by Mark Foss
To amplify the generic nature of the sex, each encounter the draft dodger has with throwaway lovers is filmed with discarded clothes in the foreground, lingering on designer labels while bodies thrash it out in the background. The sex scenes with Molly O, by contrast, are imaginatively presented; the body parts are equally obscured, but the observant viewer can pick out some object — a lamp, a rug, a hammer — that the auctioneer’s daughter had been holding up for inspection. An auction is no idle choice since it’s all about buying and selling commodities with the escalating bids mimicking the sexual act.
In the penultimate coupling, the draft dodger is licking Liberty Bell stamps and sticking them all over Molly O’s body — on banal parts, as well as erogenous zones, making the viewer question why nipples are any more erotic than knuckles. Yes, the Liberty Bell is “cracked,” but Nailand has enough taste not to make any visual puns to remind us.
“I will bring you to the Land of the Free!” mouths the draft dodger. Molly O’s body vibrates from his attentions, either out of sexual arousal or in response to the sound waves of all those Liberty Bells ringing on her skin.
“More!” she silently mouths, and we’re left to wonder if she wants to be stamped for sexual titillation or to secure passage back to the United States. With the final stamps, he strings five bells across Molly O’s lips, and her muffled protest — playfully rendered onomatopoetically in the inter-titles as Whmmhhh thmmmm fummmm? — reveals his true intentions. The draft dodger, fleeing the imperialist politics of his own country, blithely imposes his own brand of democracy on “the other.” Molly O, refusing to be silenced by this patriarchal nationalism, rips the stamps off her mouth.
“No good here,” she mouths. Is she condemning the intrusive foreigner in her midst? Criticizing her home and native land? Or wryly informing her arrogant lover that US stamps are not accepted in Canada?
With her father and the Mounties closing in on them, the two flee the country, crossing the border by boat in the dead of night. In a hyper-real climax that only underscores their futile predicament, Nailand leaves them in an abandoned house in northern New York State with a full refrigerator, a warm fire crackling, and American hundred-dollar bills stuffed into the cracks of the windows to stop the draft. It’s a perfect ending, although the sentimental among us might long for an echo of Daddy Long Legs, a return to the auctioneer alone on the stage, bereft at the loss of his daughter and extraordinary assistant.
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14
THE THREE OF US TRAVELLED in singular orbits, rarely crossing each other’s path. Candy continued her triumphant appearances twice a week on our backyard stage with Rox aiding and abetting, while I handled administrative tasks. With her increased confidence, Candy became more reclusive than ever, taking trays of food to the bedroom for Rox and herself. I imagined they planned the next day’s wardrobe, either for school or the stage. Their secret world on the other side of the bedroom wall no longer enticed me. By grade thirteen, I stopped following Candy’s trail in the school corridors and fuming silently at her exalted status on the auction stage. Let her model those ratty faux-fox stoles: I took my life back, and was grateful, not resentful, that she was distracting Joseph. Yes, he depended on Candy, but he belatedly recognized the need for a successor. Too late. I was bound for university in the fall, while Hoss, two years out of school, had left the auction world long behind. He drifted from job to job, taking on anything that demanded gloves to protect his hands. Nothing stuck. Like those losers in Goin’ Down the Road, he threw out junk mail flyers instead of troubling to deliver them. In his new job, he tossed dynamite-shaped bundles of trees over the fence instead of planting them. He rested his aching back in bed, toking to early Genesis in headphones while I typed up an essay. He never recovered from the release of the band’s Abacab album. Having discovered prog rock after its best-before date, Hoss was increasingly morose that its peak years had passed him by. It was impossible to find a piece longer than eight minutes, and there were no concept albums in sight. Yes reunited, but they went commercial. Jethro Tull went techno with Ian Anderson’s flute buried under a million samples. Only the polyrhythmic sounds of the reformed King Crimson expanded the progressive vocabulary, and rumour had it they were breaking up again. Nothing stayed the same.
