“After this, the film falls back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, begins to suspect with more confidence that the young French woman is a Nazi sympathizer, or even worse an out-and-out collaborator; he lies and tells her that he’s Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangers her family; the girl goes out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watches her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rings out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought is that it’s a trap, and that perhaps the girl has indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulls on his wool coat and dashes out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film goes black. Instead of images, there is nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot calls out the girl’s name breathlessly as he runs, until another shot rings out, and the moon clears from behind the clouds. There at his feet is a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appears to be German, although it’s hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could remember wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasps his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. In the moonlight, the pilot leans down to listen to the man’s dying words.
“‘She can’t…’ says the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settles in, the screen grows brighter, in flickers, and the pilot looks back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He takes off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it becomes clear that all is lost. By the time he arrives the farmhouse is engulfed in flames and the pilot falls to his knees and slumps forward. Then something very strange happens: the film switches to color again, but not because it’s a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remains hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerges from frame right.
“It’s the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you can see that her eyes are blue. She kneels down beside the pilot and puts her hand beneath his chin and gently lifts his face toward hers. By this time the color has become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly pans down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opens, palm up. In her hand she holds a small silver swastika, which gleams in the light. It seems to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. As the film switches again back to black and white, the familiar Hollywood music begins, signaling the end. The camera slowly pans up to the pilot’s face, which wears an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continues panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farmhouse.
“At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farmhouse to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farmhouse, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. The truth is the ending of the film was too terrible, too truthful, to ever really talk about, involving a technique that used multiple split screens, a technique I’d never seen before that literally split the screen into not two but four or five panels of action, each one divided by a vertical red line.”
*
My notes say Laing’s description of these two films (although description isn’t the right word) lasted about three hours (it can’t have been that long) and that I left the motel for lunch and returned a while later, having agreed with Laing that the only business we should conduct together in the motel room was “movie business.” When I return he has straightened the room up a bit, shaved, and the scarf isn’t to be seen.
“Hutton,” Laing says, “was the name of it. A short film, but suggestive of something much longer, almost historical in length, epic, with all the darkness that trails history, catching up with it, overtaking it, devouring it.
“As I remember it, Hutton waits in the car. These are his instructions. To wait.”
As Laing recalls the movie he sometimes squints, as if bringing it, or parts of it, the parts of it he wants to remember, into sharper focus.
“It is late in the afternoon, now. He has been there since 10 a.m., in his gray suit provided by the Messiah Detective Agency. Out the passenger side window is a city park. Families come and go. Out the driver side window is an old red-brick apartment building, with beautiful leaded windows and black iron work around the steps. Out the front windshield the street divides into a boulevard about 50 yards ahead of the parked car.
“The car windows are open. A fluke warm day in late October, the movie suggests, though I can’t remember how. Maya Deren’s granddaughter, Rachel or Raquel, or Aimee, gave it to me, the film, in the old stale cafeteria at the land-grant university in Pennsylvania, where we had agreed to meet through a series of letters (letters that served as long negotiations) and then through many short phone calls. When I say gave I mean loaned, though it amounted to the same thing in the end. She wore her black hair in sharply cut bangs, I remember, that was the style during those long years before the Towers fell. I could see the face of her grandmother behind or inside her own face, and her gestures seemed to imitate Maya’s swift and elegant movement in Meshes of the Afternoon. And with her, Aimee—that was her name, not Rachel or Raquel—brought several pages of her grandmother’s notes for the film, notes suggesting that it was not nearly complete, and that its ending would involve an apocalypse the likes of which had never been rendered on screen before. Aimee turned out to be a real chatterbox, which surprised me, except when it came to the topic of Maya’s notes for the calamitous ending, which she talked about in hushed tones as if not to arouse the curiosity of some invisible butcher towering just behind her there in the cafeteria, in a sort of transparent region of space that loomed behind her and that I could almost make out. And she wouldn’t allow me to examine her grandmother’s notes in front of her, forbidding me to so much as look at them in her presence. The cafeteria food was dull, which gave us a chance to laugh together at something, some shared experience, and it was then that I finally relaxed and flirted a little bit with Aimee over our dry mashed potatoes and slightly crusty orange Jell-O. In fact, it was Aimee who pointed to the mashed potatoes with her Spork and said, as if naming it for the first and last time, Mashes of the Afternoon.
