by Dana Spiotta
She wasn’t in the right state of mind to see Carrie’s light comedy. She could feel her resistance, and she could see the setup for each joke, each pratfall, coming before it happened. It was, on its own terms, well done. Its ambition—to make a raunchy school comedy about women—was fully realized.
Meadow couldn’t wait until it finished and she slipped out before the end. She walked down the street and came to a stop. She turned back toward the theater. What was wrong with her? Why was she like this, so ungenerous? On a different day—or maybe a different time in her life—she would have laughed and gotten lost in the fun of Carrie’s film. Carrie’s perfect, playful comedy. Meadow stood there, unmoving, and lifted her glasses to wipe her eyes. Her stingy tears. What kind of person had she become, and why couldn’t she be better?
CARRIE GOES TO THE MOVIES
There were reasons, very reasonable reasons, they had not been as close. Meadow was hard to connect with on the phone, Meadow was cold sometimes, you had to be right in front of Meadow for her to engage with you. Some people were like that, but it just felt sad to realize that you hadn’t been in touch with your best friend, and in fact Carrie had closer friends if you looked at her current life. Carrie had heard nothing about Meadow’s new film until she got the invitation to the screening of Inward Operator. Carrie should have called more, but it was hard to keep up with anyone. She barely remembered to talk to Will on some days. Twelve-hour days in production. Nearly the same in postproduction. She now had a chance to make a big studio film with a real budget and well-known actors. She had been very busy, but she was determined to make it to Meadow’s screening and she did.
It was being shown as part of documentary film festival at the Walter Reade. The place was packed, and she didn’t see Meadow. Carrie sat in the dark, and she wondered if Meadow had seen her film, Girl School. She worried that Meadow had seen the film and didn’t like it, and that’s why she hadn’t talked to her about it. After all, it wasn’t Meadow’s kind of movie. But Carrie decided that Meadow was simply too busy to go see it, and eventually she would watch it and say something. The Inward Operator promotional sheet had some quotes from Meadow:
I had a formal problem right from the start. How to make a nonvisual story visual? I tried to find a way to make hearing—not seeing—the dominant sense of the film. To make the viewer listen, somehow. But by the end of the film, the power of the visual again overtakes us. The ending silent very long take of Nicole, for instance. This is Cesare Zavattini’s idea of remaining in a scene for the longest and truest duration
Carrie put it down without finishing. God! Meadow could be so pretentious sometimes. Carrie felt bad as soon as she thought that. And it wasn’t even accurate, was it? Meadow was not pretending, that wasn’t the right word. She was self-conscious and ambitious; she took herself very seriously and sometimes Carrie found it exhausting. Shouldn’t the work speak for itself? And yet there were lots of great filmmakers with manifestos. Essays and polemics. Why not Meadow? Why was Carrie so harsh on her?
The lights dimmed. So many times, in the dark waiting, and then the feeling when the music and the credits come up. This film, Meadow’s film, stayed dark after it began. A woman’s voice only, a beautiful woman’s voice and a black screen. My name is Amy, but I am also known as Jelly and Nicole.
The voice continues to tell her story and the screen stays dark. Carrie thought it looked very close, maybe too close, to the black-screen section of Meadow’s Kent State film. Why make a film if you are not using a visual? Why would Meadow want to cut off the most important sense element of cinema? But of course a black screen is a visual, isn’t it? As the woman’s voice explains phone phreaking, Meadow adds things: graphics of old phones and a series of tonal sounds. “I loved the phone. I mean, I could be myself on the phone, the self I really was, or ought to have been. I never thought of it as lying. Oz wanted the tones, the machine. I was always happy to reach an inward operator.” Then it returns to a black screen.
“What is that?” Meadow’s voice.
“People who can connect you to wherever you want to go; they are deep in the machine and essentially superoperators. I wanted to reach them because they were voices, humans, somewhere in the big wide world. Remember I was nearly sightless at the time. They talked to me from somewhere. I could be anyone and they could be anyone. A voice on the phone.
