Steven Dunne - Deity

While Edith is whingeing again the three friends hold hands and set off further up the Rock. This is in slow motion and there is an unnatural rumbling as they leave. Edith seems to know something is wrong and begins screaming and runs off.

I found this film very moving. It was quite slow but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. What I found most moving was the calmness with which the girls faced their death. They are the only ones in the film who don’t seem to be suffering. They’re leaving the world behind. Their pain is over and it is left to everyone remaining to suffer the torment of their disappearance and to wish they’d behaved differently towards them.

Back in the real world, Mrs Appleyard’s school starts to go bust and she ends up drinking too much and then killing herself at Hanging Rock. Sara throws herself off the roof of the school because she misses Miranda so much and she can’t bear the pain. The director is telling us that perfect love can’t exist for very long and we have to settle for imperfect love or die.

Interestingly, one of the girls, Irma, is found but she can’t remember anything and her life becomes really miserable again once she returns to normal life. The director might be suggesting she may have been better off dead because now she has to grow old and ugly and live with all her pain. He’s also trying to tell us that a lot of the story may not be real and not to believe what happened because the first words spoken by Miranda are from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe which I found on the internet. ‘What we see and what we seem is but a dream, a dream within a dream.’ This tells us that reality and fantasy are being mixed up, like life may be a (bad) dream but there are different places where you can be happy, including when you go to the afterlife.

824 words

By Kyle Kennedy

Kyle checked through the text and saved it on to his pen drive. He lay back on his bed and flicked at a remote. He was bare-chested, his skinny frame glistening in the evening heat. Music drifted out of the speakers mounted at each corner of the room — The Smiths. He looked down at the pasty, almost white flesh on his puny torso and pulled on a T-shirt in disgust then gazed at the cloudless sky, the same sky the girls at Hanging Rock must have been looking at. He could hear the faint muffle of outdoor life continuing elsewhere even though his window was firmly closed against it.

His favourite song started to play — ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ — and he began to sing along. He nodded wistfully when Morrissey sang about the possibility of being run over by a ten-ton truck and that to die beside his lover in such a way would be a privilege. Kyle dug into his skintight jeans and pulled out a crumpled and dirty piece of paper. Unfolding it, he read the handwritten text.

Jake finished his hundredth sit-up and fell back on to the floor panting. He sat up and rolled over to do his press-ups when he noticed his mobile flashing. It was Kyle. Jake sat on his bed and looked at the sweat dotting his brow in the wardrobe mirror.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s Kyle.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Jake. I’m outside.’

With phone in hand, Jake looked out into the dark sultry night. Kyle was at the front gate waving at him. ‘It’s late, Kyle.’

‘I’ve got something for you. To thank you for this morning.’

‘This morning?’ asked Jake, though he knew very well what Kyle meant.

‘When Wilson went for me at college. You stopped him hitting me.’

Jake smiled. ‘Oh, that.’

‘Can you come down? I’d knock on the door but I don’t think your dad likes me much.’

‘Wait there.’ A minute later, Jake had slipped through the kitchen and out of the back door. He came round the corner of the house and walked towards Kyle, who pulled his hood down and watched Jake’s panther-like steps.

Kyle grinned sheepishly. ‘Hi, Jake.’

‘Kyle.’ Jake nodded back. There was a brief silence. ‘Well?’

‘Well, it’s my eighteenth tomorrow.’

‘Happy Birthday.’

‘Thanks.’ Kyle hesitated.

‘Hope you’re getting a new hoodie.’

‘Sorry?’

Jake smiled to diminish any insult. ‘That G-Star thing you’re wearing. You ever take it off?’

‘It depends,’ said Kyle mysteriously.

Jake stiffened. ‘Was there something else?’

‘My mum’s going away for the weekend with Daddy Warbucks — Uncle Len. He’s kind of her boyfriend.’

‘I know him,’ said Jake. ‘That old fart who dresses like Eminem.’

Kyle giggled and Jake reluctantly laughed with him. ‘I know. A pensioner in a tracksuit. That’s so not right on so many levels. Well, I’m having a few people round — not many, just a handful.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘I don’t have a block full of friends.’ Jake’s expression remained sombre so Kyle said his piece. ‘About nine o’clock. Only if you want, of course. And no present, just presence.’ Kyle laughed, embarrassed at his own pun.

Jake stared at him, making no attempt to reply. Finally he squirrelled a glance at Kyle’s hand. ‘You said you had something for me.’

‘Right.’ Kyle handed over a pen drive, a CD case and a rolled-up poster. ‘I’ve done that film review for Media Studies. I thought you might like to borrow it — you know, get some ideas for your own essay.’ Jake kept his eyes on Kyle then unrolled the poster. ‘It’s Morrissey from The Smiths. Greatest Living Englishman,’ Kyle looked around and laughed shyly, ‘far as I’m concerned. And I burned you a Smiths CD — you know, just to thank you.’ Kyle nervously rested one plimsolled foot on the other. He looked about twelve to Jake with his short crop and pale girlish features. Not even a suggestion of facial hair.

‘You didn’t have to. But thanks.’

Kyle took his hands out of his pockets and looked up into Jake’s face but Jake had turned away.

‘Was there anything else?’ he said coldly.

Kyle looked at the ground. ‘A ten-ton truck would be nice.’ He pulled his hood back up and walked away into the night.

‘What does that mean?’ shouted Jake after him.

Kyle turned, a wistful smile on his face. ‘When you listen to the CD you’ll know. Track nine.’

Rusty walked slowly along the pavement, his eyes glued to the glow of his camcorder. What a result. Becky Blake dancing for him, stripping for him. Forget Animal House starring John Belushi and directed by John Landis. This was no American frat-house comedy, this was . . this was . . Body Double. That’s it. Brian de Palma’s remake of Vertigo starring Melanie Griffith as the erotic dancer, performing her dance of death for the hapless Peeping Tom in a nearby apartment .

Rusty grinned at the playback. Becky had seen him, he was sure. Cry for help? Goddamn right. He was so engrossed in the image of Becky’s naked body that he didn’t hear the noise from behind until it was too late. At the last minute the whirring of a bicycle registered and he turned in time to catch a flash of steel descending towards his neck. He screamed in shock and pain and fell to the ground, clutching at the wound.

As he hit the ground he tried to keep hold of the camcorder but it fell from his grasp and rolled along the pavement, coming to a stop with the lens facing him. As the blood trickled through Rusty’s fingers, clamped to his neck, he tried to right himself but caught sight of the camcorder as he did so. The red light was on.

Ignoring his injury, he reached out a bloodied hand towards the lens just out of reach. A second later, he slumped down to the hard pavement with a rasping sigh, and lay motionless while the camcorder continued to store his image.