Robert Coover: A Night at the Movies Or, You Must Remember This

Nor are aristocrats and mad projectionists their only catch. Other milieus slide by like dream cloths, dropping swashbucklers, cowboys, little tramps, singing families, train conductors and comedy teams, a paperboy on a bicycle, gypsies, mummies, leather-hatted pilots and wonder dogs, neglected wives, Roman soldiers in gleaming breastplates, bandits and gold diggers, and a talking jackass, all falling, together with soggy cigarette butts, publicity stills, and flattened popcorn tubs, into a soft plash of laughter and applause that he seems to have heard before. "Another fine mess!" the jackass can be heard to bray mournfully, as the mobs, jammed up behind police barricades in the dark but festive Opera House square, cry out for blood and brains. "The public is never wrong!" they scream. "Let the revels begin!"

Arc lights sweep the sky and somewhere, distantly, an ancient bugle blows, a buzzer sounds. He is pulled to his feet and prodded into line between a drunken countess and an animated pig, marching along to the thunderous piping of an unseen organ. The aisle to the guillotine, thickly carpeted, is lined with red velvet ropes and leads to a marble staircase where, on a raised platform high as a marquee, a hooded executioner awaits like a patient usher beside his gigantic ticket chopper. A voice on the public address system is recounting, above the booming organ and electrical chimes, their crimes (hauteur is mentioned, glamour, dash and daring), describing them all as "creatures of the night, a collection of the world's most astounding horrors, these abominable parvenus of iconic transactions, the shame of a nation, three centuries in the making, brought to you now in the mightiest dramatic spectacle of all the ages!" He can hear the guillotine blade rising and dropping, rising and dropping, like a link-and-claw mechanism in slow motion, the screams and cheers of the spectators cresting with each closing of the gate. "There's been some mistake!" he whimpers. If he could just reach the switchboard! Where's the EXIT sign? Isn't there always…? "I don't belong here!" "Ja, zo, it iss der vages off cinema," mutters the drunken countess behind him, peeling off a garter to throw to the crowd. Spots appear on his clothing, then get left behind as he's shoved along, as though the air itself might be threadbare and discolored, and there are blinding flashes at his feet like punctures where bright light is leaking through.

"It's all in your mind," he seems to hear the usherette at the foot of the stairs whisper, as she points him up the stairs with her little flashlight, "so we're cutting it off."

"What — ?!" he cries, but she is gone, a bit player to the end. The animated pig has made his stuttering farewell and the executioner is holding his head aloft like a winning lottery ticket or a bingo ball. The projectionist climbs the high marble stairs, searching for his own closing lines, but he doesn't seem to have a speaking part. "You're leaving too soon," remarks the hooded executioner without a trace of irony, as he kicks his legs out from under him. "You're going to miss the main feature." "I thought I was it," he mumbles, but the executioner, pitilessly, chooses not to hear him. He leans forward, all hopes dashed, to grip the cold bolted foot of the guillotine, and as he does so, he notices the gum stuck under it, the dropped candy wrapper, the aroma of fresh pee in plush upholstery. Company at last! he remarks wryly to himself as the blade drops, surrendering himself finally (it's a last-minute rescue of sorts) to that great stream of image-activity that characterizes the mortal condition, recalling for some reason a film he once saw (The Revenge of Something-or-Other, or The Return of, The Curse of …), in which -

Titles and credits fade in and out against a plain white background, later understood as a bright but overcast sky. Silence at first; then, distantly, gradually augmenting, a hollow voice: "I have risen! I have risen!" As the cry grows louder, it repeats and echoes itself, until it folds in upon itself entirely, unfurling into a kind of hollow vibration which fades away as the last of the credits fade.

Slow even tilt down to a village on a flat plain under the overcast sky. The camera moves into the village by way of a dirt road, which gradually becomes the main street leading to the cathedral, the dominant feature of the village. The houses along the street are small, humble, huddled close together, the outer walls made of clay, some of them whitewashed. The light is penetrating but not glaring; virtually no shadows. A dark frame is painted around the doors of some houses, and there are empty flowerpots on sills or lying about. No trees, grass, flowers; no animals; everything is empty and silent. The doors are all closed, the windows shuttered. Long steady contemplative takes. The cathedral is glimpsed frequently as the camera pans slowly about, but it remains unexamined, out of focus, mere background.

Silence maintains, as the camera proceeds deeper into the village, occasionally pausing as it pans onto small streets or alleyways. These are narrower than the main street, rutted, winding. Once or twice, the camera hesitates before a side street, zooms in slightly, pauses, pulls back, pans away, continues. Finally, at one side street, no different from any of the others, it zooms in slightly, hesitates, then continues slowly to advance, leaving the main road.

Same kind of penetrating shadowless light on the side street; same silence and emptiness. The houses are, if anything, poorer and pressed even more tightly together. The camera movement, though still unhurried, is less steady as it passes over the rutted street. The camera now makes frequent turns into yet smaller side streets, each in worse condition than the last, and the camera motion becomes consequently more and more unsteady. The camera pauses briefly from time to time to focus on some small detail or other: a barred door, a shuttered window, a lone dry weed, a small fence, a rock, the texture of a clay wall.

The streets narrow, the surface worsens, and so does the jolting movement of the camera, until it is almost impossible to keep anything in focus. Stop. Inconsequential view of part of a rooftop. Brief jolting motion. Stop. Inconsequential view of the street, the corner of a house. Jolting motion. Stop. View of a house, like the others, and of the narrow space between it and the next house. In this space, between the houses, but in full light (still no shadows), a cord is strung and hanging from it is a small scrap of tattered white cloth. Pan to the house and slow zoom in: clay wall, shuttered windows, closed door. The slow zoom continues, moving in on the door and toward its handle.

Sudden brief fluttering sound, like a bat's wings, loud, breaking the silence. The camera swings back to the scrap of white cloth on the line: it droops lifelessly there as before. The camera, after hesitating, begins slowly to pan back to the door. The cloth, still in view, moves slightly (no sound): the camera pauses, pans back to the cloth, waits.

Sudden loud click, amplified alarmingly. The camera wheels sharply past the unshuttered front window to the door, still closed, zooms in on the handle, pauses. The handle does not move, but the camera, after a brief wait, begins to pan hesitatingly back toward the window, the now unshuttered window. Behind it, in the darkness, a pale gaunt face is staring out, as though in anger. Or judgment. Then the face fades back into the shadows, leaving only the darkness. The camera hesitates, then zooms very slowly in on the window.

Again the loud fluttering of cloth or wings: rapid pan to the clothesline. Focusing adjustments. The tattered piece of white cloth is motionless, but the bottom end of it is now curled back up over the cord, so that it hangs in a tattered loop.