Zeroville

by Steve Erickson

  “Where?”

  “Please do not talk.”

  146.

  Soon he feels the car come to a stop. All the doors open and someone pulls Vikar out of the backseat. Led blindfolded for several minutes, at one point Vikar trips and two men catch him and pull him to his feet.

  They stop and there’s the metal creak of an opening door. “There is a step here,” someone says. Vikar lifts his feet to step inside the door, which he hears pulled closed behind him.

  147.

  Vikar assumes he’s been arrested by the same officials who interrogated him in customs when he entered the country. When the blindfold is taken off, he expects to see the fan of Miss Natalie Wood waiting for him.

  Instead he’s in some sort of warehouse. On the far side is what appears to be a makeshift soundstage with a bed, and in one corner a particularly old moviola. Lined against the wall are a dozen guns and rifles and rounds of ammunition.

  There’s also a small screen and projector with a low table nearby and someone sitting on a stool watching a movie. Vikar looks around him; one of the men, his driver, holds several film canisters. The other men wear rifles on their shoulder or guns in their belts. The figure on the stool doesn’t turn to look at Vikar but continues watching the movie.

  148.

  When the man on the stool turns from the movie to Vikar, he doesn’t look like a policeman or customs official.

  He’s slight in stature, dark, in his late twenties. He wears dark pants and combat boots and a kind of workshirt; a scarf is tied around his neck. On the table next to the stool where the man sits, next to a bottle of wine and several glasses, Vikar sees a military issue .45.

  The man on the stool notes Vikar’s bound hands. “Untie his hands,” he says to the other men. He says to Vikar, “I apologize for the ropes. Please,” and indicates another nearby stool for Vikar to sit. He turns his attention back to the movie, and together the two men watch.

  149.

  The movie is about a young bride who travels to Thailand to be with her French diplomat husband. Among the embassy’s aristocratic females, the bride has a number of sexual relationships, then is sent by her husband to be trained by an older man in the art of sexual submission.

  Vikar believes that the young woman is very attractive but perhaps the movie is not so good. “This film is not allowed in my country,” the man on the stool says to Vikar. “You know of this actress?” Over the man’s shoulder, Vikar watches the driver of his car set the film cans on the editing table.

  “No.”

  “Miss Sylvia Kristel,” the man says, as though this explains everything.

  “Is she French?”

  “The film is French. She is …” he thinks, “… Dutch, I believe.”

  150.

  They watch awhile longer, the man riveted by the Dutch actress. Then he reaches over and turns off the projector. He says, “You are Señor … Vicar? How do you say it?”

  “Vikar.”

  “Like a church name.”

  “With a k.”

  This isn’t altogether clear to the other man but he says, “I am Cooper Léon. Are you hungry?”

  “No, thank you.” There are seven or eight men besides Cooper Léon. One is an older man who sits on the soundstage bed smiling at Vikar, and who appears to Vikar to be wearing some sort of military costume and make-up, although from the distance Vikar can’t be sure.

  “Have a little wine,” says Cooper Léon, who takes the bottle from next to the pistol on the table and pours a glass and hands it to Vikar. “Of course Cooper Léon,” says the man, “may not be my real name. Or it might. It might be that my parents really did name me after Gary Cooper who fought for the Republic in For Whom the Bell Tolls. If that is so, then it places you in a potentially untenable position, since I have told to you my real name.”

  “But it might not be your real name,” says Vikar.

  “Exactly. It is as with the chamber of a gun that may or may not have a bullet in it. But the larger point is that if you cooperate, you will be all right in either case and it will not matter if it is my real name.” Cooper Léon says, “Do you know who we are?”

  “No.”

  “We are the Soldiers of Viridiana.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “We are the resistance to the fascist assassin the Generalissimo.”

  “The man who’s dying?”

  “Ah.” Cooper Léon is pleased. “Gracias. We arrive at the heart of the conversation without further preliminaries.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Dying is not dead, this is the mournful truth of our situation. The assassin dies and dies and dies and dies, it goes on and on and on and on, which is to say he lives and lives and lives and lives. It is a tedious thing.”

  Vikar says, “He should die more quickly.”

  “He should die NOW!” Cooper Léon roars in Vikar’s face, then pulls back, hands raised. “You see?” he waves to the men around him, then places his hand on his chest. “It unsettles us. It unsettles all of Spain.” He pours himself more wine and stares at the blank movie screen, lost in thought.

  151.

  Cooper Léon says, “What is cinema, Señor Vicar?”

  “What?”

  “What is cinema? Cinema,” he answers himself, “is metaphor.” He looks at his men around him to gauge the awe with which this insight has been received. “Cinema is metaphor, and this is one of the things that cinema has in common with politics, which often is metaphor as well. The assassin the Generalissimo, it is no longer a question of his power. He is dying, and in his dying he has no true practical power anymore. Slow but sure the country rustles itself to freedom and justice. On the Fuencarral by your hotel, for instance, you have recently noticed more women of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is what I mean.”

  Vikar considers the political implications of the women he has seen on the Fuencarral.

  “But in his unseemly insistence on continuing to live, the assassin the Generalissimo holds another kind of power over the minds of the countrymen he has oppressed for more than thirty-five years. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “No.”

