Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  The camera stays on blank, unaware Nicole, for an uncomfortable thirty seconds. Finally Nicole’s voice. “I did it for love.”

  The film ends.

  JELLY

  Jelly took the bus to New York City and then took another bus to her aunt’s house in New Jersey. The next morning she went back to the city and made her way to the theater in lower Manhattan where Inward Operator was playing. Jelly had ignored Meadow’s invitations to press events or screenings. But Jelly did, finally, want to see the film.

  She sat in the dark and looked at the huge screen with her huge face. And Jack.

  She watched Jack’s face when he first saw her. Meadow hadn’t recorded the sound in the conversation. It didn’t matter to Meadow what was said, but it mattered to Jelly. Jack said that he was glad to see her, to actually meet her, but he couldn’t get over how much she had lied to him. Worst of all was how she dropped him, cut him off. “I thought,” he said, “that you loved me.” Jelly didn’t know what to say. In the film, Jelly stares down at her hands.

  But now Jelly watched his face on the screen, looked for the disappointment and revulsion and all the things she feared. What she saw on Jack’s face was none of those things. She had missed it in the moment because she was so overwhelmed. It flashes across his face, a very specific expression. He is hurt. Stricken. As if someone has slapped him. And then it is all gone. The cynical old man takes over, and he appears cold and annoyed. Finally she looks up at him. What can’t be heard in the film is that she had then whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  All her life, Jelly loved and needed the calming dark of a movie theater. The way the shadows on the screen would make her forget she had a body, forget she was in a place. The way the movie light and sound swallowed her and let her lose herself. But not this time. To see herself, her tiny life blown up and public, ruined everything for her.

  Jelly’s face got hot and her breath stuck in her throat. Her eyes flooded and the images blurred. She closed her eyes and pressed her fists to her forehead until the knuckles made her head ache. She heard herself make a moan sound with exhaled air. She was not mad at Jack, but at herself and that woman Meadow. Why did she ever have to meet Jack? Why did she let Meadow talk her into it? She knew how to talk people into things, and yet she couldn’t defend herself.

  She opened her eyes and watched as long as she could, and then she abruptly stood up. She sidestepped, stumbling along the empty seats, until she reached the aisle. She looked away from the screen into the dark corner of the theater. She blinked, spotted the glowing light of the exit door, and headed toward it.

  PART THREE

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  WOMEN AND FILM

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  “HOW I BEGAN” INSTALLMENT #36: CARRIE WEXLER

  Prefatory note, 1/15/15: I have been reluctant to contribute to the Women and Film Series, even though I think it is a great resource for filmmakers. Of course no one can describe the single right trajectory for how to be an artist, but she can describe the history of her own project: who inspired her and what helped her (and what hurt her). My reluctance to do this myself was simply personal—I didn’t want to make something private public; I didn’t want people speculating and commenting. But the irony is that silence does not, in fact, protect you. People will publicly say what they think of you, will speculate and judge. I don’t mean to complain about it—it is part of what it means to have an audience, isn’t it? I don’t want to be defensive. I want to express my gratitude for all that I have. C. Wexler

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  My early films came out of attending NYU’s Tisch film school and the contacts I made there. I have benefited from the generosity of my professors, who are accomplished filmmakers, and for this I am eternally grateful. But all of that is known and well established. I want to tell a different origin story today, because I am convinced that your sensibility is formed at a much earlier stage. What comes later is a matter of determination and luck, but the details are prosaic and practical. The earlier sensibility is what makes you particular (and ambitious, I think).

