by André Babyn
He never said anything about that at all to me, and for all I know he loved Durham, loved going home, loved his girlfriend and his daughter and hoped to stay in town forever. That was just the impression I got from him or maybe something I invented based on how I thought I would feel in his situation. What’s that called — projecting?
Anyway, it was dead quiet, but we stuck it out. There was always the off chance that we’d be greeted by a flurry of customers once the whistle blew on the final period — or whatever it was — and we might have told ourselves that we couldn’t miss out on them, although I don’t remember that happening and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had.
We usually had something playing on the TV across from the cash registers, but when it was quiet we could turn up the volume and really focus our attention. It seems to me — although it couldn’t have been true — that the lights were dimmer in the store that night, as if in preparation for what we were going to see. Maybe there wasn’t a hockey game after all and we were just waiting out some monster storm that was flickering the overhead banks and blotting out the sky. But no, that can’t be right, because that would mean that the television would be struggling, too, since they all ran on the same power. It’s probably just that I got so wrapped up in the movie that it seems that way to me now, as if nothing else existed during that short, ninety-minute span.
Whatever the case, looking back it almost feels like the movie was waiting for me. Now I’ve seen it so many times that it’s hard to believe there was ever a time I didn’t know it, like when you look back and try to evaluate your impressions and prejudices when you were first introduced to your best friends, and how it’s really hard to do that without bringing what you know about them back with you from the future.
Michael was a real movie buff, and Evie was one of his favourites, although I think he liked it for different reasons than I did, more because it was virtually unknown, especially outside of Canada, and for the weird bravado that allowed it to exist in the first place. At first I was struck by how obvious its premise seemed to me — I found it incredible that there weren’t a hundred movies like it already. But then I started thinking deeply about why I’d never heard of it before and I inhaled sharply and realized that I was essentially alone in the world, my tastes far from universal.
Before Michael put the cassette in, he told me that the funding for the movie had come from a weird (long since closed) tax dodge, in which the Canadian government briefly, if unintentionally, allowed persons of means to obtain tax credits through indiscriminately funding arts projects (hoping to reap in a share of the — always nonexistent — profits). Predictably, this led to a lot of really bad, bizarre art, which is probably the necessary result when wealthy people toss money at artists who couldn’t earn a living otherwise. If the rich knew anything about culture they wouldn’t be rich, which is something that Mr. Wright likes to say.
Michael always told me that one day he would bring in the book which contained the record of all the weirdo paintings, photographs, poetry, music groups, films, and dramatic performances funded through the tax “loophole.” (He also explained that after the Canadian government had caught wind of the project it had rescinded all credits and taken the accountants who had facilitated the arrangements to court, financially devastating everyone who had contributed.)
Of the projects, Michael said, Evie was by far the crown jewel. And he told me that it couldn’t have otherwise existed in a thousand alternate universes.
It was true.
Michael never actually brought the book in. But it didn’t matter. I was hooked before he even pressed play.
The story of Evie is basically cheap fantasy, the kind of thing you could find in any paperback in a used bookstore. But it is filmed with a restraint that elevates the material, imbuing the action with force and meaning. It is essentially a Western, set in a fantastic world, filmed in Northern Ontario. I’d recently discovered Sergio Leone (through Michael, of course) and I was crazy about Westerns, a genre that up until then I hadn’t given any thought to at all, writing them off as vaguely capitalistic fantasies for American men who refused to grow up.
Which didn’t mean that they weren’t, but I liked to think that Evie was different, even if it wasn’t, fundamentally.
I didn’t really know, either way.
The movie opens with a long shot of a rickety cabin built on the edge of a forest clearing, ringed with squat jack pines and under-painted with pink tendrils of granite and red clusters of sumac. Which is a familiar scene to Canadian audiences. But, as Michael explained, the location was chosen because to foreigners it might more easily suggest a magical and alien world, one in which the fantasy might conceivably take place. But for those used to the landscapes of the Group of Seven, of the mythos of the North, the effect is jarring, as if an alternate dimension has been overlaid over your dreams.
It’s early morning. No sound but the thrum of insects in late summer, the occasional bird call. The camera lingers on the scene, setting a leisurely pace, only broken later by short bursts of action. Despite the obviously poor quality of the cameras themselves, which Michael says were at least a decade old at the time of filming, the framing and editing is, frankly, incredible: it’s the first project from the director of photography who would later go on to work on The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Wake in Fright (Michael talked about those movies all the time, but I never got to see either before Joe’s shut down).
The silence is finally broken by the voice of a little girl inside the cabin. She’s humming to herself, playing by the fire with a little doll. She’s unspeakably dirty and her dress is torn. This is Evie. Her parents are behind her, sitting down at a table, as if for breakfast. Evie says something to the doll, and the doll replies, in Evie’s tiny voice. Then Evie does something quickly, and the doll rips. She drops the doll on the floor and leaves the shot.
“Wake up!” we hear her say. “Wake up! Wake up! ”
Finally, crying. Evie, obviously.
Shot of the mother, then the father. Both are dead. Their deaths were obviously violent, and they’ve been dead for a while. Flies buzz around both corpses. There’s no telling how long Evie has been taking care of herself alone in the house. But it’s time to go. Somehow the spell is finally broken.
