Don DeLillo - Underworld

The dancers spread across the stage and in a single dexterous swipe, like unholstering a gun, they pulled off their tearaway trousers and went into a final rousing kick, gams flashing, and drew several waves of applause. Then they dissolved their kick line and formed a star, clearly depicted in the high-angle shot on the screen above them, and the footlights painted them solid red. They marched in place as the orchestra lifted solemnly into the pit and began to play, what-something Russian, Mara thought. And how strange it was to see a thing like this, a red star of such political and military moment, plunked down here, the grim signet of the Soviet Union, in the Music Hall of all places-think of all the Easter shows and Lassie movies.

The dancers stood white-faced now, upstage, transfixed by beams of light from mammoth spots high in the rear of the auditorium. The curtain began to fall, covering first the video image of the dancers and then the dancers. The music grew weepy and frilled and then the curtain lifted to reveal the vast movie screen bearing a single word, Unter-welt , and finally the borders at each end of the curved screen folded in to accommodate the small squarish frame of the old movie, and images poured from the projection booth, patchy and dappled with age.

Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to-you wouldn't want it any other way

Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter- there's a lot of opposition and conflict.

It seems you are watching a movie about a mad scientist. He sweeps through the frame, dressed in well-defined black and white, in layered robes, wielding an atomic ray gun. Figures move through crude rooms in some underground space. They are victims or prisoners, perhaps experimental subjects. A glimpse of a prisoner's face shows he is badly deformed and it is less shocking than funny. He has the sloped head, shallow jaw and protuberant lips of an earthworm- but a worm with a human pathos about him.

In a scene that was extravagant, silly, off-kilter and technically impressive all at the same time, the scientist fires the ray gun at a victim, who begins to glow in the dark, jerking and dancing and then looking rather wanly at his arm, which starts to melt away.

Other victims appeared, muscles and bones reshaped, slits for eyes, shuffling on stump legs.

Klara thought of the radiation monsters in Japanese science-fiction movies and looked down the aisle at Miles, who was a scholar of the form.

Was Eisenstein being prescient about nuclear menace or about Japanese cinema?

She thought of the prehistoric reptiles that came mutating out of the slime and the insects with chromosome damage poking from the desert near some test site, ants the size of bookmobiles-these were movies for the drive-ins of the fifties, a boy and girl yanking at each other's buckles and snaps while the bomb footage unfurls and the giant leeches and scorpions appear on the horizon, all radioactive and seeking revenge, and the fleeing crowds, of course, because in the end these creatures not only come from the bomb but displace it, and the armies mobilize and the crowds flee and the sirens wail like sirens.

Eisenstein's creatures were fully human and this complicated the fun. They humped and scuttled through the shadows, hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it's okay to laugh at cripples and mutants if everybody else is laughing, it's a way to play off your aversion, and it wasn't just the twisted features and elaborate gestures and the curious sort of lip-gloss effect you've noticed on the faces of male actors in silent movies but the music as well, this was pretty broad too-string sections of soaring melodrama.

A title now and then, in Russian, untranslated, not that it mattered-it made in fact for a giddy kind of total confusion.

Jack said, "Getting claustrophobic, are you?"

And it was true, the film was embedded so completely in the viewpoint of the prisoners that Klara was beginning to squirm.

Jack said, "I bet you'd give a hundred dollars to stand in the rain right now and smoke a cigarette."

"Is it raining?"

"Does it matter?"

The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some nether-land crevice. There was none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive-the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed, and this was disappointing to Klara. She loved the martial architecture of huge moving bodies, the armies and mobs in other Eisenstein films, and she felt she was in some ambiguous filmscape somewhere between the Soviet model and Hollywood 's vaulted heaven of love, sex, crime and individual heroism, of scenery and luxury and gorgeous toilets.

All you have to do is think of the other Underworld , a 1927 gangster film and box office smash.

Esther said, "I want to be rewarded for this ordeal."

Admit it, you're bored. Klara tried to take encouragement from Miles. He was in a state of rapt elation, that pure surrender he undertakes, able to lose himself in the eye and mind of the movie, totally drawn and charmed-charmed at some level even when he doesn't like what he's watching. But she knew he liked this. It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along.

How and when would it reveal itself?

She wondered why the film was silent. Maybe it was shot earlier than the experts surmised. But she thought it was more likely that Eisenstein knew he'd have an easier time doing the film in secret if he did not use sound. And maybe silence suited the development of his themes.

What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism, against the party-minded mandate to produce art that advanced the Soviet cause. Was he in secret rebellion? He'd been condemned for earlier work, according to Miles, and had seemed to capitulate. But what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?

Even better. Doesn't this movie seem to anticipate the terror that was mounted against Russian artists in the late nineteen-thirties? The secret police. The arrests, the torture, the disappearances, the executions.

The mad scientist aims the gun.

A figure stands against a wall, his body going white.

The scientist shows a tight smile.

The victim is transfigured, pain-racked, his lower lip dribbling off his face, a growth appearing at the side of his neck, a radiant time-lapse melanoma.

The scientist approaches and touches the man, tenderly, on the cheek.

Abruptly the screen went dark. Intermission seemed a timely idea and Klara thought she'd take Esther on a tour of the powder rooms, there were quite a few, she thought, on several levels, and well worth beholding-murals, sculpture, furniture, things she'd seen through her mother's eyes, suddenly free in space, independent of memory

Miles went up to a private viewing room in the third mezzanine to confer with his colleagues. The two women left Jack in a chair in the grand lounge, downstairs, a carpeted area about two hundred feet in length, and they went into the nearest powder room.