  I grew up in Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s. I had a loving but chaotic childhood with a confusing amount of privilege and hardship. My parents divorced when I was eight, and we never had actual money. Nevertheless, we often lived as if we did. My father—who died several years ago—went through various forms of bankruptcy during my childhood, and my mother had a steady but low-paying job as an English and drama teacher, which required her to stay after school most days for rehearsals and theater club. I was an only child, so I spent many afternoons in the house alone. This was nothing unusual in the ’70s—everyone seemed to have divorced parents and working moms, and people thought nothing of letting kids be on their own for the hours after school until dinner. It was lonely but also full of freedom, which I largely used for watching TV and eating. Most days I watched TV for at least six hours. And this was in the bad old days, when television was truly awful: The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Donny and Marie. On the weekends it was Saturday-morning cartoons that were even worse: except for the bright spots of Warner Brothers, most of the animation was two-cell and rudimentary. It was Spider-Man and Super Friends and Josie and the Pussycats. I watched this stuff for years, and most of it I watched over and over. What we used to call, with an air of weary resignation, “reruns.” The only way I can explain just how much TV shaped my childhood is to give you a description of one of my days, which was also typical for me. A Tuesday, for example, when I was twelve, went like this:

  Get home and throw giant book bag on the kitchen table. Pour large glass of Tab and also consume a Cambridge or SlimFast powdered mix or whatever else we were “doing” this month (my mother and I were often on a fad diet—it was something we did together). Turn on TV. Wait—that was first, TV on with the volume way up so I could hear it in the kitchen as I mixed my snack. I watched old syndicated reruns after school. (Usually I watched The Odd Couple and Emergency!, but sometimes it was The Mod Squad or The Partridge Family.) At around five, I would pull out my homework as I continued to watch. At six I would stop because 1) my mom came home, 2) the news was on. I would go to my room, put on a record, and do more homework sitting on the floor. I might play with my dad’s video camera, or dance or even do some halfhearted sit-ups. Then dinner in front of the TV while Mom and I moved into Tuesday prime time: Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley. The world in half-hour increments and punctuated by an endless stream of repeated commercials. At nine o’clock it was more “adult” time, and I often read a book while looking up and following Three’s Company and Taxi. Here is the thing about this that amazes me: I did read and do my homework during this TV watching. Maybe because the shows were not demanding or engaging I could concentrate on what I was doing? The other thing that seems important to note is that I knew how bad, as in quality, a lot of this stuff was. I knew Three’s Company was stupid and not funny. I did not laugh with the fake laughter on the soundtrack. I watched a lot of situation comedies, but I don’t think I laughed much at all. I enjoyed watching it just the same. It was comforting, the TV itself, its familiar sound and its images. It made the house feel lively and comfortable. It was how I connected to the world outside my home. In those days everyone watched the same shows on the same days, so you could talk with your friends about what was on One Day at a Time or M*A*S*H. It was a continuous thread. So my generation (I was not unique!) was raised on some terrible TV, but with bright spots. Here is how I look at it now: the shitty stuff made you really appreciate the good things. When something good or interesting was on, it was like the world lit up with possibility, and then you trudged through the crap until you found the next good thing. I loved the reruns of I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show. To this day just the sound of those theme songs makes me happy in a small but deeply embedded way, almost a visceral response. I watc
hed those shows, and I would laugh, and the sound would surprise me and sound so different from the constant laughter on the TV speaker. It made me stop, self-conscious for a second, my own real laughter coming out of my mouth with the dusty haze of sun coming in streams through the drapes in the midst of my afternoon solitude. It is the only time I felt lonely, when I wished I had a little brother to catch the eye of and see if he was laughing too. There is some weird dynamic that happens when people laugh—like a usually suppressed secret about the silliness of the world is being blurted out, and you need someone to share it with you. You need someone to hear your laughter for it to work right. (Maybe that is why insanity seems to be exemplified by people laughing maniacally at their own private jokes.) But I was very drawn to things that really made me laugh. On the weekends I stayed up past 11:30 to watch Saturday Night Live—that was a big bright spot for me. I loved the adult jokes, the ones about sex or drugs that I didn’t really get, but I wanted to get. I would laugh along because I could feel the joke in my body, in the performers’ bodies, and in the sound of real live laughter. That was my modus in those days: laugh at the funny jokes even when you don’t get them. It is like a wish about your future. Part of the joy was staying up late, after my mom went to bed, for Saturday Night and, on Fridays, the Midnight Special. I had the TV Guide, and I circled all the shows I had to see. Who was on Dinah Shore or Mike Douglas, for instance. I circled movies I wanted to see too, but I wasn’t as into films at that point. I wish I could say I was devoted to film noir or that I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. to glimpse Johnny Guitar like some people, but I didn’t have much interest in old films then. I liked regular movies. I would circle The Parent Trap with Hayley Mills, or later watch edited-for-TV versions of dramas like The Turning Point, Julia, or An Unmarried Woman. I loved musicals—the classic MGM ones from the ’50s but even the lousy later ones from the ’60s. I loved the idea of feeling so strongly about something you would break out into a song and dance. But mostly my sensibility was being formed by all the bad TV that washed over me and created a constant hum of cliché and contrivance, ideas I could see even as a kid as shopworn and formulaic. But instead of this making my taste hackish, I think it made me hunger all the more for something different. It made me imagine what might be good or even better. What struck me through the noise of ads, processed TV, and dull fake laughter, what I hungered for, was something that surprised and delighted me. I was raised on a constant stream of uninspired images, but I was primed for something more than the dumb double entendres of Mr. Roper or the “awww” platitudes of One Day at a Time. And into this hunger came my first piece of luck at exactly the right time for me: when I was in ninth grade, I took an English class that included a lot of unusual films.

