John Domini - Movieola!

Imagine the crush and bewilderment. Except, wow, you don’t have to imagine. You’re there . Shrinking in your seat, wondering about the people in tech, wondering about 3-D. Hullaballoo-cination.

There’s the F run amok, and okay, F as in freak and fierce and fuck-all. But what’s this one, an R? That letter’s always seemed a peaceable galoot, the better half of purr. Look at it now, though, R as in fuck- arr , a capital that towers over the rest, galumphing around and using that long front strut like a tentacle. The letter yanks smaller ones out in clusters and scoops them up into its belly bulge. It’s complicated. First the names and name fragments get plucked up and shoveled into a black belly, then inside that white outline the white nubbins cook down, in enzymes or something, and then as those crumbs of captured chalk evaporate the chalk outline around them grows denser. The breakdown of one seems to buttress the other. It’s complicated, it’s not uninteresting—and it’s not even the weirdest thing. You’ve got the shreds of former signifiers frittering away inside the R’s parabolic gut, and you’ve got an F ripping out dreams before they happen, and it looks as if the party’s just beginning.

Also there’s a kind of vacuum U, just look, a U wildly overgrown and schlupping down chunks of credits. Wherever the U rumbles into place, above it the rows of print start to tremble, for a while they resist, but soon there’s some slippage, a little a, or is that an @ , part of a logo or website. Once that piece drops into the maw beneath, into the rattling U, as in fuck U, other rivets start to give, the lines crumble, and there’s that chalk circle of life again. The fallen frags evaporate, their cook-pot waxes stronger, and from there things only get crazier. In a couple of spots where the white flotsam and jetsam have been sucked away, the letters and what-have-you sucked into the big vowel’s gape, whoosh, in a couple spots the black doesn’t hold out either. Not only the credits themselves get vacuumed from the screen—also the credits’ backdrop, the black, rips loose and tumbles into the vacuum. The very earth beneath our feet!

Or something like that, if you can picture our eyeballs having feet. It leaves you wondering: what’s underneath ? Behind the black, the border of our universe, if eight or ten bucks could buy you the universe—what?

Not much of the backdrop tears away, a scrap here and there, and beneath it the most you can make out is more scraps, fragments again, this time composed of color and jitter. Fire ants and Daisy Dukes? What are you watching? The movie, it could be, under there, where the black’s been torn away. The flick you thought you came out to see. It could be, as you sort out a detail or two more, Kalashnikovs and synchronized swimming. It’s something familiar, these tatters, these flashes where the black used to be. Granted, the edit is à la nutso. That slam dunk for the championship, it’s so far out of sync, no way it could be the work of the people in tech. Still, whoever did this, they couldn’t blast the entire multiplex to smithereens. They had to leave a few stretches of aqueduct above the ruins. And isn’t that what you came out to see? A story with staying power? It’s as if one of the monsters threw a wrench into the works and then the spit-out gears and bolts and sprockets came together as a better mechanism. Wrench-aissance.

Though you’d swear that no machinery could function long among these Zilla-Letters, these Destructo-Glyphs. They’ve got friends, more trouble. They’ve got three Ns running interference, when did that happen, one N pitching in with the F and the U, helping to pry loose a recalcitrant white bit here and there, and the other two running interference around the lumbering, tentacled R. Not quite so large, these auxiliary three. Not so monstrous, but no less of a menace to the lingering credits, the huddled names and brand names. Brand logos, websites, stubborn traces of a former reality. Stubborn, yes. They do appear to be hanging in, now that you’ve hung in, now as you get the larger picture.

They do appear, these bits and symbols here and there, to have banded together into a barricade. Or they’ve made themselves over as, what, a spiderweb? Lines of white print, or what used to be print, have wound themselves into thread and stitched back and forth across a patch of the confounding emergent movie.

When did that happen? How could it happen?