  152.

  Cooper Léon waves it away. “It is of no matter,” he says. “We are going to make a film about the death of the assassin the Generalissimo.”

  “The one who hasn’t died.”

  “That is why we make the film. Cinema is metaphor, and when politics is metaphor as well, then cinema is guerrilla action. So that although the assassin may live another thirty-five years, he will die in the imaginations of the people, which is what matters. I am certain you understand.” Vikar doesn’t understand. Cooper Léon indicates the old man sitting on the bed on the soundstage. “My papa here, he is playing the assassin the Generalissimo. You will direct the scene.”

  “I’m not a director.”

  “You will direct the scene, and then you will put the film together with what we have filmed, and with documentary footage we have gathered of the assassin the Generalissimo over the last thirty-five years, and with what you have cut from the film that you have been working on in Madrid.”

  Vikar looks at the soundstage and the little old man, and looks at the cans of film that his driver has placed on the far editing table. “Those,” he says to the canisters, “are what I’ve cut from Viking Man’s movie?”

  “Who is this viking?”

  “That is footage from the movie I’ve been cutting?”

  “Some is other footage, as I said. As well,” he adds, patting the projector, “we might put in some of this film.”

  Vikar looks at the projector. “The French movie starring the naked Dutch actress?”

  Cooper Léon frowns. “I have to consider this. I have to consider whether it is proper to sacrifice this film for this purpose. Perhaps some parts of this film that are not as,” he’s at a loss for the precise word, “stirring. If you cut someth
ing from this film,” patting the projector again, “you can put back together what is left?”

  “I can splice it,” says Vikar.

  “That is it,” Cooper Léon points at Vikar triumphantly, “splice!”

  “You want to make a movie of your father,” says Vikar, looking at the little old man on the set, “and Viking Man’s movie and old documentaries and the movie with the naked Dutch actress?”

  “You keep saying this viking.”

  Vikar says, “I don’t believe I can make this movie you want.”

  Cooper Léon’s face goes cold. “This has been a civil conversation, has it not?”

  “I’m very busy with the other movie.”

  “It has been a pleasant conversation, no?”

  “All right.”

  “Let us not be uncivil. Let us not be unpleasant. You will do this.”

  Vikar looks at the .45 on the table and at the stage behind Cooper Léon.

  “Pablo,” Cooper Léon calls. One of the other men raises a handheld camera.

  “Viking Man’s movie,” Vikar nods at the cans of film on the editing table, “is about long ago. It’s about the desert and people who ride horses and wear robes and have swords. I don’t believe,” he says, “your movie is going to make sense.”

  Cooper Léon smiles, having anticipated this objection. “Señor,” he says, “do you know of Buñuel?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is known in your country?”

  “People who know about movies know about him.”

  “He is considered a good director?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your great American novelist Henry Miller said, ‘They call Buñuel many things but they do not call him a lunatic.’ Señor Vicar, have you seen a film by Buñuel that makes sense?”

  “No. I believe the movie of Catherine Deneuve getting splattered with mud is a very good movie.”

  “That is my favorite as well,” Cooper Léon nods. “The mud splattering especially.”

  153.

  Vikar says, “Do you know Buñuel yourself?”

  “This is what I have just said.”

  “I mean, do you know Buñuel?”

  “You mean Buñuel the man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Buñuel has not been in Spain a long time.”

  “Do you know his daughter?”

  “I know of no daughter. I know he has sons.”

  “No daughter?”

  “If Buñuel had a daughter, would he not acknowledge it?”

  “You would be surprised,” says Vikar, “what fathers do to their children.”

  154.

  The car returns Vikar to his hotel where he sleeps three hours, then rises to find the car waiting to take him to the cutting room where he edits Viking Man’s movie. Every night the car picks up Vikar from the cutting room; three or four other men are always in the car, where Vikar is blindfolded but his hands are no longer bound. By night Vikar “directs” the death of the Generalissimo, starring Cooper Léon’s papa. By day he cuts Viking Man’s Barbary pirate movie.

  155.

  As the Generalissimo’s death is filmed, one of the Soldiers of Viridiana cooks what the men call the “Basque Breakfast”—although it’s the middle of the night—a hash of fried eggs, potatoes, onions and chopped tomatoes. It becomes the one thing Vikar looks forward to, eating it out of the skillet with the other men and drinking it down with Spanish red wine.

  Pablo with the handheld camera shoots the Generalissimo’s death scene from every angle. For the “lights” on the makeshift soundstage, three stainless-steel standing floor lamps that twist into shapes appear to have been liberated from a gynecologist’s office. Cooper Léon’s papa is lit and shot in every position that might conceivably suggest a dictator on the verge of death. Vikar shoots and shoots night after night because, first of all, he has heard that when a director has no idea what he’s doing, he should shoot as much film as possible, and because, second, he’s trying to prolong the filming so that he might finish Viking Man’s movie first and slip out of the country.

