John Domini: Movieola!

Plus what’s on the screen establishes itself at once as an intense business, near climax and in closeup, a man and a woman in a riveting drama of love amid the turmoil of history, their gazes narrow and tormented, their pouting both full of deep thought and utterly kissable. Meanwhile some inconceivable speaker system kicks in and we catch a word or three of this couple’s entanglement and despair: Why can’t people…this awful war… . Swee, looking on, needs a long moment before she notices that the clothing’s inconsistent: something turn-of-the-previous-century about the man’s lapels and something thirty or forty years more recent about the woman’s collar.

And then, as our girl assesses these particulars, there on an open-air balcony so high she can spot the sailboats out beyond San Pedro, so far above the asphalt she’d break her neck if she fell—then as Nola thinks about Costume Design, just the sort of detail you’ve got to get right before you make your pitch, she understands with a flinching incontrovertibility that she’s the one who did this , the Visualization that Ate the Mall. The certainty of it comes over her with a twinned surge, not only fright but also power, though a power in itself terrifying, from out of deepest left field, and under other circumstances it might’ve got her up from her chair and trying to have some fun with it, this wild hair; at least she might’ve danced in place. But what can she do here? Our Lady slips off her glasses, she rests a hinge against her lower lip, blinking, blinking. She hadn’t even dressed the set. She hadn’t pinned down the era. The image in her head hadn’t come together, as yet, into anything dance-worthy.

She’s still got to do her homework, okay, granted. But look at what she has done, the fender-bender out on the boulevard, the audience numbers growing. Clusters of onlookers came spilling, even, out of the armpit of the woman onscreen, where the doors to the Barnes & Noble used to be. Who wouldn’t suck the stems right off their glasses to discover they had power like this, who wouldn’t find themselves as much wound up as undone, tossed and turned in carnival giddies? Not our Nola, anyway, so whacked and fascinated that at first she doesn’t notice, over her other shoulder, the closeups losing their focus; she catches the movie again only as the lovers do an elegant fade to shadow, to black, and then as their scene leaves its difficult questions hanging in the air the entire theater begins to collapse, the theater or the Ferris wheel, pulsing and shimmering as again the mammoth half-circle separates into the fat silvery ribbons that had composed it, and insofar as Nola can think at all she understands that her turn up in the crow’s nest is coming to an end, gently but not without alacrity, her open-air balcony is wheeling down and around on a receding surf of fresh-cooked pasta, the whole extrapolation settling back into the café from which it came, the girders and window frames of the bookstore re-emerging, and the posters in the windows and the abandoned lattes on the tables, the whole dull espresso-for-lunch setup returning untroubled except for a Vaseline-like slick here or there on the corners of the furniture.

That last, the leftover goop of Krazy Kat World, that may be just the residue of her own dizziness, since after all our Lady in her little black dress has been put back into place with a certain courtesy, so that the same book as before lies open on her tabletop. The title’s slipped her mind just now, surprise surprise. And she’s not going to remember, either, not while the manager on duty straightens up beside her, regaining command of the second shift with a chest-buckling gulp of nausea. There’s no way our Lady can deal with this woman beside her, her voice rather like an eight-year-old’s, insisting that all in-store promotions need to be arranged at least three weeks in advance with the Events Coordinator .

And that’s only where the interrogation begins. In the next half a minute Magnolia faces ten or a dozen more folks rushing up and firing off questions. Naturally they don’t know who’s responsible, all they can do is ask, but what pains an industry girl the worst is to hear these hicks straining to sound industry-savvy. As if her untrammeled astonishment was only so much show business! These yokels asking, like, was that software ? Like, a tie-in with a Bo-gart retrospective? Plus, wasn’t the drive-in the totalizing peak experience of American cinema, now degraded by video and digital reproduction?

Our Lady’s no longer so Swee, she’s more PTSD. She has no answers. At the first break in the helter-skelter she’s out of there, mumbling some excuse to the manager and stuffing a klatch of fresh business cards in her purse. How had she collected them so quickly, cards that claimed to belong to writers, actors, production people pre- and post-, cards that revealed no small investment in design and paper stock? How could there’ve been so many moviemakers among the discount racks at the front of the store? Before she’d lost the impossible scent in her nostrils, the smell of gas and tar up half a hundred feet over the parking lot, these wannabes were pressing their wallet-sized rectangles into her palm—her gesture of blessing, she guesses. But Nola has no miracles, neither for them nor for anyone else. She can’t begin to guess what book she’d opened, or what page or magic word.

What her hand needs now is someone to hold it. Nola needs her boyfriend, and in particular the part of him that does Warm’n’Sensitive. But then by coming home when she’s not expected, when she’s too upset to bother with the garage, she winds up first having to deal with some asshole who, it turns out after a minute or two, calls himself Laverne.

She discovers the guy with his hands all over her G-lord, the two young men coiled together giggling and whispering at one end of the futon, naked except for the newcomer’s disgusting eye shadow. An oily powder-blue like you’d see on some freak out of Satyricon , one of those mulattos Fellini always threw in somewhere (Laverne’s dark, a caramel topping over G’s Ivy League cream)—the lover’s eye shadow stings the sharpest, a finicky veil draped over something just the opposite, over clutching and grinding absolute in its blunt rapacity. And Nola too feels like just the opposite, fumbling and confused, while these two were dead certain in their blood rush. That’s what bothers her worst, the paint that fails to mask, that in fact highlights the true and ineradicable. It’s far more disturbing than the final wave goodbye that Laverne gives his still-distended cock. The guy flips his russet meat first at his lunchtime trick and then at the so-called girlfriend, before he finishes pulling his pants back on (shorts, since G and Swee live a long way from those San Pedro breezes).

And after Laverne trots away, for minutes on end, Magnolia can hardly hear the things said by the man who remains. She can’t tell the apologies from the rationalizations, something about something bound to happen sooner or later. Something about a conversation on their first date and the homoerotic subtext in Jerome Kern. She doesn’t realize he’s poured her a shot of Absolut Citron, chilled and neat, till she raises it to her lips. Maybe she tastes some Cointreau in there as well, a very civilized trank, and meanwhile he keeps at it, her well-spoken Gaylord, entirely presentable though naked above his unbelted ducks. God, he must’ve made the boys’ mouths water. He seems to be arguing that it’s better this way.

Nola, don’t you see? They weren’t working for the Peace Corps here. They were going for the mega-dollars and the metrosexual freedoms, and the sooner he and she came to an understanding, the better. Their relationship was a benefit to them both, certainly. Himself, in all of Hollywood he had no better pal than Sweet Magnolia, and nothing on the resume so useful as a girlfriend, either—an actor couldn’t risk coming out before he got his card. But the two of them alone could hardly be expected to satisfy all their shadow selves. The last thing a pair of players needed were delusions about… about some totalizing peak experience…