“After Oz and I broke up, after I was finished with phreaking, I moved into this small apartment by myself, where I have lived ever since 1973.”
Meadow kept withholding the image of the woman in the movie, “Nicole,” and yet Carrie still found it gripping. An occasional illuminated word from Nicole’s monologue interrupts the black screen and then fades like a firework, leaving a faint trail of itself. She talks about her life, her childhood, and how she lost her sight for a time. Still the film doesn’t show Nicole. A cityscape in black and white, Syracuse, presumably, with all its faded November bleakness.
“After the breakup, I recovered most of my sight, which was great. My pastime has always been watching movies. Even when I was mostly blind, I would try to watch movies—that’s how much I loved them.”
Now the film screen contains another film screen, like a movie theater, but the image is blurry, just moving shapes and colors.
“I listened and watched the blurs. Sometimes it felt like a hallucination, trying to fill in what I couldn’t see.”
A bright circle obscures the center of the same blurry image.
“Maybe it is like how the brain fills in our imperceptible blind spot, the part of all our eyes that actually has no photoreceptors. I looked at certain parts of the screen and imagined what else was there. It tricks you into thinking you see more than you do.”
The blurry film is slowed down until the images become stills and frame lines appear. Meadow’s voice speaks over the images. “All films are a kind of hallucination—the way we see twenty-four static images a minute as movement. The speed tricks the eye, and the eye fills in what is missing. The form constant delusion.” The images speed up and slowly come into focus. They are from Francis Coppola’s film The Conversation. Gene Hackman is destroying his apartment, looking for a microphone. Nicole’s voice is heard as Hackman methodically peels his wallpaper down.
“After Oz left, I went to the Cineplex all the time. I went through the TV Guide and I circled films I had to watch. I would stay up all night sometimes.” Now the images are of another film, black and white, what is it? Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7. “My other pastime was to call men and have conversations with them. More than a pastime. My vocation was calling men. You know that word, vocation, means a calling? Calling was my calling.”
“Strangers?”
“Yes, I had learned cold-calling from my sales job, but I did this for no real reason. Not money, anyway.” Her voice trails off. A close-up of stacks of cards by a phone. Then a close shot of a woman’s hand dialing, a little animation of phone lines across America. “One day an opportunity came up for me to combine my pastimes.”
Meadow’s camera moves slowly toward an artfully lit Rolodex. No shots of this woman. Soon, Carrie thought, she will have to show her.
The film cuts to the talking heads of the men. Three middle-aged guys, all successful in the entertainment business. All talking about this girl who called them, Nicole. Each one describes his phone connection in sequence, showing how Nicole used a kind of formula on the men. Through the manipulating of the men and the repetition of her technique, Nicole starts to emerge as a con artist.
The three of them talk about wondering what she looked like, even though they sensed an issue there. A black screen returns but with an intertitle: After weeks of being interviewed off camera, Nicole finally agreed to be filmed. Then a cut to the first full view of Nicole. She walks down the street with a small dog on a leash. She looks older than her voice and has a lumpy white body that wears its years heavily. Her blouse
is a little too tight, with slight gaps where her body strains between the buttons. Watching Nicole walk made Carrie feel weary. She could see where this was going. A clean cut to Nicole on her couch in a blue kimono, a more flattering view. She isn’t ugly at all, Carrie thought, and Meadow has lit her nicely. Her blond hair frames her face in fragile wisps, but the hair is styled, smooth. Her made-up face is round and clear, her eyes and her mouth are pretty in a puffy, tender way. She is a somewhat attractive, large-bodied fiftyish woman. But she is far from beautiful. As she talks, she becomes more lovely, her voice smooth and just on the edge of throaty. She laughs, and it is a delicate, soulful-sounding laugh.
“Jack was different for me, the last person I had a call”—she paused, looked around for a word, smiled—“thing with.”
Meadow’s voice from off camera. “What happened, why was Jack different?”