  “Perhaps you should moan,” Vikar suggests to Cooper Léon’s papa during filming. For a “soundstage,” the set is remarkably absent of any kind of sound equipment—perhaps, Vikar believes, because it’s the style of European filmmaking to dub in the sound later. Nonetheless Vikar also believes Cooper Léon’s papa should moan even if no one can hear it; the camera will hear it. These directions are translated to Cooper Léon’s papa and he moans. I don’t believe it’s a very good moan, Vikar thinks. But perhaps this is the way they moan in Spain when they’re dying. “Perhaps,” Vikar says to the translator, reconsidering, “he should not moan,” and Cooper Léon’s papa stops moaning.

  156.

  Two weeks pass. Cutting Viking Man’s movie by day and the movie for the Soldiers of Viridiana by night, Vikar feels not only his eyes going but whatever distinctions onto which he’s been able to hold. In Cooper Léon’s movie, Vikar intercuts footage of Cooper Léon’s papa in bed with the old documentary footage of the Generalissimo and left-over shards of Viking Man’s movie, to show the Generalissimo flooded by memories and strange dreams as he dies. Bits of the sequence in Viking Man’s movie where the Berber chieftain chops off the thief’s head become a dream in which the Generalissimo as a child has his own head chopped off by his father, dressed in the black robes of death.

  Vikar believes perhaps the movie doesn’t look so much like Buñuel. He’s also not certain how Viking Man would feel about some of his movie making its way into a movie by the Soldiers of Viridiana. Cooper Léon insists that a bit of the French movie with the naked Dutch actress should be included, preferably some stray moment from the film’s “most superb scene” where the young bride is raped in an opium den. At the same time, Cooper Léon doesn’t want his print of the French movie too violated; Vikar decides to surgically remove a single frame from the opium den scene and drop it into the Generalissimo movie. He feels a bit like God doing this, sending a clandestine message to anyone who sees the movie. “But no one will see only a single frame,” Cooper Léon protests.

  “They will not see it but they will,” says Vikar.

  Cooper Léon’s eyes narrow. “They will not see it but they will,” he repeats slowly, then again, “they will not see it but they will! It is like a secret weapon, then, that explodes in the imagination of the viewer!”

  “Yes.”

  Cooper Léon looks at Vikar and his eyes glisten. “You are a man of vision,” he declares quietly.

  “Uh.”

  “Spain is fortunate you were sent in this trying hour.”

  157.

  Editing the death of the Generalissimo, Vikar notices that in scenes shot from one side Cooper Léon’s papa is not ominous in the least, but that in scenes shot from the other side, a menace presents itself that was unseen either on the stage or in the camera’s lens. It’s as though one profile of the old man is possessed in a way that only film captures. He uses all the footage from the menacing profile and rejects the rest.

  158.

  One night, after sleepless nights and days of Vikar working on both movies, the car that always waits for him isn’t there.

  Vikar gets a taxi back to his hotel. The next morning at the hotel, the car still isn’t there, nor that night, nor the next morning and night. It never appears again. The driver never returns, and no one brings Vikar lunch.

  Sitting at the window of his hotel room one night, Vikar notes out of the corner of his eye the mirror over the bathroom sink, and in it his reflection.

  159.

  Looking at his reflection in the mirror, Vikar thinks about the scenes of Cooper Léon’s papa and how by cutting to someone’s right or left profile in the editing, he can expose something. He can expose the side of the person that’s true and the side that’s false. He can expose the side that’s good and the side that’s evil.

  160.

  He can—he’s still thinking to himself a week l
ater, on the plane home—expose the side that punishes and the side that receives, the side that dominates and the side that submits. It’s different with each person and each profile: what’s represented by one actor’s right might be represented by another’s left. George Stevens understood this in A Place in the Sun; Vikar remembers what Dotty said about the close-ups of Taylor and Clift on the terrace, how Stevens had no regard for continuity in cutting from one profile to the other. As Vikar begins to decipher which profile is which—although he can’t articulate it to himself let alone anyone else—a new visual vocabulary of meaning becomes available to him.

  161.

  Variety, January 5, 1976: “LOS ANGELES—Long-time motion-picture veteran Dorothy Langer is leaving the studio after more than 25 years as editor and vice president, effective immediately, it was announced today by Paramount Pictures. Neither Ms. Langer nor a spokesman for the studio could be reached for comment.”

  162.

  Back in Los Angeles, Vikar goes by Dotty’s office on the chance she’s still there. He tries phoning her once, to no answer.

  Over the coming weeks and months, he walks out to the Paramount Gate looking for Soledad against the fountain, arms folded. He searches everywhere and asks anyone who might know her; he calls information over and over for her number, but there never is one.

  163.

  Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well. Penn’s Night Moves. Warhol’s Heat. Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales. Meyer’s Up! Sarre’s The Death of Marat. Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. In The Story of Adele H, the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century author falls in love with a soldier. She follows the soldier from France to Nova Scotia and haunts the streets of Halifax looking for him; everything she believes or has believed has collapsed into his form. She is Joan of Arc but without a god; she becomes so pure in her crusade that, by the end of the movie, the soldier himself means nothing to her and is unrecognizable to her. She’s beyond love, beyond the pettiness of her own heart; she’s beyond God. By the end of the movie, she’s gone somewhere God can’t reach her.