Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

Viewing 1:

Fantastic, this is gorgeous. I can’t wait to see it again.

Viewing 2:

The composition is so self-conscious.

Viewing 3:

The person who is narrating always occupies the lower right quadrant. It is a code, a secret code that can be charted. Windows must be passed through, seamless and yet with bravado. It is brash, revolutionary, yet very controlled and orchestrated.

Viewing 4:

Actually, not entirely consistent in the composition and cinematic tropes. Occasionally arbitrary?

Viewing 5:

Maybe not arbitrary, maybe the broken pattern is deliberate, the thing that makes the film live.

Viewing 6:

There is a kind of purgatory that happens on the sixth viewing. You are bored of the repetition, and then you go through it. You are liberated from the narrative, the story. But it is only because you know it so well, and then you can absorb HOW the story is told.

Viewing 7:

Agnes Moorehead. Paul Stewart. George Coulouris. Everett Sloane. Joseph Cotten.

Viewing 8:

He did not watch City Lights twenty times. You don’t need to watch a film twenty times to discover all it has to teach. Maybe eight times, maybe, but no way twenty.

Viewing 9:

Dialogue, I’m just listening to the dialogue. My eyes are closed. Music and dialogue.

Viewing 10:

I’ve memorized this whole film. I could recite the entire movie. I’m going to say all the lines with the actors as they say them.

Viewing 11:

I did it, I did it. Just think of how this can impress and amuse people. I’ll always have this.

Viewing 12:

I turned the sound off. Light — gorgeous silver light — and those tactile gray planes, almost abstract.

Viewing 13:

I am dreaming through these viewings. My mind wanders; I try to pull it back to the film. It is like trying to meditate. I have to let go in order to focus.

Viewing 14:

I’ve had it with this film. I’m growing to hate it. I’m listing every continuity error.

Viewing 15:

This was a bad idea. I have ruined the movie. It wasn’t meant to be looked at like this. No film is. It is meant to be magic, not endless brain wallpaper.

Viewing 16:

I’m frankly ignoring this film now. I block it out. I endure it. I am just holding out for the hours I get to sleep, unmolested by images and sound.

Viewing 17:

Now when I sleep, I dream of this movie. I’ve become a part of the film now. This movie preceded me and colonized me and will outlast me.

Viewing 18:

It really is good, you know.

Viewing 19:

I never realized how funny it is; I am crying from laughter. My laughter echoes in the room. Now every line seems to wink and turn on itself. We are in some private, exclusive world, just me and the movie.

Viewing 20:

Done.

I used a spotless 16 mm print I acquired through Jay Hosney, the cinema studies teacher at my school. This print was a gleaming object of 1940s light and shadow. I had a projector and reels that had to be changed, making it hardly a seamless dream. But the reels were so physical, and as I handled them, it was almost as if I were touching not just the object but the film itself, mingling with it in some deep way, overcoming its implacable borders. In the end, I talked to the screen; I stood in the stream of dusty shades and shapes; I watched the projection flicker across my body; I hallucinated.

* * *

At graduation I was awarded the senior prize. The summer was suddenly upon me. I found his address on a map of the stars’ homes. I sent him a copy of a school article about me and a letter explaining “A Response to My Favorite Filmmaker’s Response to Watching City Lights Multiple Times (From Emulation to Extravagance).” I told him how in homage to his watching City Lights twenty times, I watched his most famous film twenty consecutive times. I also told him how an idea of him came to me as I watched: that he was everything Americans were, writ large. Written in giant, bold, back-lit sans-serif letters. I realized, as I sat in the dark, that he conjured up our past and our future, the glory and the disappointment. We lived in it, but we didn’t like it. In fact, we hated it. We hated him. So now he was trotted out for quips, and sometimes he said disturbing things, uncomfortable things. He couldn’t help it. He never learned, and I loved him for it.

He wrote me back right away. He said he would like, very much, to have lunch with me. I came to his modest Brentwood home. A middle-aged woman served us grilled fish by his pool. He didn’t talk at all about movies. But he did talk about Brazil, about voodoo, about the paranormal, about extinct animals and the etymology of the word chivalry.

Then he said, “It wasn’t City Lights , you know. Although City Lights is a very fine film, one of my favorites, I believe that I said I had watched Stagecoach over and over to teach myself how to make movies.”