She gathers her things and sets off into the forest — the Deepthorn, vast and primeval, “a continent unto itself,” according to text that runs on the screen following her departure. I don’t know why, but it chokes me up: something about the way that her little body disappears into the woods, stumbling through the underbrush, slipping and falling in the stream. Sometimes I’ll pause the tape there and get out of my seat, look out the back window or get something from the kitchen, maybe, because I find that part so affecting, I don’t know why. That first night, Evie dreams about a bear who speaks to her in a deep, booming voice, rendered clumsily but to great effect through an uncanny editing technique. Over the course of several nights, the bear teaches her how to survive and tells her, in a final dream, that it is her destiny to kill Llor, the ice queen. Llor’s troops have overrun the Deepthorn, and it’s she who is ultimately responsible for the death of Evie’s parents. This dream upsets Evie and she is shown moaning and turning in her makeshift bed. But in the morning she finds food outside her shelter, a cache of berries and root vegetables, and she accepts the gift, and with it, her destiny. The bear’s voice echoes as she gathers up the food.
Ten years later Evie emerges from the Deepthorn leading her horse, Excalibur, whom she ties to a post beside her parents’ wrecked cabin, overgrown with greenery and collapsed in on itself. Evie has come to pay her last respects before embarking on the journey that will finally lead her to Llor.
There’s a lot of buildup for that final action, and in lesser hands, in a lesser movie, it’s very possible that it could all have come undone. It’s a blessing in disguise that the film had such a low budget: instead of elaborate costumes and effects, which would hav
e undoubtedly looked cheap with time, instead of dragging out the final action unnecessarily, Evie just stabs an old woman in an ice-grey dress. An old woman who commands an army but who spends her nights alone. Who stands up from her bowl of porridge when Evie walks into her tent. With a book open beside her on the table.
Evie has to pass through a camp of guards to get at Llor, quietly, quickly, and the simple and abrupt climax works in the movie’s favour, highlighting the irrevocable nature of action and the desolation that follows it. It even seems, for a second or two, that some flash of recognition occurs between the two players, wherein each understands and simultaneously rejects their role. I read that in a cult movie magazine that Michael brought in one day, but I think it’s true. Evie has killed before, but regardless you can see that she wants — even for a brief moment — to undo the thrust. And Llor, maybe, wants to undo everything, for her life to be the book and the porridge and the table, nothing more. To not have to be responsible for whatever she has done to Evie, not to escape her fate, but to free her killer from hers. At least that’s how it seems to me.
When Evie leaves the tent, limping, and stands before the guards waiting outside, it’s impossible not to reflect on the fact that every action has its consequence, and that the consequences of all actions are necessarily dire, because they bring us one step closer to where we are all going. That’s super dark, I know, but I think it’s true. Somehow it is immediately clear to the guards what has happened, as if Llor was a sense that they lost after she died. Evie just stands there, and they just look at her, and no one has any idea what to do. Evie’s lost a lot, and maybe she has even found a kind of glory, but it’s unclear what that glory means. Maybe she’s going to die. Maybe she’ll claim a reward. It doesn’t matter. The price has already been paid, and I don’t mean Llor’s death. It’s more complicated than it seems, and it gets more complicated with each viewing.
I love Evie not just because it shouldn’t exist but does, not just because no one knows about it, not just because it feels so Canadian, awkward and so earnest at times that it verges on sentimental despite how much it tries to come off as cold. I love Evie primarily because the movie is about growing up. It is about being abandoned by those you love and being forced to fend for yourself.
When I watch Evie I feel like my brain is expanding, like I am ready to be dispersed into space and to become part of all of the possibility that I see before me. I wanted to put that feeling into my documentary. I wanted to create a work of art that would raise myself and all my peers together into a kind of holy ecstasy. But I didn’t know how to do that. And whenever I sat down and thought about it I got scared, really scared, like I was a scrap of paper about to blow away in the wind.
2
We found out how long our documentaries were supposed to be on the day we handed in our communications essays. The subject of my essay was “net speak,” specifically as employed on MSN Messenger, and how it wasn’t “degrading” language (as I’d heard a lot of — mostly older — people claim) but adding “an additional register,” aping the language of an article I had read in the paper several weeks prior. I thought I’d made some good points, even if the essay was a bit rushed, and I had been hoping for an A. Walid finished writing his in the library at lunch. He said his essay was “hot garbage,” but that so was Wright. I liked Wright, but I agreed with Walid because it was more fun to continue the joke than it was to shut it down. I liked imagining hot garbage walking the streets in the shape of a man, shadowed by a squadron of hungry seagulls.
But anyway, I felt good about my essay, for once, and I wanted to get a head start on the next project, so when I got home from school that day I headed straight to the attic. There, in a box marked APRT: Msc was a dusty JVC camcorder. From the late eighties, I think. The tapes were about the size of a pack of cards and they fit into an included master tape (which was also inserted, weirdly, inside the device) that fit into any VCR. The camera itself was about the same size as half a cheese wheel, maybe twice as heavy, was just as conspicuous raised to my shoulder, and probably got about as good a picture, all things considered.