  One thing my mother’s teaching afforded us was free tuition at Wake School in Santa Monica—which is an arts-focused private high school. In those days it was a no-frills enterprise, simply an alley with prefab box classrooms on each side. But it had—and still has—extraordinary teachers. Attending Wake helped make me a filmmaker in a number of ways. [Editor’s note: Carrie Wexler has endowed fellowships for young women of limited means at a number of elite high schools across the country.] I had the great fortune to take a class from Jay Hosney, the (now-retired) legendary English and communications teacher. He never patronized us, and he taught challenging and important films. He showed us great silent films like Sunrise by Murnau and Joan of Arc by Dreyer. He showed us iconic American films of the ’40s and ’50s, not just film noir and Westerns, but the perverse women’s films of Douglas Sirk, which I loved because they seemed to both celebrate and subvert—in vibrant Technicolor—the consumer culture I recognized. He also had us watch European films like Persona, Bicycle Thieves, 8½, Jules and Jim. Of course we saw Breathless, but also Godard’s Week End, and let me tell you how much the world opens up to you when you “get” a cinematic joke that Godard has told. There is a moment in Week End in which the girl, Mireille Darc, stops at a car wreck and pulls designer jeans off a dead body. Laughing at this—as a young girl in Southern California—changed me. We were not Godard’s famous “children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” we were more like the children of TV and Tab, but in some of us grew a profound hunger for a funny and provocative joke, a want from the depths of our processed American childhoods. Finding humor in Godard worked for me like reading Mad magazine or watching the conceptual jokes of Monty Python, or collecting the satirized ads of Wacky Packages: a cynical, knowing joke was an inoculation against all the crap we still consumed, what we swam through every day. We reminded ourselves that it was bad and we knew it was bad, even as we were saturated in it. We forged a kind of default irony as a way of making meaning and authenticity. This sensibility is a hallmark of people of my generation, and Jay Hosney’s film classes gave me a way of looking at it all, an approach. Culture, then, became mine for the taking. I cannot explain what a gift it was to learn that at a young age. You waste no time feeling intimidated. You are in the know in a most empowering way. That is why comedies are so important to me: they are both in the culture and pointing at the culture. Mainstream and subversive, at least ideally. So school made a huge difference to me. But the other leg of my apprenticeship came from a friendship. My closest (if not best) friend in those years and for many years into my adulthood was Meadow Mori.

