I point out that there are wonderful, artful things to look for in the movie. Look at the way the film shows the empty train tracks. We see them again and again. It’s a wordless, eventless way of creating a sense of danger. Each time we see those tracks we are reminded that it is from that direction which evil will come. Same thing for the clocks. Tick, tick, tick, tick. They even slow down as the hour of noon approaches.
And then there is Cary Cooper. Actors who worked with him were often surprised at how little he did during a scene. It seemed as if he hardly “acted,” hardly did anything at all. But when you see his performance onscreen, it pushes everybody else into the background. Actors saw their performances disappear into a blur around him.
“Watch where your eye goes during his scenes,” I told Jesse. “Imagine being a fellow actor and trying to compete with that.”
Just so we didn’t get too lofty-minded, I showed him Internal Affairs (1990), a nasty piece of fun, indeed. Richard Gere plays a corrupt cop. When an unstable fellow officer (William Baldwin) is called to testify, we see just how magnificent a villain Gere can create. (Better than his leading man.) With those small eyes, this is Iago on the LAPD. Gere’s stillness—and the moral self-possession it suggests— is hypnotically attractive. You understand how his character holds on to even his ex-wife. And how, if he feels threatened, nothing is beneath him. I ask Jesse to watch for the scene where, with just a few sentences delivered in an offhand, even amused way, he cranks up the sexual horror in the imagination of Andy Garcia, the officer assigned to investigate him.
“Don’t be fooled by his smug good looks, or his talk-show philosophizing,” I said. “Richard Gere is the real thing.”
We turn to David Cronenberg’s Dead Zone (1983). Christopher Walken as a lonely psychic; so sad; a true prince of stillness. Then The Godfather: Part II (1974). What can you say about “Big Al” Pacino? He has the poised, “held-in” feel of a moray eel at the mouth of a cave. Wait for that gorgeous scene with a senator who misses the significance of Pacino’s second, lower offer for a casino licence.
I showed Bullitt (1968); it came out nearly forty years ago but still has the authority of stainless steel. With a blue-eyed Steve McQueen never handsomer. McQueen was an actor who understood the value of doing very little; he listens with the titillating stillness of the great leading man. I dug up from the basement an old interview with the chatty Canadian director Norman Jewison, who made three films with McQueen.
“Steve wasn’t the kind of actor who could stand onstage with a chair and entertain you,” Jewison said. “He was a movie actor. He loved the camera and it loved him back. He was always real, partly because he was always playing himself. He never minded if you took a line away from him. Just as long as the camera was on him he was happy because he understood that it was a visual medium.”
McQueen had a difficult life. He spent a couple of years in a juvenile home for delinquent boys. After a stint with the Marines, he drifted to New York and took some acting classes. In other words, I explained to Jesse, this was no arty, president-of-the-drama-club guy. Talent, I said, doesn’t always turn up where you think it should.
We watched The Samurai (1967) (Alain Delon); Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946); and, of course, the mighty Clint Eastwood (any stiller and he’d be dead) in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). You could spend a long time on Clint. I start by naming five things I love about him.
1. I love how he holds up four fingers to the coffin maker in Fistful of Dollars and says, “My mistake. Make that four coffins.”
2. I love it—it was the British critic David Thomson who pointed it out—that when Clint stood beside Prince Charles at London’s National Film Theatre in 1993, it was clear to everyone in the audience who the real prince was.
3. I love the fact that when Clint directs a movie, he never says “Action.” He says calmly, quietly, “When you’re ready.”
4. I love watching Clint fall off his horse in Unfor-given.
5. I love the image of Clint as Dirty Harry walking down a San Francisco street, gun in one hand, a hot dog in the other.
I mention to Jesse a brief junket-chat I had once with William Goldman, who did the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and later wrote Absolute Power (1997) for Eastwood. Goldman adored him. “Clint is the best,” he told me. “A complete professional in a world dominated by ego. On an Eastwood set,” he said, “you come to work, you do your job, you go home; usually you go home early because he wants to play golf. And he eats lunch in the cafeteria along with everyone else.”