Jeff and I found the camera six summers ago, when for twenty bucks each we cleaned out all of the junk in the attic, swept a bit, and put everything else into some kind of rudimentary order. We found a bunch of things we hadn’t expected, including a stack of old letters from my parents that we were too afraid to read, though I think we both read them, anyway, in secret, or at least I did, as much as I could stomach. There was also a stack of old film cartridges buried in an adjacent box.
Most of the tapes contained a weird and uncanny vision of a trip my parents took to Nova Scotia sometime after Jeff was born. Before me. I’d heard about it only because my grandfather was living in a place out there when they did the drive, and it was one of the last times my mom saw him alive. On the tapes, younger, thinner versions of my parents addressed each other, in turn, following shaky-cam monologues and extreme long shots of waves breaking on the ocean (as seen from the window of their inn). It was weird because even though I’d seen photographs of him, older and more recent, I didn’t really have a great image of my dad in my head. In the video there he was, reclining on chairs, on couches, in front of the en suite television, my mother popping into mirrors holding the camera, which proved that she hadn’t always disliked it as much as she now claimed (maybe only because it was tied to him). Most of the video was a montage of shots of the drive, terrain becoming progressively rockier, tired parents eating at road stops, hope, teased hair, signs in English, French, English, and the same procession again, but in reverse order, at the end of the tapes, on their way back (fewer shots of the countryside, subdued tone, mournful even, talk of picking Jeff up from Aunt Wanda’s, Welcome to Ontario, my father cursing at the wheel, a near miss, black car rapidly passing through the frame, camera switched off in the midst of a violent outburst, Mom telling him to calm down, hyperventilating herself).
A brief shot of my grandfather, which Jeff and I rewound and played back multiple times, saying, with his slight accent, “What is that stupid thing?” before the camera was turned off again. Then a sneaky five-minute cut of him working in his garden, shot through a window. We told Mom about it and she watched it with us once, asking herself how she could have forgotten. Then it cut back to Dad and her and she said, “Oh, yes,” and went back to whatever she’d been doing, making sure to let us know that she wanted us to give the tapes to her when we were done so she could put them somewhere safe.
There was a blank in the box, too. Jeff and I spent a few weeks using it to make movies with old action figures, movies about the neighbourhood, its fictional underbelly, movies that used that old stop-camera trick, movies about falling down in one place and getting up in another, movies about disappearing in the blink of an eye (following a moment of anticipation, a tension, as we froze in place, waiting while the ancient camera ground to a stop). Something was always threatening to revoke itself in our movies. We screened them, at most, once or twice, and only for ourselves, sometimes for Mom, then we rewound back to the beginning and started again, callously destroying all of our hard work in the name of future production, just to save the cost of a new blank. Our rationale was, I guess, that each new video contained the seed of the previous ones, so that if we wanted to look backward we only needed to look at what we’d just done to see everything that had come before it. We must have thought that we would keep making those videos forever.
But, of course, we didn’t. We kept on rewinding and recording until one day the little tape exploded, shooting out little black threads that got tangled so badly in the stupid master tape that they had to be cut out. Then we put the camera back in the attic and no one’s touched it since.
I wish I had that tape now, that it hadn’t exploded, so I could watch the Jeff caught there and remember him in greater detail. Instead just the camera, filled only with his traces.
* * *
I see Jeff everywhere. It’s h
ard not to. Even when I close my eyes. There are pictures of him all over the living room and kitchen downstairs, so maybe I am exaggerating when I say that I don’t remember what he looked like. Or that it is hard to. But looking at them only makes his absence larger, since they don’t really show who he was, just his physical characteristics. If that makes any sense. It’s him, but without him the images feel like so much less.
Mom still hasn’t done anything with his room. I’m not sure she’ll do anything until after I move out. Or when she does. She vacuums it out every once in a while, but that’s basically it. The door stands half-ajar, inviting, as if he were home and felt like talking or as if the room itself was waiting for him to come back. Sometimes I will walk to the bathroom in the partial darkness and see him in the mirror before I turn on the light. Nothing spooky — just my own face, our resemblances, which evaporate without darkness to smooth over our differences. I’m a lot smaller than him, my face is thinner.
I’m alive.
A while back I started leaving the house in order to get away from his ghost, and now I do that just to be alone. There is a place I like to go in the forest near where we live. A spot that is quiet and lonely and where only I am allowed: moss and needle carpet; ceiling of low cedar limbs; fifty yards away, downslope, the soft trickle of a brook. And me. That’s it. It looks like a long time ago the clearing belonged to someone else — when I first found the place there was a folding chair sitting by itself in the centre of the clearing, plastic worn and tattered. Like it had been waiting thirty years for someone to fill its place.
Maybe it’s stupid, but I feel something like Evie when I sit there. Evie in the moments before she embarked on her quest to do away with Llor. Evie preparing for her journey. Taking in the quiet like a potion. Using it like a whetstone on her sword. I feel like I’m preparing myself for something, too, except what I’m preparing myself for isn’t a battle or a long journey.