Another long pause. It was great the way Meadow let people pause, let them say nothing. And that she included her question in the film. Carrie hated when the pauses got cut out. “I really fell in love with Jack”—an L cut to Jack in his kitchen while Nicole talks—“and I think he fell in love with me. I mean, I know he did.” He is making some coffee with a French press. While he waits for the coffee, he lights a cigarette. The sound is now no longer Nicole’s voice. It is Jack lighting up. And having a coughing fit. He is also older, easily sixty. He has a full head of gray hair and wears a black sweater. He looks attractive in a dissipated way. Lots of wrinkles from smoking, a jawline weakened by age. He laughs at his coughing fit, then he talks about Nicole. He says it was a long time ago, but you can see he is still upset as he describes his attachment to her. He says he persuaded her to meet him. Meadow cuts to Nicole, who talks about how she sent a photo of her friend, which meant she could never meet Jack.
“Why didn’t you send a picture of yourself?”
“Look at me,” she said. “Do I look like anyone’s fantasy?”
“Why a fantasy?”
“Because that is what I enjoyed, imagining myself like that. It is for me as much as them.”
“But they don’t know that.” Another pause. She looks wavy, and her face colors. She looks a little emotional. Shamed. That’s the word. Carrie didn’t want Meadow to keep at Nicole.
“It was different with Jack. I let myself be myself more and more with him. Under different circumstances, we were very compatible.”
Now it is Jack’s turn: Meadow shows him in Malibu, walking on the beach. It interested Carrie, where the film was going, however obvious its point; how enslaved we are by our bodies, our selves concealed. How much are we our bodies? And why is it so different for women? Why is Nicole’s tumid, faded person so much less appealing than worn, old Jack? And it isn’t just success or money. It is men and women. Carrie felt a heat rise in her face.
Carrie was watching Meadow’s film, but she was also thinking about her own life, her own disappointing body. She was barely thirty-two, and already she could read it in the faces of the interesting men she met. She would be having a great conversation with another filmmaker. Someone her age, someone with a comparable amount of success. Not even actors, for god’s sake. Just male equivalents of her, people behind the camera and not built for glamour. And she would feel a rapport. Then they would say, I want you to meet my wife. Or, here is my girlfriend. And out she would come, so young and perfect. Breathtakingly attractive. Not stupid by any means. Full of admiration and adoration. Why should these men get it all? It was such a cliché. And what did Carrie get? A tired, frustrated husband she had no idea how to please anymore. Things were going so well for her, and yet she knew she was slowly losing him. Carrie’s eyes blurred.
Next, the film settles into a straight monologue from Jack that doesn’t get intercut with Nicole. Meadow’s presence is felt even though she doesn’t say anything; she is who he is talking to. The camera is Meadow, and the waiting is the question. One of Meadow’s favorite techniques.
Jack tells the story of being stood up by Nicole. He sits on his white couch. His legs are crossed and he lights a cigarette. “I’m over it now, but for years I tried to figure it out. I am not a player, you know? Not like a lot of men I know. I’m divorced, I work a lot. It’s an old story. Nicole listened to me, and I think I made her feel good. I liked that I could. I’m a little cynical and rough around the edges, but there was something about her voice on the phone. She didn’t interrupt me. She told me about her life, and I told her about mine. I wanted to meet her. Actually, I wanted to be with her. Change my life, whatever it took. I never felt that way before.”
A pause and Jack’s eyes look to the side, then back to the camera.
“I thought she was a student at Syracuse University, interested in the film industry. I think I thought she grew up here—she seemed to know everyone. I don’t know—there wasn’t a lot of backstory with details. She elided details; we talked about movies and music. Our childhoods. She was very intelligent and kind.” He shrugs. “Okay, kind until the end when she stood me up and disappeared.”
Jack lights a cigarette, sighs, and exhales. “I wanted to meet her in person. She seemed to want to meet me. She sent me these photos of herself.” Now Meadow finally cuts away and old snapshots fill the screen: a beautiful woman in a bathing suit, clearly not Nicole, not even young Nicole.
Meadow’s voice says, “Were you pleased with the way she looks in the photos?”