When Clint was offered the script for A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, it had already been around for a while. Charles Bronson said no, it was the worst script he’d ever seen. James Coburn didn’t want to do it because it was going to be shot in Italy and he’d heard bad things about Italian directors. Clint took it for a fee of fifteen thousand dollars, but—and I emphasized this for Jesse—insisted on cutting down the script, thought it would be more interesting if the guy didn’t talk.
“Can you guess why he did that?” I said.
“Sure. You imagine all sorts of things about a guy who doesn’t talk,” Jesse said. “The minute he opens his mouth, he shrinks a couple of sizes.”
“Exactly.”
After a few distracted seconds, he added, “It’d be nice to be like that in real life.”
“Uh?”
“Not talk so much. Be more mysterious. Girls like that.”
“Some do, some don’t,” I said. “You’re a talker. Women love talkers, too.”
Three years went by before Eastwood saw the finished film. By then he’d pretty much forgotten about it. He invited some pals to a private screening room and said, “This is probably going to be a real piece of shit, but let’s have a look.”
A few minutes in, one of his pals said, “Ah, Clint, this is pretty good stuff.” A Fistful of Dollars revitalized the western, which had become, at this point, a kind of rest home for aging movie stars.
After the film, I asked Jesse to indulge me, to allow us to revisit the rope scene with James Dean in Giant. Dean surrounded by slick businessmen trying to cut him a deal; Rock Hudson laying twelve hundred dollars on the table, “What’re you gonna do with all that money, Jed?” Everyone moving, talking, except Dean. Dean just sitting there. “Who steals the scene?” I asked. “Who steals the whole movie?”
I even made a foray into television, Edward James Olmos as the black-suited police chief in Miami Vice (1984–89). I said, “This is a stupid, implausible show, but watch Olmos, it’s almost sleight of hand. By not moving, he appears to be in possession of a secret.”
“What secret?”
“That’s the illusion of stillness. There is no secret. Only the implication of a possessor,” I said. I was starting to sound like a wine writer.
I clicked off the DVD.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing the rest of the show,” Jesse said. “Would that be okay?”
So while the contractors banged and sawed and blow-torched the second floor of the condo (getting bigger every day) across the street, Jesse and I watched three consecutive episodes of Miami Vice. At one point, our neighbour Eleanor clomped past the window and glanced inside. I wondered what she was thinking, the two of us watching television day after day. I experienced a kind of cretinous desire to run after her, to say, But it’s not television, it’s movies. There was, I noticed in myself, an occasional, unattractive hurry toward explanation these days when it came to Jesse.
From where I was standing in the living room, I could see Rebecca Ng turn the corner at the top of the parking lot. White jeans, white jean jacket, chartreuse T-shirt, her night-black hair falling just so. The construction crew at the foot of the church wall signalled to each other and one by one they found a way to look at Rebecca when she got abreast of them. A grey fist of pigeons rose and fluttered to the west.
I was brushing up on New German Cinema. We were doing Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of G
od (1972) that day. (Be sure to prepare him for the scene where the conquistador matches his fingers to a bloodstain on a rock.) Sometimes I learned this stuff a half-hour before I put the movie on. Jesse was outside. He was hungover. He didn’t say it but I had smelled it on him when he came up the stairs. One of his friends, Morgan, had gotten out of jail the night before (thirty days, assault) and dropped by. I’d had to kick him out of the house, gently, at four o’clock in the morning and send Jesse to bed.
It was a fine line chez nous and some days I felt like I was beating back chaos and disorder and irresponsibility with a whip and a chair. Indeed, it seemed as if there was a jungle growing all around the house, that it was constantly threatening to poke its branches and vines through the windows, under the door, up through the basement. More than a year had passed since Jesse left school (he was seventeen now) and there was no sign yet of his charging up the stairs to take the world “by the lapels.”