CANDY'S TELEGRAPHIC NOTE on the blackboard — “Rx. Later” — was nothing unusual, except she usually just wrote “R.” It was only as the auction neared that we discovered she had not been at Rox’s house that day. I peeked into Candy’s bedroom, half-hoping to find her silently choosing a persona for the evening performance. There was no scowl to shoo me away, no fingers pushing against my back, no slammed door in my face.
Alone on the stage for the first time in years, Joseph tripped over words. He lowered the price rather than driving it up. He missed the most blatant signals for bids from patrons. Auction-goers, so used to Candy’s presence to liven up the endless parade of appliances, tools, and furniture, left early.
Well-versed in protocol from The Rockford Files and Cannon, Joseph waited twenty-four hours before contacting police to report Candy missing. He didn’t believe she was gone. Joseph and I sat in front of the Predicta, feigning calm while ready to pounce on the telephone and the mailbox for news. All we got was an update from Hoss, who was in England in search of the lost chord of prog rock. Like Peter Gabriel, he wanted to feel his heart go boom-boom-boom. Except he’d confused Solsbury Hill with Salisbury Plain, and ended up at Stonehenge. I wanted news of Candy, and all I got was a bunch of rocks.
A week into her disappearance, all semblance of my inner calm was shattered. Payback for an entire year of thinking I had a life of my own. Joseph buried himself in work, but I quit my summer job as a lifeguard before it began. To hell with all those kids. If anyone needed saving, it was Candy.
I bought a staple gun for hydro poles, thumbtacks for community billboards in grocery stores, and cellophane tape for bathroom walls and stalls. Wearing a makeshift holster, I walked the streets with a grim countenance, thin-lipped, ready to draw my gun quickly. I affixed my Missing Sister poster to attract the best walk-by traffic, plastering my crisp, brightly coloured paper over the wrinkled and faded appeals for long-lost pets. I wanted to believe my efforts were hardly worth the trouble, that I would be blessed with a briefly lost sister. Taking a cue from the descriptions of beloved family dogs, I wrote under Candy’s photo in block letters: Does not answer when called. No, Candy was loyal to no master or mistress except her artistic vision as Joseph’s star assistant; apparently, she has thrown that away.
I read once that a dog leashed outside a store feels abandoned, no matter how many times its owner returns a few minutes later. I felt that sickness in my gut every time I entered a store to find no one had pulled off a tag with my name and number. When Candy was not waiting outside for me, my inner knots pulled tighter. I jumped when the telephone rang. If the technology had been available, I should have insisted on an implant under Candy’s skin or set up an invisible security fence.
It all happened in June, two months before I left for university in Ottawa. Every morning I drove through surrounding villages to add more posters. These were bigger places, with two intersections and maybe a service station-cum-convenience store where a clergyman or gas jockey would notice a silent stranger. Afternoons, I checked the post office for responses to my classified ad offering a reward, and then scoured social notices in community newspapers for Candy Grant, daughter of Joseph and the late Mary Grant, left home silently, but sends word she is fine and will return at a propitious moment.
Evenings, I called Rox, who had a summer job dishing up hard ice cream in Spencerville, an ideal venue to gather intelligence on Candy. Our conversations were laced with tension from a mutual refusal to ask what we wanted to know. Her days were measured by how many kids inadvertently dislodged the top scoop with their tongues, sending it hurtling to the ground. She has a soft heart, and replaced the splattered ice cream on the sidewalk again
st the boss’s orders, blaming herself for not sufficiently securing the Tiger Stripes and Rocky Roads. Some kids wallowed in their misery even after the source of the pain had been removed. Recounting these incidents turned her voice licorice black, and I wiped the receiver on my shirt before it short-circuited from my sweat and her spittle.