“I was, but I wasn’t surprised. I could tell from how she sounded on the phone that she was an exceptional girl. I mean, she was very young for me, I know it would make me seem like a cliché, but I didn’t care what anyone thought. I loved her. I thought, maybe this is an old photo, but she said no, it was recent. Why would I disbelieve it?” He puts out his cigarette. “It isn’t much of a story from here on out.”
Jack is smiling, but you can hear the edge creeping into the tone of his voice.
“I bought her a first-class plane ticket—and I am a pretty frugal guy, so I had never done anything like that. I was really infatuated with Nicole. Wanted her to feel loved when she got on the plane. It was all set. I spoke to her the night before, nothing odd about it, no cryptic hints. I drove to LAX, with fucking flowers in my hand and a sign, just as we had discussed. I planned a dinner at my house; I was never happier than when I bought the food for that dinner. Lots of women walked right past me. None of them looked like Nicole. None of them looked at my sign. I stood there, stupidly, ridiculously for an hour. I asked if everyone was off the plane. They were. I asked if Nicole Lamphor was on the plane. She was a no-show. I tried calling her from a pay phone. No answer. No answering machine. It rang and rang.”
“What did you think happened?”
“At first I worried that maybe there was an accident.”
Following Jack is Nicole’s version of the same story, also a monologue. She tells her side of it. “I made the plan thinking I would go. I wanted to go. I had fantasized about him, about that house by the beach. Of making dinner together and sleeping in the same bed and not being so alone. Of sex and affection. Of belonging. But I couldn’t do it. I even took the bus to the airport. When the bus pulled up, I didn’t move. I stayed there until the bus headed back out, away from the airport.” Nicole wipes her eyes with her hand. “I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t face it.”
“What?”
“That I lied and he wouldn’t understand. That I was unlovable, deep down. It was not a nice thing. It was mean what I did. I stopped calling and I stopped returning his calls. I just cut it off.”
She pauses.
“I had nothing to say. I let it go too far. Of all the men I called on the phone, he was the only one I ever considered meeting. But they all ended the same way: me cutting them off.”
The next section, somewhat predictably, consists of Meadow arranging for them to meet.
“What if I told you she would be willing to meet you in pe
rson, now?”
Jack shakes his head. He turns away from the camera. He puts his hand in front of his eyes. He collects himself. Shakes his head. Then he looks at the camera/Meadow.
“I miss her so much. Still. It is pathetic.”
“That isn’t her in those photos.”
Jack nods, resigned. “Yeah. Of course not.”
“You still want to meet her?”
“I do.”
Nicole is getting ready. Carrie was already cringing. Why would Meadow do this to these people? Why would they go along with it?
Meadow shows Jack waiting at a diner table. There is no sound from the scene, only music: low, steady, minimalist pulses. Nicole walks in. Her face already looks broken. She is trembling as she approaches the table. The camera moves into a medium shot as they meet, and the ominous pulsing gets louder. Clearly it is a disaster. Jack’s face when he sees Nicole; then Nicole’s face when she sees Jack. They sit at the table. He is speaking but still the only sound is the loud, oppressive music.
The next scene has the sound of Jack talking over images of Nicole at home by herself, looking particularly solitary as she feeds her dog and then sits on her couch.
“She lied to me, and she manipulated me,” he says as the camera stays on her. “I never cared what she looked like.” A cut back to him, smoking. “I didn’t realize it until she was in front of me, but it was all a lie. Not just what she looked like or her age. I am glad I finally met her, because now I can see it was all a trick. I can’t have feelings for her if there is no her. How can I know if any of it—of her—was real? I trusted her.” He is very upset. Then back to Nicole, looking awkward on her couch. Her face looks so blank, she is obviously waiting for the filming to start. Meadow has started filming Nicole without her realizing it. Carrie knew that everyone looked peculiar if filmed before the person thinks the camera is turned on. Using it was a bit manipulative. Carrie watched Nicole sitting there as Jack’s voice says, “Why did she do it to me?”