  I met Meadow at Wake School when we were both in eighth grade. When I saw her the first time, I thought she was older than I was: she wore stovepipe tight black jeans, black motorcycle boots, and a ribbed black turtleneck. She was slim and flat-chested, her brown hair cut in an asymmetrical bob, and she wore no makeup except dark red lipstick. She had a large, straight nose that gave her a defiant, anti-pretty edge. The look was a kind of ’60s beatnik variation of punk, which was a tremendous amount of glamour for a thirteen-­year-old. At the time I was still feathering my blond hair and wearing badly applied blue eyeliner. I bought too-tight jeans at Fred Segal and had them altered to cut close at my ankles (we all did), but I was too chubby to look good in them and I wore oversized men’s shirts to cover the bulge at my waist. Which probably made me look even fatter. I was uncomfortable and awkward in my body, and what impressed me most about Meadow was how confidently she inhabited herself. She glided into a room and every eye turned to her and she seemed unfazed by the attention. She fascinated me; I had one of those adolescent girl crushes on her, half admiration and half envy. I would have admired her from afar for years, but I had the dumb luck to be assigned a seat next to her in Jay Hosney’s ninth-grade honors English class. That first day, I was thrilled to see her up close in all her detail. She had ditched the black and now wore a white sleeveless shell shirt and white tailored capri pants tucked into flat-heeled ankle boots. She had applied a perfect cat eye with liquid eyeliner, and her lipstick was very pale. A sleek sex kitten, but modified by her muscled arms and her slightly butch attitude. I could not help sneaking glances to my left as she sat there. She smelled of cigarettes! So exciting. She caught me staring and I started to giggle, which is what I did—and still do—when I am nervous.

  “What?” Meadow said, but with more weariness than irritation. I was laugh-snorting, could barely speak. I caught my breath.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I like your outfit.”

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “I’m really into retro-slut,” I said, and barked out a dumb laugh. She rolled her eyes, but I could see she was laughing.

  “You are, huh?” Meadow looked me over in my oversized man shirt and my jeans so tight that when I bent my legs at the knee, skin pinched into the folds of the fabric. “What look are you going for?”

  “Fat and poor,” I said. She gave out a guffaw at that, a sound that betrayed her surface cool. We had that in common: loud, awkward, unladylike laughs. She smiled broadly and her wide mouth softened her hard edge. She was—and is—a seductive person.

  That day, when class was over, she invited me to her place after school. Of course I sa
id yes, what would I miss? My TV and my Slim Fast? But first she suggested we ditch last period. We walked to Lucy’s, the cheap taco stand behind the alley, and ate greasy quesadillas wrapped in foil. We decided to walk over to the Santa Monica Pier to get coffees, and then I watched her roll and smoke a cigarette. I remember watching her smoke and knowing somehow that my adult life was beginning and she would be the key to it. I truly could not have been more impressed.

  We ate ice creams to get rid of the cigarette breath and made it back to campus in time for her mother to pick us up in her big green Mercedes. The car had a burled wood and tan interior with a creamy leather smell: so different from my mother’s old Honda Civic’s reek of french fries and stale candy corn.

  Her house in Bel-Air was extremely lavish compared to our little rented house in Santa Monica, but I was used to that. Everyone at Wake School had money except for me and a few other scholarship kids. Her wealth was merely typical in that world. But what did strike me was her collection of books and records. She was, it turned out, brilliant on top of stylish and beautiful. I have to admit that I thought for a second that it wasn’t quite fair. Meadow had everything. But I stopped myself and just thought, She wants to be friends with me, which felt very good. We sat on the floor of her room and listened to Talking Heads: 77, which I also owned. We all bought that record. In those days, whether it was jeans or records, the whole class acted in unison: the same records in every collection with a few variations. But here is where Meadow began to change me. Instead of watching TV, she suggested we make a movie. She had a Super 8 camera and actual black-and-white film, which was rare. She wanted us to film each other in the canyon behind the house. And we did, first Meadow directing me as I walked through the shrub and rocks.