Steve Erickson - Zeroville

Another half hour passes and neither Dotty nor Vikar says anything until Clift takes Shelley Winters out on a lake in a small rowboat.

“You have to hand it to Shelley,” Dotty says. “She was supposed to be a bombshell, that’s what the studio was grooming her for — she was going to be Marilyn Monroe, before anyone knew who Marilyn Monroe was. She and Marilyn were roommates when this was made. But she fought for this role, this role of the dowdy little factory mouse who, you know, comes fully alive only when she’s terrified, and she plays it right on that edge between pathos and pathetic. Now watch this.” Montgomery Clift’s eye dissolves into a shot of the rowboat and its passengers in the distance, a faraway glint of light on the dark lake that becomes a glint in Clift’s eye before his face fades altogether. “Like with the close-ups, this picture did things with dissolves no one had seen, not in Hollywood pictures anyway. You had two images dissolving at the same time, one coming in and one going out. There have to be more dissolves in this picture than anything since Murnau. Stevens planned all that — we were measuring the dissolves in feet , if you can believe that — and the thing is, this picture doesn’t look like any of Stevens’ others. If anything, Stevens always had been a purist, he liked the idea of stillness, just putting the camera there and watching, especially if he thought, like when Astaire and Rogers dance in Swing Time , a cut would just disrupt things. Your boy Preminger is another one like that — no cuts at all, put the camera there and show the audience everything and let them figure out who or what they’re supposed to pay attention to.” Clift and Winters talk in the boat and the camera turns from one to the other. “You see what’s going on here?” she says.

“I’m not sure.”

“Every time we turn to Shelley, she’s right in the middle of the frame. She’s pregnant with Monty’s baby, she’s both threatening and pleading with him to marry her, and when we see her, she almost seems to loom. Overbearing, frantic, somehow she’s not only shrill to the ear but to the eye — hell, shrill to the soul . Then every time the camera turns to Monty—”

“—he’s hunched down in the boat,” says Vikar, “at the end—”

“—the far end of the boat. The far, far end. Like he wants to crawl out of it. Like he wants to crawl out of not just the boat but the fucking movie. Like he can’t get far enough away.”

“The whole world,” nods Vikar, “is coming down.”

“Half the frame is the dark lake, the dark woods, dark sky behind him, everything dark hovering over him, enveloping him, bearing down on him. Back to Shelley, she almost seems to be growing closer, even though the camera isn’t closing in at all. That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious. A few minutes ago we thought Monty was going to take Shelley out on the lake and throw her overboard and drown her — and we’re horrified, we’re thinking you can’t do that, she’s pregnant with your child, you have to do right by her. Then in the boat he seems to have changed his mind — hard to know whether it’s conscience or failure of nerve, but he seems to be reconciling himself to a life with her, his dream of Liz slipping farther away, and now we’re thinking, even if we don’t realize it, Jesus, will you please throw this broad in the lake already? Liz is waiting for you! The most beautiful woman in the world is naked in bed, waiting for you to come to her right now ! Life with Shelley Winters? You would be better off dead — at which point we’ve doomed him, we’ve doomed all of them. The picture’s even gotten the women in the audience half-thinking this, which has got to be the mindfuck of all time. Now, the truth is I’m not sure Stevens understood any of it. I think he thought he was making some sociological thing about class in America or something. But everything about the way this picture is shot and cut says this is a dream. This is a dream where you’re guilty not just for what you do but for what you think and feel, where you’re guilty not just for acting on your fantasies but having them in the first place. I mean, this picture couldn’t be more morally absurd. But in some way that we don’t understand, it makes sense. So when you get to the end of the picture and he’s going off to the execution chamber and Liz is going into a convent —a complete cliché—giving her life to God because there’s no one left after you’ve fallen in love with Montgomery Clift, that makes sense, too.”

Vikar reaches over and turns on the light, even though the movie isn’t over. “God,” he says, “doesn’t deserve her.”

96.

Each scene is in all times, Vikar tells himself, and all times are in each scene. Each shot, each set-up, each sequence is in all times, all times are in each shot, each set-up, each sequence. The scenes of a movie can be shot out of sequence not because it’s more convenient, but because all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time. No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other. No scene is really shot “out of order.” It’s a false concern that a scene must anticipate another that follows, even if it’s not been shot yet, or that a scene must reflect a scene that precedes it, even if it’s not been shot yet, because all scenes anticipate and reflect each other. Scenes reflect what has not yet happened, scenes anticipate what already has happened. Scenes that have not yet happened, have. “Continuity” is one of the myths of film; in film, time is round, like a reel. Fuck, as Dotty would say, continuity.

97.

Seven years after coming to Los Angeles, Vikar will meet at a party in Laurel Canyon, not far from the cave where he slept that morning the police came for him, a famously renegade director trying to get another feature off the ground. His previous movie was something of a hit and the director was nominated for an Academy Award, along with the star of the movie who’s his wife — but now he’s back to struggling again. His new movie is ostensibly about a strip-club owner trying to protect his establishment and his dancers from gangsters. Really it’s about the director protecting his dreams from Hollywood.

The director will stare at Vikar’s head with a wild lopsided grin and tell him about the time he was a young actor just out of the army in the early fifties, about to enroll in the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and he went to see A Place in the Sun in a theater downtown. God I hate this movie, the young actor thought when the lights came up. The next afternoon he went back to see it again. He went back to see it again the next afternoon and the next and the next, the theater getting emptier around him, each time telling himself, God I hate this movie, until finally, halfway through the eighth consecutive time seeing it, he whispered to himself in the dark: God I love this movie.

98.

One night Vikar cheats on Elizabeth Taylor. He finds the air around her too thin to breathe anymore, which is to say he finds the air of his own dreams too thin to breathe. Defied and thwarted and driven to distraction by her, he feels no choice but to back away and give her up, and find someone else — the later Elizabeth, perhaps, the Elizabeth of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 . That Elizabeth would lie between his legs and take him in her mouth. But that Elizabeth has no hold on him.