Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

I head straight to the camera supply store with my father’s wad of cash and pick out some gear. Then onto Route 15 and then 40, by myself, driving to New York. I drive until I reach a motel just over the New Mexico border. It isn’t until I collapse on the motel bed and switch on the TV that I feel it. I watch the special report, and I see him young and beautiful. Close to my age, in fact. And out of that young man comes my boyfriend’s voice. I cry and hold the motel pillow against my face. I see his face as he lay on the gurney, and it is that image that makes me feel how lost he is to me. How much I will miss him. How much I will always love him. I sleep.

In the early-morning light, I sit on the motel bed and examine the equipment I have bought. I read instructions; I put pieces together. I lift the camera and look through the viewfinder.

I will make my trip and I will also make a film diary of my trip called A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents. My first film since high school. I will make film after film that spring and summer. In the fall I will briefly attend the college with the excellent undergraduate film program. My life will begin to take an ordinary shape, as if the past nine months never happened. As if it were a dream, an unfinished film, a lost radio broadcast.

I am a hungry young woman, just like thousands of other young women. But I have some ideas. A directive, of sorts. I will work and I will work. I have said this is a love story, and indeed it begins that way: my love of cinema, as pure as any I have known. Making, watching, thinking cinema. I become a machine of cinema, a monocular creator. It is as though I had been a drawn-back rubber band my whole life, seeming to pull farther and farther away from the life I wanted, until I am released and then I come forward with a huge snap. I am no longer wishing; I am doing. What do I do? I make films that excite and please me, occasionally frustrate me, and for a long while that feels like enough. Later I will find this meager in a number of ways. Later I will see it as self-aggrandizing, problematic, not just useless but hurtful. Later I will quit.

But there is still a bit more of this inaugural story to tell, the end of the story of how I began. A narrative thread that I have left hanging. So here it is: a year after he died, I was working late and began to think about him. There had been a big retrospective of his work, and there was a flurry of articles in the paper. I knew more about him and his work than all of these people. I considered my future and my opportunities. I took the wicker box out. I read the letters. They were beautifully written: some were a little erotic, some were funny. They could be tastefully edited, in any case.

I took them out on the fire escape with me, and read them as I smoked. I could have shown them to an agent, published them, offered them to the highest bidder. That’s what he had suggested — no, urged — me to do. If I approached it all in the right way, the interest in me could lead to a chance to make a film. One little chance to take that attention and use it to my advantage. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was like a puzzle for me to figure out: here was how I thought the world worked; here was how I thought I fit in it.

I also could burn them, one by one, like a girl in a black-and-white movie. Every last one.

But instead I perched on the steps under a shimmer of deep-night summer stars, and I started once again at the beginning. I read one, folded it, and put it away. I read another, then another, then another. When I got to the end, I put them back in the box, closed the box, and put them away, my secret forever.

I told you this was a love story.

— Meadow Mori, 11/5/2014

Meadow Mori was born in Los Angeles in 1966. She has directed and produced feature-length documentaries, essay films, shorts, and video installations including Kent State: Recovered (1992), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary; Play Truman (1993); Portrait of Deke (1987), which won a BATT Silver Medal and the jury prize at the Seattle Film Festival; Inward Operator (1998), which was a jury prize winner at the Sundance Festival, and Children of the Disappeared (2001). Parts of A Film Made to Cover for the Lies I Told My Parents, the making of which is described in the post above, can be viewedhere.Her reconstructions of famous lost films (made in 1984–1985) can be viewedhere.

Related links

Carrie Wexler, A Conversation with Mira Shirlihan: Number 8

Meadow Mori interview, Sound on Sound, June 1999

Meadow Mori film channel at Gleaners.netand Vimeo

Comments (866)

MouchetteJan 6

This is so disgusting.

SleepovergirlJan 6

She was Carrie Wexler’s best friend, but she barely mentions her here.

LegacyAdmit12:15 am

What happened to the letters?! Did she finally publish them?

Eds12:30 am

A Carrie Wexler interview can be read here.

Limpidpools12:33 am

Is it just me, or is this a straight-up star fucking/sleep your way up story? Yay, feminism. Not.

Limpidpools→ Mouchette12:40 am

Like you said, disgusting.

Mouchette→ Limpidpools12:41 am

I meant a teenager sleeping with an old obese man. And calling that a “love story.” Call it whatever you want. It’s just sad.

dogyears→ Limidpools7:22 am

Nice to be so judgey about a great artist. Yay, female solidarity.

Limpidpools→ dogyears9:30 am

Who says I am a woman. #feminismfail

TheQualiaConundrum22→ LegacyAdmit9:33 am

She has never published them. She also stopped making films a few years ago. She had some sort of breakdown.

Eberhardfaber9:37 am

I want to read the letters. I wonder if she will publish them now that she has told everyone about this relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a setup for an announcement of a publishing deal.

deranger10:02 am

So cynical! Don’t you think the point of this is that she doesn’t plan on exploiting the letters? That she got what she got on her own. His help to her was inspiration. What she did is unrelated to the famous boyfriend.

Makemoney12:42 pm

I didn’t believe it until I saw this with my own eyes! I work from home and make $1050 a week doing easy transcription and data entry. Go to www.workfromhome.com and stop struggling.

films4freedom1:00 pm

If you like Meadow Mori’s films, you should check out theendpoint dot net. We aggregate nonfiction and essay films that spotlight the struggle against corporate imperialism and environmental degradation. Many important documentaries all streamed for free.

RitaHayworth3:30 pm

So she fucked Orson Welles. Who hasn’t?

Rulalenska3:37 pm

What happened with Carrie Wexler?

IrrealisMood→ RitaHayworth3:38 pm

You are killing me Rita. I laughed so hard I almost choked when I read this.

Canyouhearmenow→ Rulalenska3:39 pm

They don’t speak because Wexler screwed her over. Neither Mori or Wexler will discuss it.

Limpidpools3:45 pm

She hardly followed in his footsteps. Making those horrible films. Those distortive, pretentious documentaries. She is a tasteless, self-righteous defender of monsters. And it turns out she is the biggest woman-in-Hollywood cliché of all… expand comment to read more