m afraid, he thought, I’m afraid of this city. He hailed a cab and told the driver to take him through the park and up to Broadway and Ninety-fifth, to the Thalia, where Feu James Dean was showing for a single night as the last of a “Festival of French Film.”

  “You want out here?” the driver said at length. He sat up and saw that they were in front of the Thalia; the last show had started and the lights were dark, the box office closed and a single door open to admit late arrivals. He went into the theatre and an usher accosted him at the door.

  “The last show is on.”

  “That’s all right,” he said, feeling in his pocket for the price of the ticket. “I’ve seen this one before. How long has it been on?”

  “You’ve missed the first three sequences,” said the usher knowledgeably, taking the money. “There’s a single on the aisle, two rows down.” He pointed, and Jean-Pierre sank into the seat with relief and a sense of coming home.

  Even after ten years the soundtrack was very good, he thought. On the screen, a solitary bicyclist made his way across difficult roadless terrain, empty country, the haunt of many wild birds, and you could hear the birds’ cries very distinctly, an effect that everybody had used afterwards, wind, birdcalls, the crunch of the bicycle tires over stony ground. He recognized his aunt’s country with joy; he had spent his summer vacations there for more than twenty years. He remembered the excitement of making the picture, and the comradeship, mixed with almost intolerable tension, he had shared with Michel and Claude as they worked. They had counted so much on the picture, and later their hopes had been so generously fulfilled that the tension seemed in retrospect acutely agreeable.