She liked to end the call with something funny that happened. I would hang up, dissatisfied but relieved she hadn’t told me something I was unable to hear. In her three-inch heels, her loose Flapper-style skirt, and rouge applied liberally to both bare knees, Candy waited in line today behind whiny kids and short-tempered fathers with bellies protruding from vulgar t-shirts. She changed her mind at the counter, and while the rest of the customers sweated in the still humid air, a gentle breeze followed Candy, swishing her skirt as she sauntered off. I lay awake with these troubling fantasies, trying to push them aside with positive scenarios as sleep overtook me. Often I awoke, convinced that Candy was back, and it took a few blinks to separate fantasy from reality.
15
AMONG THE RUINS OF TINTAGEL Castle, ruminating on Rick Wakeman’s musical interpretation of King Arthur, Hoss met a cranial sacral therapist who introduced him to the pastoral sounds of an ex-Genesis guitarist. Lying on the massage table, endorphins released from the gentle pressure on his skull and then caressed by elegiac minor chords that conjure up wandering minstrels, Hoss got immediate, if short-lived, relief to his hands.
Back in the new world, he had barely touched down in the Wasteland before announcing his move out west. In Nelson, British Columbia, he planned to learn the art of hands-on healing while indulging in free-ranging pot. On August evenings, after another fruitless search of our environs, I watched silently as Hoss painstakingly transferred his prog LPs onto more portable cassettes. It was a delicate operation, not one to be disrupted by a pointless recap of where I hadn’t seen Candy.
For Hoss, our sister simply wised up to the constraints of small-town Ontario, and sought out a bigger canvas. Her disappearance was a sign of personal growth that should be celebrated. No doubt we would hear from her when she made good. Headlines. Reviews. Hoss told me all this while carefully folding his A Friend with Weed Is a Friend Indeed t-shirt into his backpack. On the eve of his departure, when he was almost out the door, I reached out desperately to hold him a half hour longer. But he had no time for a rerun of Taxi. His future awaited. Before bed, for consolation, I played his favourite Yes album — Close to the Edge — and pretended he was about to fall stoned off his bed in the dark. If I moved quickly, I could catch him.
It took all summer for me to see that maybe Hoss was right. Candy did not disappear to build a new life for herself in surrounding towns. She was after brighter lights. New York was too dramatic a leap. No one cared if you made it in Ottawa, but I was sure that was her first step. My four years in film studies gave me ample time to pick up her trail. I started spreading the news on campus and downtown, and then moved farther afield. No suburban neighbourhood was too upscale or skuzzy for my penetrating gaze and trusty staple gun. I staked out speech therapists, vintage clothing stores, my survey course on early cinema, anywhere that might have drawn Candy into the open.
Some of the Missing Sister posters in laundromats got marked up with moustaches, glasses, beards, eye patches. Exactly the way Candy would have laid waste to the cover of the weekly television guide to piss off Hoss. She was either sending me an encouraging sign or making herself more difficult to find. Apparently I had to earn the right to see her again through dogged pursuit. Lieutenant Gerard chasing Richard Kimble on The Fugitive did not have it this tough.
CANDY’S ABSENCE DREW larger crowds to the auctions. Some expected her to turn up, and wanted to be there for the big moment. I was one of them, sneaking down for Sunday evening auctions without telling Joseph. He had barely recovered his composure. Increasingly he lost control, conjuring up the Tone without warning. An edge of lament crept into his stream of words, an ache reminiscent of the saudade in Portuguese Fado songs. Faced with this projection of overwhelming longing for that which they’d never experienced, dealers who had thoroughly checked the box of Sorry in the preview now sensed the game was incomplete. As Joseph pitched jigsaw puzzles of the Priaia de Marinha in Portugal, older gentlemen who once took it on faith that no pieces were missing harboured doubts. They could not bear to recreate the scenes only to find holes in the boats or a broken sky. Soon they stopped coming altogether.
Those who showed up were increasingly indifferent. Joseph’s chant filled entirely with nonsense words. He drifted off for minutes at a time without touching down, losing track of the latest bid. Far from gently insistent and cajoling, his tone became self-questioning, self-mocking. Really, it seemed to say, who would give me five dollars for this?
