Рик Муди - The Creature Lurches From the Lagoon

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I wanted to make movies when I was younger. I was at Brown, and they had a really good film program, and I had made a couple of super-8 films while I was in high school. Around me were Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon and others of their ilk, filmmakers gathering up their filmmaking ambitions. But I arrived at a decision, you know, that I didn’t want to collaborate with anyone that much, didn’t want to try to learn how to construct a story while negotiating with other people. I mean, of course, that the medium of cinema is inherently collaborative, as many have observed. Therefore, when you make the argument that a film reflects a director’s point of view, are you describing the medium as actually practiced? What about the role of the producer? Is Andrew Sarris’ auteur theory not a particular argument, rather than a conclusion? Every Irwin Allen production is like every other Irwin Allen production ( Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno ), as is every Jerry Bruckheimer film ( The Rock, Crimson Tide, Days of Thunder, Top Gun, etc.); so when people speak of the director’s vision, are they not speaking likewise of the screenwriter’s vision and the producer’s vision, not to mention the contributions of editor or composer or cinematographer?

It’s a Napoleonic ambition, writing fiction, wanting to be, first and last, the one responsible, the one whose name goes on the product, alongside no other. There’s no muddle, there’s no dilution of responsibility, no diminishment of control. Perhaps this is an old-fashioned thing, this presumption that the solitary artist is creator of the work, not part of a vast cultural force. In the context of adaptation, however, you the solitary artist are an occupied country. As with all occupied countries, you harbor a resentment toward the occupier. And the politics within your nation, after the occupation, will be contentious and Balkan.

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The wobbly shot of the creature lurching forth from the lagoon, or rather the wobbly shot from the point of view of the monster, as it lurches forth, disconsolate, shaggy, confused, hungry: one of the rare moments when cinema tries to exploit a first-person narrative. It’s always a wobbly shot. The gait of the monster is never sure-footed. I’ve been on the wrong side of a few panel discussions with film-history experts on this matter. There are many such first-person moments in cinema, these experts observe, in e.g., Rashomon, where the different stories being narrated by the different characters are concealed in a third-person point of view, though they are actually in the first person. Often the gaze of the camera itself is held (by experts) to be the first-person voiceof the director, but I think this argument is sophistry. It’s an attempt by artists stuck with an inflexible storytelling medium (cinema) to argue for flexibility. I’d suggest that film, almost entirely, is in the third person. In narrative filmmaking, anyway. In films in which the characters do not address the camera.Mostly, therefore, cinema renders depictions of community, people in collision, not depictions of individual consciousness, which is the province of language. Music feels like consciousness, painting depicts the sensation of observing, but language can describe the actual experience of consciousness, because it can record sensory data and the experience and interpretation of this sensual material. One of the first things you give up when you sign the option agreement in which your book is given over to filmmakers is this consciousness. If your book is in the first person, you may have to content yourself with a voice-over, often considered a difficulty by producers of popular entertainment. Or you may simply find that the point of view of your first-person narrator (in my book, he concealed himself as a third-person narrator, only to venture forth with the truth of his identityat the end of the story) is stripped away immediately, to be replaced, again, by portraiture of the community. Your first-person narrator may get more face time, but that will be the only vestige of his former role. This arrangement works well when it is drama that is being depicted, conflicts between individuals, but it is an arrangement that doesn’t at all favor the mysterious adventure of consciousness, the dreams and volitions and complexities of consciousness, the way one mood or habit of being merges with and becomes its opposite so fluidly. Consciousness is hard to make palatable in movies and is probably boring when it is attempted at all. There are some trade-offs on which filmmakers have relied in order to delude you into believing that this is human psychology being depicted here at the multiplex — a dream sequence, a flashback. But these equivalencies almost always feel cumbersome.

Which reminds me, there’s a shot in The Ice Storm of a hard-boiled egg on a countertop. I could never figure out what that shot was doing in the movie. It’s only there for a split second, just before Joan Allen goes on her shoplifting spree. For a second, on a countertop, an egg, without a character, just an egg. Whose egg? Ang’s egg? James Schamus’s egg? My egg? Turns out it was meant to be the Ozu shot in The Ice Storm: the iteration of domesticity, as this domesticity gets left behind. See how difficult abstraction is to render in the movies?

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Centrally, in both book and film of The Ice Storm, a boy is accidentally electrocuted. My apologies for giving away part of the story, but I imagine most people who care to have either seen the film or have heard about this electrocution from others. It took me a long time, while writing the novel, to figure out how to execute this poor, unfortunate boy, and it was a turning point in my life as a writer. Before that time, both in my first novel and as I embarked on writing The Ice Storm, I had felt confined by the difficulties of getting published. I thought there were certain ways that I was supposed to behave if I were going to get published. Poor Mikey Williams (he had his surname changed to Carver in the movie, for legal reasons )was the ritual sacrifice that enabled me to start thinking about what I liked to do as an artist, what material called to me, what my own voice sounded like, and so forth. In fact, the opening of the third section of the book, wherein Mikey meets his demise, summoned in me the beginning of the kinds of longer sentences that came to characterize everything I’ve written in the ten years since I finished The Ice Storm. I know, therefore, that Mikey’s sacrifice, as surely as if I were a Mayan priest and poor Mikey were laid out on the stone slab before me, made the gods smile. Because nature is disjunct, nature is cruel, nature is discontinuous, nature is lumpy not smooth. Children die, and planes go down, safes fall out of the sky. And yet cinema is that popular art in which no child is supposed to be slain. Again, there’s this matter of the very large investments. Are you going to kill the kid? This was reported to me as an anxious question lodged by the studio financing The Ice Storm, which studio was probably even more anxious when word came back that Ang and James, indeed, intended to kill the kid. In the seventies, you could still get away with this kind of thing: in The Conversation, say, or in Bonnie and Clyde, you could get away with a movie photographed in the dark, mortal hues, but not in an era of family entertainment. Adultery, child sexuality, accidental deaths of adolescents? Not demographically sound. And yet The Ice Storm got made. The sacrifice worked. Or maybe it was just Ang’s good-luck ceremony. On the first day of shooting. His ceremony involved a bowl of rice and some bowing. It was dignified and strange. And it worked.