Wherever the backdrop came off, wherever the black split open and erupted in color and drama (isn’t that drama, in those torn spaces?), the white bricabrac must’ve first been stripped. You couldn’t tear out chunks of black, or the U couldn’t, without first cleaning off the white. Yet there’s some kind of comeback afoot. Some kind of resistance, that’s the larger picture. The credits have mustered a counterforce. Those huddles are deliberate, that barricade is holding, and dinosaur DNA alone isn’t enough to turn a few random letters into the Freaks that Devoured the Mall. They may have the size, but the others have the numbers. The others can shake loose of their rank and file, the torpor of reading left to right. A setup like that, left-right-left-right across the colorless flats, wasn’t it ripe for plucking? Wasn’t it bound to shred and crack and flinder and in the end, turn cannibal?

Now that the smaller critters have been set free, they can find ways around the marauding jumbos. Where the fabric of the former universe burst open, where there’s an outbreak of story, no matter how bizarre and pyrotechnic, they can sling lines of containment.

Is the monster R in trouble? Is that what you’re seeing, a brave squad of lowercase w’s and h’s, maybe a t or two, wrapping their arms around each other to create a kind of lasso? You never noticed that about letters before, how they’ve got arms, most of them, loving arms apparently, and extensible too. The way this squad links up, they might be taking that Sistine ceiling touch-of-God to the next level. They’re a rope, a group-grope-rope, and they pitch their loop past the hench-Ns and around the fixed foot of the R. They yoke the big roughhouse and set him flailing and tottering. As it wobbles, wow, look, a few of the bits in its belly tumble out. You never thought of that, how the bastard may be huge but he’s still two-dimensional, he’s got his limits. He spills undigested nubbins of credit.

Elsewhere some of the advertising trademarks have woven a kind of barbed wire around the F. A cage for a Tyrannosaur? A mad experiment, homespun white wire, but then again, why not? If the credits birthed the Destroyer, can’t they build a box to hold it? Some of those advertising trademarks were bristly to begin with, the people in Design wanted tension in the graphics, and meantime, over in another quadrant, other leftovers have come up with a tactic for the omnivorous vacuum U. A trick out of Three-Card Monte, bait and switch. First, a couple-three broken lines of phonemes will gather and compose themselves, as if they still added up to something comprehensible. Of course they don’t—what you’re seeing would never be mistaken for words in sequence—but nonetheless those few chameleonic lines will attract the U, eager as ever to schlup. It’s not as if the big upright can read , after all. But no sooner is the urn in place than, above its hungry mouth, the ruse breaks and scatters. The signifier was only signifyin’.

The idea is, each time, you leave the freak vowel more run down. Doesn’t even the Devourer get run down? Doesn’t an anomaly, too, hit the wall? Anyway, what you’re seeing is all a mad experiment. A counterforce of the blind, unsure of its end, it scrabbles on feeling its way.

It’s a good thing you got out! Back home you’d have fallen into that stalling tactic, that channel-surfer’s tactic, blipping from scene to scene in search of just the right shock on which to end. That notion that the right scene would set up your destiny. The dream that this country does best. Good thing you came out instead, you risked a doddering and fusty entertainment based on how long a person can go without having to pee. The flicks themselves have long since run out of surprises: if the assassin doesn’t fall in love, the bookish girl in black whoops it up in a candy-colored romper room. There never was much opportunity for surprise, in ninety minutes or a hundred, and there’s even less these days, when you need a multimillion-dollar urban-renewal package just to save the downtown moviehouse. The star-studded American shebang, winding up through the coming attractions and down through the credits in their grave-rows, that’s long since been squeezed dry and shoehorned into smaller screens. Yet here you sit, putting off the bathroom. It feels like a stone in your belly, but that’s nothing compared with what’s going on in the belly of the R. It’s mostly empty now, that upper-story belly, now that the rebels have lassoed its back foot. As the flabby consonant struggles against its leash, most of its half-digested bits and pieces tumble out. The remains, gnawed and pitted and in no way legible. But look, wow, the monster’s stomach acids had a side effect. Look, a few of these nubbins have been infected. We’re talking zombie nubbins, and they’re sprouting up, too, muscling up. The alien spawn flex their dorsi, they spread their talons, and one of them’s going after the rope that holds the mother-letter’s leg. The resistance needs to regroup, and if they had any last semblance of jot and tittle, of names or logos, they’ve lost it now. Next thing you know, anything’s possible, it’s fresh dynamics altogether, here a Visigoth or a chimera, there a warrior saint or a comely stranger with a quick sword and a reflecting shield. Now when did that happen?