Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

But in the end, she was stunned at the effect. Sitting in their screening room, never having seen any of the daily rushes, never having seen the rough cut, but now watching the finished film itself — with music! — the Actress hardly recalled that she was witnessing herself. At every sequence, she could remember the Director’s hand guiding her through the moment. Her elevated sensuality in the hotel room with her handsome costar. Her face registering the feeling of being pursued and the fear of being caught as she made her getaway. The shadings in her expression as she reveled in her own conniving and cunning while her character listened to interior voices. Even the angle of her head as she listened over a motel dinner of sandwiches and milk, a woman listening to a story, but matching it to her own, comparing it, her disrupted life not ruined at all, but a shiny thing in her hands once again, renewed.

She had become that woman entirely.

The Actress knew it even as she watched her character sit at a motel room desk, her moment of reckoning coming. In a little notebook, she scribbled out the simplest of subtractions: seven hundred from forty thousand. Something she could have done in her head. But she did it because her character was alone and silent, not even a voice in her head, and the audience in the dark needed to be looking over her shoulder as she began making amends.

She tore up the note, about to throw it in the trash, but then turned to look to the bathroom, as if remembering it as the one place where everything vile gets washed or flushed away, the camera gliding along with her as she moved to that space.

She was framed in the doorway of the bathroom, bending down to the toilet.

The camera showed the toilet, pristine and white, but unsettling somehow, a toilet never having been on the screen before, and she soiled it with the torn-up pieces of her crime and then flushed.

She bent down to lower the lid, stepping over to close the door firmly, looking up as if to make sure it was closed, then took off her robe, her back exposed to the camera.

Off came her slippers one by one, the robe on the toilet haphazard, her bare legs stepping into the clean tub, and the curtain pulled back with a quick rush of metal rings.

The Las Vegas girl bent down — they used her shots after all — her nipples hardly registering through the thick shower curtain, but from up above, the Actress knew, the crew had looked down in hunger.

Now the Actress, facing the side wall of the shower — the shot from the first day of filming — her hands up in anticipation of the water, her hands up as if in ecstatic prayer.

The showerhead looked down at her like a giant eye.

The water warmer now, her face in relief at finally cleansing, nearly two days, remember, without a shower, a Phoenix secretary spending a night in her car out in the desert foothills east of Los Angeles.

Her arms to block her breasts, the soap beginning to lather. She was beginning to understand why the Director asked her to turn slowly to the left. Patiently. Even taking a shower requires technique. You don’t just stand. You turn to wet every part of the body. Turn, he had said. Slowly. Clean. She tilted her head back like a ballerina.

It came closer to her, the camera. Her head back like a dancer’s. That’s what she’d been thinking, but what it did was show her neck, offering it up to what was coming. Keep turning. Slower.

The showerhead, as if observing quietly, the way the crew had, respectful even though they had wanted an eyeful.

Then the camera, as if it had magically sat on the back wall of the shower, more water coming from another nozzle a little above, like a second curtain of water. Keep turning. Other direction now. Slower.

And there it was. When she had stood in the shower, anticipating. When the body double kept stumbling in too loudly; when they oiled the hinges on the door to a smooth silence. A silhouette coming with a horrific certainty that the Actress herself hadn’t been able to see from her position. A terrible silhouette darkening the frame, the Actress deliberately moving out of the camera’s eye as it closed in on the curtain. The menace of the silhouette terrifying her even now as she watched herself on the screen.

Up there, she turned around from her slow, deliberate dance.

Up there, the camera cut in close as she screamed.

Up there, the camera cut in even closer to just her open mouth.

A silhouette in women’s clothes, and a big butcher knife. Any knife will do in real life — a pocket blade in a street-corner mugging, a sharpened screwdriver in a jail cell. But this was the movies and it had to be a butcher knife.

The knife came at her like a tiger’s paw reaching through a cage, not able to strike, but the illusion was the same.

The silhouette brought the knife up.

What was (or wasn’t) a Las Vegas breast.

From overhead, it was heartbreakingly easy to see how she had nowhere to go, trapped as she was on all sides.

More screaming. Keep your face in the water. It will force you to shut your eyes.

Her hands over her breasts: an effort to conceal herself, the Actress knew, but now it read like a gesture of futile defense.

Her own open mouth. She hardly remembered screaming that loudly. Or for that long. But the sound editing made it interminable.

Her hands over her breasts: but by this time, no one in the audience would be thinking of breasts.

The silhouette bringing up the knife yet again.

Put up your hands now. All five fingers.

The silhouette, even closer. The head of a monstrous woman.

Her head moving side to side, as if to say no.

The only thing the knife ever cut through was the water.

Her hands up, but nothing to hold on to.

The knife coming through the veil of water even more forcefully, tearing through it as if it were flesh.

No, no.

When you bring down the knife, he had told the double, hold it like so. I want to see the glisten of your fingers holding it. I want to see the fingers.

The Las Vegas girl’s naked torso. A dancer turning to her left to meet the knife at just the tip. Not a breast curve or a pubic hair in sight. Not even blood on the knife.

No, no.

The arm still coming down. The knife in silhouette because by this point it would be dripping in blood. Not even all that water could wash it clean so quickly.

The Las Vegas girl kept turning, her breasts visible to everybody on the set, but on the screen, just the curve.

No, no. The futility of no.

She’d stood in ketchup, movie paint, and all manner of liquids, the special-effects guys watching how it pooled around her feet, mixed with the water, and here it was. Chocolate syrup — but in black and white, it was a terrible river.

Start dancing. To the right. Slowly.

She sees herself face the back of the shower wall and clenches in her seat as the knife comes down, despite the pantomime.

Her feet turning, the river churning now in deep, horrible color.

I want to see the fingers. Show me the fingers. She showed them, and there they were, out of focus.

The silhouette exited the bathroom forcefully. An angry, venal exit.

Her hand again, extended like a starfish. And now she saw the power of repetition.

Keep your hand there and turn slowly. She did so with a look of resignation, her body slumping into the tub.

Reach out. Extend all your fingers. Hands did everything here: tore up, cleansed, revealed, resisted, murdered. Now it was a single hand, reaching, with nothing for it to hold but the shower curtain. The Las Vegas girl, her breasts barely in focus.

From overhead, like before, it was easy to see she’d had nowhere to go. Yet it had happened, the way God looks down at everything and lets it happen.