Still we had the film club. The yellow cards on the fridge, a line drawn through each completed film, reassured me that something, at least, was happening. I wasn’t delusional. I knew I wasn’t giving him a systematic education in cinema. That wasn’t the point. We could as easily have gone skin diving or collected stamps. The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics—Rebecca, Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes.
Some days, he asked about people I’d interviewed: What was George Harrison like? (A nice guy, although when you hear the Liverpool accent, it’s pretty hard not to start jumping around and screaming, “You were in the Beatles. You must have got, like, a ton of chicks!”); Ziggy Marley (Bob’s son; a sullen little prick if there ever was one); Harvey Keitel (great actor but a brain like an uncooked pork roast); Richard Gere (a classic actor-pseudo-intellectual who hasn’t figured out yet that people listen to him because he’s a movie star, not because he’s a brainer); Jodie Foster (like trying to break into Fort Knox); Dennis Hopper (foul-mouthed, funny, a great guy); Vanessa Red-grave (warm, statuesque, like talking to the Queen); English director Steven Frears (another Brit who doesn’t know when to lay off the aftershave. No wonder a woman can’t put her head in these guys’ laps); Yoko Ono (a defensive, prickly drag who, when queried about the whys and wherefores of her latest “project,” replies, “Would you ask Bruce Springsteen that question?”); Robert Altman (chatty, literate, easygoing; no wonder actors worked for him for a song); American director Oliver Stone (very masculine guy, smarter than the scripts he writes; “War and Peace? Jesus Christ, what kind of a question is that? It’s ten o’clock in the morning!”).
We talked about the ’60s, the Beatles (too often but he indulged me), drinking badly, drinking well; then some more about Rebecca (“Do you think she’ll dump me?”), Adolf Hitler, Dachau, Richard Nixon, infidelity, Truman Capote, the Mojave Desert, Suge Knight, lesbians, cocaine, heroin chic, the Backstreet Boys (my idea), tattoos, Johnny Carson, Tupac (his idea), sarcasm, weightlifting, dink size, French actors, and e.e. cummings. Such a time! I may have been waiting for a job but I wasn’t waiting for life. It was there, right beside me in the wicker chair. I knew it was marvellous while it was happening—even though I understood, sort of, that a white ribbon awaited us down the road.
These days, when I return to Maggie’s house as a dinner guest, I pause rather tenderly on the porch. I know that Jesse and I will come out here later in the evening with a cup of coffee but it won’t be quite the same as it was back then in the film club. Curiously enough, the rest of her house, the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room and bathroom, bear no trace of me. I feel no resonance, no echo of my time there. Only the porch.
But where was I? Oh yes, Rebecca’s visit that fine spring afternoon.
She stepped lightly up the steps; Jesse remained seated. There was an exchange between them; she stood with her hands in her jacket pockets, the expression on her face like that of a stewardess who thinks she has just heard something unpleasant but isn’t positive she got it right. A polite but cautious smile. Something unusual going on. In the far distance you could see one of the construction workers, frozen, holding on to the side of a ladder, looking this way.
I heard the door open and they came inside. “Hello, David,” Rebecca said. Breezy, in charge. Or at least she wanted to be perceived that way. “How are you feeling today?” she said. It caught me again by surprise.
“How am I feeling? Well, let’s see now. Fine, I think. How’s school?”
“We’re on a little break now so I’m working at the Gap.”
“You’re going to end up running the world, Rebecca.”
“I just like having my own money,” she said. (Was that a shot?) Jesse waited behind her.
“Nice to see you again, Rebecca.”
“And you too, David,” she said. Never Mr. Gilmour.
Down they went.
I went up to the second floor. Turned on the computer and looked for the third time that day for messages. Maggie was the last person on earth to still use a dial-up Internet phone connection so there was always a wait and buzzing and whining and shrieking before the screen came up.
I read the morning paper on-line. I looked out the back window and saw our neighbour Eleanor poking about in her back garden with a hoe. Getting ready for a new planting season. Her cherry tree had shot into blossom. After a while I went to the top of the stairs. From the basement I could hear the murmur of conversation. Rebecca’s voice, animated; then his, strangely deadpan, too even, as if he was trying to talk from his chest. Talking from an attitude.