John Ford! Not Chaplin. I felt my face get hot. Had I misread that? It didn’t seem possible that I could have made such a mistake. He pushed butter into the soft center of a roll. He bit into the roll, all the while watching me. I took a sip of ice water and watched him back. At once I knew what to say, but I took another sip of water first, placed my glass on the table and leaned back.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said slowly. “You were lying about all of it anyway, right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said.

“You didn’t watch any film twenty times. It’s a lie.”

“I don’t think of it as lying. I think of it as a little story I told about me, or what people want to think of me.” He took another bite of his roll. It was nearly finished, only a dainty piece remained between his meaty fingertips. He slowly chewed and swallowed. “I’ve already disappointed you.”

“No, you haven’t at all,” I said. “It is much better as a lie.”

He barked a laugh at this; he laughed so hard his eyes closed. His body shook. He finally stopped laughing. “Just marvelous,” he said. “I feel sorry for the college you’re going to attend.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know about going to college,” I said. “I don’t like the way everyone expects certain things of me because I am…”

“A bright young person,” he said. “Possibly the best thing in the world one can be.” The middle-aged woman, who apparently was the housekeeper, cleared the plates. At first I imagined she might be a wife or girlfriend of some kind but then I realized how unlikely it would be that such a person might wait on us. I watched her disappear through the sliding glass door.

He patted my hand, and then I leaned over and kissed him gently, pressing my lips against his. Understand, I was no groupie, no seeker of famous men. He seemed to me, for whatever reason, a chagrined innocent, a man I could trust. So I kissed him, then pulled back and waited for it to change my life. He shook his head, and he laughed again, a lower, softer laugh that trailed off into something else. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck. People, if you have never had that, that kind of look, well, it is worth giving up everything for. I sat back down. We ate crème brûlée. He had a beard. I never liked beards before. But I had never liked anything before, I realized.

I never left. I did return once to my parents’ house — only a few miles away on the other side of Sunset Boulevard. I drove my graduation gift, a dark blue VW Rabbit convertible (this makes me sound spoiled, but it was used, a 1982, and you should see what some of my fellow graduates got as gifts), up into the winding streets of Bel-Air. We lived in a recently built very large one-level house that hugged the edge of a scrubby canyon. Sliding glass doors in every room faced the landscaped yard: the pool and the hazy view beyond the pool of other houses with pools on the opposite side of the canyon. Some of the walls in our house were lined with suede panels and other walls were lined with mirrors. My parents liked the effect of juxtaposing contemporary surfaces with an elaborate collection of French and Italian antique furniture. My mother considers herself a person with interior design skills, or at least a very strong sense of her own taste, and I admit that it worked in a way that at least felt deliberate. I didn’t mind looking at the fine Louis XIV gilt-painted wood table set unexpectedly in front of the palm trees and cactuses visible through the glass panels. But I myself would have preferred a Mediterranean-style Craftsman bungalow decorated in Art Deco tubular furniture with the chromed curves and the squeak of leather promising a life of gliding modernity. That’s me all right: out-of-date modernity with its edge of future promise unfulfilled, even failed. Which I admit contains a smug kind of nostalgia, but you can’t help what you find beautiful. I so loved the clothing style of the 1930s that my prom “dress” was a slim, high-waisted vintage men’s suit (in those days I liked to dress like a man, albeit a kind of louche, fem-stylized “man”) that I had rented from Western Costume, something a minor player wore once in a long-forgotten silvery black-and-white film. But my mother was different from me. She liked things hypernew or very antique. None of this freighted recent past for her. “Vintage?” she would say when we went into the expensive, retro-stocked stores that now dotted Melrose Avenue. “That’s what they call this garage-sale attic junk?” Or she would make a sound of hard-pushed air in her throat, which I came to understand meant that she had a similar item once and had happily discarded it years ago. She had no tolerance for the sentimental revisiting of the 1950s that became so popular during my grade-school years. She never understood our desire to dress up in sock hop outfits for “’50s days” and felt that watching Grease was ridiculous (not to mention inaccurate, i.e., “The fifties weren’t fun, by the way”). My father did not have such strong feelings, but he went along with my mother in matters of decor and in almost everything else.