One evening I hid in the barn to see how Joseph fared when the patrons left. At midnight, he set out through the field for the flat rock. He walked with singular purpose, paying no attention to the quicksand pits. I moved to the stage, transfixed by a mournful chant pouring into the heavens, a Tone that made the clouds part and a bright star appear. I crumbled to my knees, convinced I saw Mary materializing among the shadows beyond the rock. Or was it Candy? I wasn’t sure who Joseph was summoning, or who I wanted to see more.
Despite his passion for the mystical creatures that populated the prog-rock universe, and his fascination with auras and energy, Hoss had no patience for my reported sightings in the Wasteland. Living out west made his detachment from all things Candy all the easier. He urged me to say goodbye to the past, to accept facts, to embrace change. His new girlfriend was into Wicca, and could arrange a pagan blessing. We would stand in a circle where we faced the four directions with objects to represent earth, fire, air, and water. Place a photo of Candy on the altar, and call the elements to watch over us as we recite the incantations. More words. Maybe Candy left because we talked too much. Fending us off in the same house was no longer enough. Disappearance was the only choice, a natural extension of her silence.
Joseph stopped caring for his throat. Without hot tea and honey, it was often hoarse and ragged. He developed a persistent, hacking cough. I wondered if he screamed himself to sleep, alone in that house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dead land and live ghosts. Or was it the land that was alive, and Joseph who was becoming a ghost?
I CAME HOME the summer after my first year of university to help out with the auctions. Not to stand on the stage — no one could replace Candy — but to resume my childhood role as a lightning rod for grieving widows. Everyone knew our family history. Cradled by Joseph’s soothing voice and the tender echo of our misfortunes, these widows momentarily forgot their own losses. I came to see us as performing a valuable public service. Joseph himself teared up at how they identified with him. As he spoke about how life throws us for a loop, his voice quaked with ever-more emotion. My presence on these sales trips was too much for Joseph, reminding him about what had been taken and what he’d failed to cultivate in me. Instead, I made my old rounds through the neighbouring villages in case Candy had tired of the nation’s capital.
From Candy’s desk, which overlooks the Wasteland, I could hear Joseph wander around in the dark on the dead soil. In the same way a stroke causes some people to adopt foreign accents, the trauma of Candy’s disappearance caused Joseph to chant words from forgotten tongues. I heard the stamps and snorts of the neighbour’s horses, how they were drawn to the strange sounds. But it was the wind — a fierce, relentless wind — that chilled my blood. Each tone Joseph produced churned up another gust, which rattled the open window and blew Candy’s old papers on the floor. The house itself started to shake. Then silence.
I ran out back, behind the stage. The wind calmed. It was quiet. At the edge of the field, I peered into the darkness, childhood warnings rooting me in place. Joseph emerged a few yards to my left, humming, oblivious. For a second, as he passed under the light from the house, his face radiated inner contentment. Did I smell Tareyto
n cigarettes in the breeze? Or was that Candy on the rock, about to walk backwards again into our lives?
Molly O
The Seductive cinema of Mickey Nailand
Home Films Suppositions About Me
Backwards Walking
Posted by LJ
Each of Molly O’s films with Mickey Nailand has a signature moment where she is alone in a room: she undresses with her back to the camera, but stops abruptly, as if she senses someone watching. Finding no one, she continues, peeling off outer clothes until she stands in underwear and bra. Again she stops, but this time she “discovers” the camera. In the hands of a lesser director, the woman would collude with the audience, and begin a coy striptease. With Nailand, we get an icily defiant stare from the woman — a look that belittles us for watching. But the camera does not turn away. A battle of wills ensues: who will blink first? Molly O takes an aggressive stance, walking towards the camera, creating an extreme close-up that blurs her features. Whenever the camera tries to turn or pull back, she matches its moves. Then, her point proven, she comes into focus — not through the director’s manipulation of the camera, but rather through her stepping backwards into the room. She continues walking backwards, her gaze fixed on the camera, until she disappears through an open door behind her. Her ability to walk so effortlessly, so gracefully, without looking behind, reinforces just how firmly she remains in control of her body.