Then silence followed by footsteps on the floor below, two pairs of feet. No words exchanged. The front door opened and closed, carefully, as if someone didn’t want to disturb me. By the time I got downstairs I saw Jesse. He was leaning forward, grim-faced. In the distance I spotted a small figure, Rebecca, retreating at the far end of the parking lot. The boys on the construction crew, heads turned in her direction.
I sat down with a creak in the chair. For a moment we just sat there. Then I said, “What’s up?”
Jesse turned toward me, holding his hand in a way that obscured his eyes. I wondered if he’d been crying. “We just broke up.”
This was what I’d been afraid of. A new guy with a car and a swanky apartment, a stockbroker, a young lawyer. A more appropriate audience for Rebecca’s professional aspirations.
“What did she say?” I said.
“She said she was going to die without me.”
For an instant I thought I had misunderstood him. “She said what?”
He repeated it.
“You dumped Rebecca?”
He nodded.
“Whatever for?”
“She came over to talk about our relationship one time too many, I guess.”
I took a long look at him, his pale complexion, his filmy eyes. After a moment, I said, “I’m sorry to ask this but I have to. Are you hungover today?”
“A bit but that’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Jesus.”
“Really, Dad, it doesn’t.”
I started in cautiously. “I’ve learned over the years, Jesse, that it’s never a good idea to make a decision about your life when alcohol’s involved.” He opened his mouth to speak. “Even when it’s indirectly involved. Like a hangover.”
He gazed off into the distance.
“Is there anything you can do to undo this?” I said.
“I don’t want to.” He caught sight of the work crew. It was as if their image reinforced something in him.
I said, “Okay, let me say this and then you can do whatever you want, all right?”
“All right.”
“When you leave a woman, things happen that you think aren’t going to matter. But then when they do happen, it turns out they matter a great deal.”
“Like other guys?”
I said, “I don’t want to be brutal about this but there are certain
factors you have to take into consideration before you break up with someone. And one of them, the big one, it often turns out, is that they’re going to be with other people. And that, trust me, can be an unsavoury experience.”
“What does ‘unsavoury’ mean?”
“Unpleasant. In this case, horrifying.”
“I know that Rebecca’s going to get another boyfriend, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you? Have you really thought about it?”
“Yep.”
“Can I tell you a story? Do you mind?”
“No, no.” He looked distracted. Jesus, I thought. This is just the beginning. “I had a friend in university,” I began. “Actually, you know him. He lives on the West Coast. Arthur Cramner.”
“I like Arthur.”
“Yes, well, a lot of people like Arthur. That was partially the problem. I had a girlfriend once, this was a long time ago, I was maybe a few years older than you are now. Her name was Sally Buckman. And one day I said to Arthur— he was my best friend—I think I’m going to break up with Sally. And he said, ‘Oh yeah?’ He liked her. Thought she was sexy. She was.
“I said, If you want to, you know, see Sally afterwards, that’s fine with me. I believed it too. I was done with her. So a few weeks later, maybe a month, I broke up with Sally Buckman and went away for the weekend to a friend’s cottage by the lake. Are you still with me?”
“Yep.”
I went on. “At that time, Arthur and I played in a rinky-dink band; I played the drums, he sang and played the harmonica; quite the rock stars we fancied ourselves. Slim-hipped irresistibles.
“I got back to town that Sunday night from the cottage where I’d spent the weekend boiling the roots of marijuana plants and hanging them upside down and not missing Sally one tiny bit. In fact, every so often, I’d feel a gust of relief that she wasn’t there.
“I went straight to a band rehearsal. And there was Arthur. Lovely, likeable Arthur Cramner playing the harmonica, kibitzing with the bass guitarist, being a great guy. Being Arthur. All the way through the rehearsal, I kept looking at him, kept wanting to ask him the question: Did you see Sally while I was away for the weekend? But I didn’t get the chance. I was getting anxious, though. It had moved from being something I was curious about to something I was scared of.
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