“We spent the day like that, walking around campus, her all the while with the 16 mm film in her grungy satchel, and she would say things to strangers like I haven’t slept with your son, or Don’t worry, it will be over before you know it. She finally handed the film over, in one of those beautiful and alien metal circular canisters that can only be opened carefully and in a balanced sort of way by placing your fingers on opposite sides of the top lid and gently lifting. It had a red sticker on it, I remember, in the shape of a jagged cone that seemed something like an emblem of death, an emblem painted on with nail polish and, I could swear, warm to the touch. This was up in the storage area part of my library office where I had set up two 16 mm projectors and an AV cart with a VCR player, and I remember that it was hard to breathe for a few moments with Aimee Deren sitting there cross-legged on the floor next to me as I opened the canister and unspooled the film leader, holding it up to the light like it was secret microfiche depicting the code names for all the torture centers. I had difficulty breathing not because of Aimee or the closeness of her bare kn
ee but rather because I felt that the apocalyptic ending that Aimee had told me about might actually be lying in wait there in the film itself and that’s why I asked Aimee, So have you seen this before? to which she replied, as I knew she would, Not all of it. For a moment it struck me that we were alone together—really alone—and that we could have done anything with each other had we wanted to. So you don’t know if the world ends or not? I asked, half-teasing, but her face suddenly had the look of someone stricken, stricken with a terrible thought in the shape or form of a shadow.”
Laing stops for a moment, as if realizing for the first time that he had veered off track, or as if regretting that I had been sent here on assignment not to ask him about Aimee (and later A.) but instead about the unfinished Maya Deren film she had brought to him. He produces from a pocket a blue bandana that he uses to wipe at a spot or something (I don’t see a spot) on the table in front of him and I assume it’s a tick or a habit or something about who he is that lurks beneath the surface of who he pretends to be that is just now beginning to reveal itself in this small action. I size up the discrepancy between my idea of Laing and the Laing who sits across from me now and it’s clear to me that if he’s telling me the truth about these films then it’s a special form of truth, one that operates by its own uncertainty principle. It’s actually worse than that. It’s as if Laing himself—even though he’s right in front of me—occupies an uncertain space, or else makes that space uncertain, so that position and momentum can’t be known simultaneously. And then I think about the missing children, and understand that this is how they exist, too.
Laing returns to the film.
“Hutton gets out to stretch, the 10th or 12th time that day judging by the bored look on his face. Puts his arms above his head. Reaches down to his shoes. Gets back in the car. Maybe not in that order, but close enough.
“Finally, as the sun begins to set in furious orange (the sort of orange that’s such a hot image that it threatened—and if Aimee were here she’d say the same thing—to burn up the projector from the inside) the back car door opens and a man slides in. Hutton knows him as Hector. Dressed entirely in white. Large hands. Full beard. The whole scene is shot reverse-shot, just back and forth, Hutton in the front seat, Hector in the back.
“‘Well,’ Hector says. ‘How’d it go?’
“‘Good, I guess. Nothing happened.’
“‘Was something supposed to happen?’
“‘Well, I thought…’
“‘Just a joke, Hutton. Of course something happened. Now tell me what you saw.’
“‘From memory or…’
“‘If your memory’s good, then just tell me,’ says Hector.
“‘… because I jotted down notes…’
“‘Of course you did. As you should have.’
“‘… and I could read…’
“‘Like I said, Hutton, if your memory’s good then just tell me. But if there’s some fault in it then read me from the notes.’
“‘… the notes…’
“‘That you said you jotted down.’
“‘…’
“‘Hutton.’
“‘…’
“‘Hutton.’
“‘I could…’
“‘Read from your notes.’
“‘… find some fault.’
“‘In?’
“‘My memory,’ says Hutton.
“‘Even though it was just from this morning.’
“‘But that was…’
“‘Not such a long time ago, Hutton.’
“‘… under different circumstances.’
“‘Than what?’
“‘…’
“‘Than what, Hutton?’
“‘…’
“‘Hutton.’
“‘… than…’
“‘Than what?’
“‘Than now.’
“‘Of course, Hutton! Of course they’re different!’
“‘You weren’t here.’
“‘And that’s why I need you to tell me what you saw.’
“‘If only…’
“‘Hutton. Enough.’
“‘If only it…’
“‘Had been what?’
“‘Clearer.’
“‘I understand. And so.’
“Hutton opens a small green flip-spiral notebook provided to him by Hector that morning. His jottings are mundane, trivial: boy falls off swing, 10:20; low-flying plane & everyone in park looks up, 11:07; two men in sweat suits argue in street, 11:30; Hector crosses street in distance, 2:35… These are shown, I think, as inserts. Hector says something like ‘Do you mean you saw me cross the street at 2:35? Is that what this says?’
