Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Weren’t you scared they’d keep the tape and show it at frat parties or something?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I was definitely scared they’d keep it and I wouldn’t get to use it. But luckily all these girls were lined up outside the bathroom, banging on the door and stuff. That Steve guy put down the camera so he could answer the door, and the girls all started yelling at him, and then everybody was arguing and distracted so I just grabbed the camera and ran.”

All this time I’d been feeling terrible for leaving Sophie alone, she’d been enjoying herself. I thought about walking out and leaving her to deal with the boxes on her own.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

I started pushing the boxes forward, finally. I didn’t want to look at her anymore.

“You knew how bad I felt,” I said. “You just let me feel that way even though you planned it all along.”

People were staring at us openly now. Sophie turned to me, and I could tell she was angry.

“I told you not to,” she said. “You wouldn’t listen. You think everything I do is some judgment on you.”

“Come on,” said the girl who was behind us now, staggering under a giant box.

We both pushed our boxes forward. When Sophie turned to me again, she looked less mad. She looked like she was proud.

“Listen,” she said, “I was upset that night. I was really scared of them at first. I didn’t know what they’d do. They cut my scalp, and I was bleeding. Making it part of the movie, that was the only way I could fight back.”

“It’s a weird way to fight back,” I said.

“You were at the screening,” she said. “People wanted to talk to me, and I could actually talk to them because of the movie. I think I can be really good at this. Please don’t make me feel bad about it.”

I didn’t say anything. We reached the cashier, who grumbled at us for taping the boxes wrong, then retaped and labeled them and sent them off to New York. The next day I drove Sophie to the airport in the early morning, and I helped her with her tiny suitcase. Then I watched her walk into the crowd of people, and I remembered how small she was, and I was afraid. I worried she’d meet someone in New York who could hurt her much worse than CeCe had. And then beneath that was something else, something vaguer: I thought of her proud face at the end of the movie, and I was afraid of what she was capable of, what she might do without me around to watch. I thought of running after her and demanding to come along, but I didn’t move, and then the crowd closed around her and I couldn’t see her anymore.

Local Theater Shows Independent Film

R. Benjamin Martin

I watched Daniel with three other people. For the Ocean View Theater on West Grimble Drive (which does not have a view of the ocean, though it does, as its marquee proudly states, now boast a working heater), this is a rather impressive crowd. That they turned out to see a medley of short films by independent directors was doubly unusual. I was glad to see Grimble Bay townsfolk exposing themselves to something new and untested, especially since the Ocean View typically shows, inexplicably, revivals of such nonclassics as 1977’s Slap Shot .

My three fellow audience members all appeared to be residents of our local retirement home. Two complained loudly throughout the film’s opening scenes that it was “hard to understand” (which it would not have been, absent the complaining) and left after the first five minutes. The third, like me, remained riveted as the film unfolded.

Daniel was Sophie Stark’s first film, a college effort that hadn’t seen release until now, when the critical success of Marianne has drawn some modest attention to her work (though less, I would argue, than it deserves). If Marianne was imperfect, then Daniel is a total mess — it’s clear that at the outset Stark didn’t actually know how to work a camera. But what the film does, as well as most better-known films on the topic and better than some (the overrated American Beauty comes to mind), is convey the experience of obsession.

At the beginning of the film, Stark’s desire to worship her subject — a frattily handsome college basketball star — clearly outpaces her skill at doing so. Early scenes of fans extolling his greatness from the stands are dull — I surely cannot be alone in attending movies in part to escape the tedium of sporting events — but over the course of the film her technique seems to evolve to catch up with her devotion. An extended shot of the title character spinning around and around like the child he no longer quite is warmed the heart of even this jaded viewer, who in the past thought himself profoundly allergic to anything remotely heartwarming.

And then, in the final scene, whose substance it would be unfair to reveal here, the obsession takes on a life of its own. Freed from its object, it suffuses the face of the filmmaker herself. Daniel is gone, and now Stark is obsessed with her own image, or rather the power that image has to disturb, to enchant, to enthrall.

And despite my reservations, I — along with my elderly fellow viewer, whose name turned out to be Violet — did find myself very much enthralled.

I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SOPHIE STARK. MY PRODUCER, Gary, was the movie geek; he’d seen Marianne and said we had to get her to do the video. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to make a video anyway. The label thought it would sell records, and it didn’t, and I’ve never done another one, and I’m glad. But I was younger then, and I was still doing things because I thought they might help my career somehow and because deep down I didn’t like saying no to people. So the label execs, who were really just these guys four years older than me with an office in Brooklyn, said do a video, and Gary said Sophie Stark. And I picked the lake, because a masochistic part of me had always wanted to go back there.

We didn’t rent the same house my family used to stay in — that would’ve been too weird — but the one we got across the lake looked a lot like it. And it had the same smell, like if you made a dent in the floor, the lake water would well up. I thought about the ghost stories my dad used to tell — the little girl who drowned in the lake and left wet footprints on the stairs, the old lady floating from room to room with her feet a few inches above the floor.

Ghosts or not, the shoot didn’t go real well. I can see now that the song wasn’t actually very good—“Deep” is the kind of fairy-tale-knockoff ballad that was sort of popular at the time but that now just sounds sort of twee and annoying. Sophie ignored a lot of the lyrics. The final video is mostly just this eleven-year-old actress she hired sharpening a knife and then rowing out into the middle of the lake. Now I recognize how good it is — it’s not dreamy or old-timey at all, like I wanted back then. Instead, the way she shot it makes it look almost like a documentary, even though some of the things in it couldn’t happen in real life, and that makes you want to watch it over and over, like you’re going to find out more about these people, even though they’re not real people and of course you aren’t.