“‘I think so. It looked like you.’
“‘Would you say I crossed the street in order so that you would see me?’
“‘Yes, I’d say,’ Hutton replies, ‘right up there,’ motioning to where the street forks into the boulevard.
“Hector leans forward in the backseat. He points through the front windshield: ‘There?’
“‘About there, I suppose.’
“‘Drive me up there, Hutton,’ Hector says abruptly, leaning back in his seat. ‘Drive me to where you think you saw me.’
“Hector starts the car, adjusts the rearview mirror so that he can see Hector, pulls forward along the curb. The sun is very low now. The earth is disappearing. This is conveyed,” Laing tells me, “by some weird red line that suddenly appears horizontally across the screen. That line, that wavering line, somehow suggests the disappearance of the earth. The very earth itself as well as the conditions that made earth possible along with any thought of humanity. This is something that both Aimee and I felt, as it seemed to drain the space we were in of meaning and while it’s true that my library office was never the same after that red line appeared it may have had more to do with what was going on secretly and magnetically between Aimee and myself than with the line, which after all was just something projected on the wall.”
Laing pauses, as if deciding whether to lie to me or not, and I say this because—and listening to the tapes again now makes this clear—rather than pause or hesitate when he was about to lie he sped up, as if the speed of words could waterfall on ahead of the rotten ideas they signified, or as if that knife formed by the angle of the sun on the motel room floor had been anything other than something conjured, some warning to me but not a warning from Laing, but rather from the dead field next to the motel where, if this were a film that had lost its way, the bodies of some of the children were buried would be revealed in a series of cuts that would strobe across the screen, depicting first Laing’s room, the throne chair splashed in blood, followed by a shot of the motel from a distance, followed by the field with the buried bodies framed by the motel in the very near background, followed by a final shot of an X-ray version of the field, with the bones of five or six small bodies, some intertwined as if in forced embrace.
“‘Here,’ Hutton says, stopping. ‘You crossed right about here.’
“‘From which side?’ Hector asks.
“‘From left to right,’ Hutton says, gesturing. ‘From there into the park.’
“‘And you’re sure it was me.’
“‘It looked like you.’
“‘Of course.’
“‘I thought that was part of the assignment,’ Hutton says.
“‘The assignment.’
“‘Why I was here. To notice something unusual, out of the ordinary. Seeing you at 2:30—when you said you wouldn’t return until evening—was unusual.’
“In the film (movie as Aimee called it; she thought film was snobby) it’s fully dark now. Hector has lit a cigarette, and Hutton can see him in the rearview mirror, the orange glow illuminating the vague shape of his bearded face. A distant siren wails.
“‘Hutton,’ Hector says, tapping his cigarette ashes outside the open backseat window, ‘let me ask you something.’ He pauses. ‘Let me ask you this: what if who you s
aw wasn’t me, but someone who looks just like me?’
“Hutton thinks about this for a moment. Turns the question over in his mind, it seems, wondering if it’s some sort of trap. The movie conveys this in a secret way, making you complicit in the act of moral defilement that gives rise to omniscience.
“‘Looks just like you…?’
“‘Let me put it another way,’ Hector says. ‘Hutton: are you not unhappy?’
“‘I am not.’
“‘Not what?’
“‘Unhappy,’ Hutton says.
“‘So then you are happy. Can we reliably agree on that?’
“‘I’m afraid not.’
“‘You’re not happy?’
“‘That’s right,’ Hutton says.
“‘And you’re not unhappy?’
“‘True.’
“‘For God’s sake, man! You’re neither happy nor unhappy.’
“‘I’m afraid I’m neither. It’s the bodies.’
“Hector pauses and sort of pulses on the screen, as if there was a strobe light inside of him,” Laing says.
“‘The bodies, Hutton?’ Hector more says than asks.
“‘The ones out there,’ Hutton replies, pointing weakly at the camera, which means of course that he’s pointing at Aimee and me, us and our world on the other side of the screen, or wall I should say, the white wall of my cramped library office where we were projecting the film.
“There must have been missing footage because the movie cuts—cuts as if slashed across the eye with a razor—from that moment to a shot depicting Hector, who has left the car and is running down the boulevard. The film jumps to life in a new, revolutionary sort of way, the colors more vibrant (even though it’s night), the camera movement more aggressive.
The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Page 4