Andrew Vachss - Only Child

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard about them, but...they’re...I mean, only hillbillies do them, isn’t that true? Like cockfights being a Hispanic thing?”

“No...” He was starting to educate me, then caught himself before the topic veered too far from his favorite one. “Anyway, I filmed one. It was incredible . I filmed other things, too. Things you’d probably never see on tape in your life. But I couldn’t control any of it. So what I had was a lot of amazing footage, but none of it—even all of it together—would add up to a movie.

“It all...evolved,” he said. “It took a long time. Years. My next stage was when I used actors to ‘be’ real. I’d put them in situations, and whatever happened, happened. Kind of vérité cranked up. And what I saw was that I had a lot of control but it cost me the realism. Like, have you ever seen a trial on Court TV?”

“OJ,” I replied. “And when Frank Dux sued Jean-Claude Van Damme.” A safe Hollywood answer.

“Do you think any of them would have behaved the same way if they hadn’t known the cameras were on them every second? The lawyers, the witnesses, even the judge? And those ‘reality’ TV shows. Survivor ? Right! Big Brother ? Sure! That Jenny Jones thing, where the guy thought he was going to meet someone who had a secret crush on him, and it turned out to be another guy? But on camera, what happens? Not so much. Off camera? He fucking kills the queer. Blows him away. You see what I mean? What if I’d had that ?”

I nodded, unwilling to interrupt the flow of something so important with speech.

“Don’t you see ?” he said. “Even if all I did was set the...boundaries, like, it still wasn’t real. Because, if they knew the camera was rolling, that changed everything. I threw most of that crap out. You know what I called it, finally? Faux vérité! ”

“Wow,” I said softly, overawed.

“Everybody’s a screenwriter,” he said caustically. “They want to write ‘realism’ and call it their ‘creation.’ But they don’t get it. If you create the realism, it isn’t real!”

“That is heavy,” I said. CV for cinéma vérité; FV for faux vérité. And NV...?

“That’s when it came to me,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

Without waiting for a response, he opened the flap on his shoulder bag and took out a cassette. I felt Michelle freeze next to me.

“You’ve got a VCR here...?”

“Of course, ” Michelle assured him. She stood up and took the cassette from him, walked over to the console, turned it on, inserted the tape. She came back and handed the remote to Vision.

“Thanks,” he said. Without further preamble, he pointed the remote at the console and kicked the tape into life.

Darkness.

The camera’s eye picked up a synagogue.

“Jews!” a harsh, off-camera whisper. “Fucking Jews.”

Figures running across an expanse of lawn.

Heavy breathing.

Swastikas springing from spray cans.

“Heil Hitler!”

“The white man is coming, kike bastards!” A different voice.

Fade to black, deeper than darkness.

In the silence, I said, “How did you know they’d be—”

“What you’ve just seen,” he interrupted, “is a very early example of what I call noir vérité .”

“I love that name!” Michelle.

He bowed slightly, taking his due, but not finished opening our eyes. “With cinéma vérité, I had realism but not control,” he said. “With faux vérité, I had control but not realism. But with noir vérité, I finally had both .”

“How is that...I mean, how is what we just saw...both?” I asked him, my tone a study in confused admiration.

“How many actors did you see?”

“Uh...four, I think, right?”

“No,” he said. Waited a beat. “You saw one . One of them knew this was a movie. The other three, they thought they were going on an ‘action.’”

“You mean they were set up to...?”

“Not set up! They wanted to do exactly what they did. It was the actor’s assignment to get them to do it when they did it, and where they did it, that’s all. For the actor, this was a role. But for the others...”

“I think I under—”

“That was just the beginning,” he said. “The first step.”

“Now, who was acting in that one?” he asked, eyes on Rejji, who he’d spotted sneaking peeks at the screen.

“It can’t have been the one doing the paddling,” I said. “Why would the others have just gone along and—?”

“This is the final stage,” he said. “Or nearly it, anyway. Because they were all acting. But only one of them knew the script.”

“I don’t...”

“Okay, look,” he said, leaning forward, intense. “They all thought they were acting. In a movie. The script was this sorority thing...like you saw for yourself. But the girl doing the paddling, she was told that this was a different movie. And the plot of that movie was a girl who wants to get even with another girl, so she makes up this whole ‘movie’ thing.”

“Unreal!” I said.

“ Completely real,” he corrected. “The concept is that everyone knows they’re on camera, but only some of them know that the script isn’t really the script. But even the ones who think they know, they don’t understand that their role is another role. One that only the director knows. And when it all comes together, at that perfect moment, it’s totally real. And totally under my direction.”

“Oh my God!” Michelle said.

“Noir vérité,” he said proudly. “That’s why it’s always done with a single camera. The last thing I want is a Rashomon effect. Here, each of the actors has his or her own reality, but the only truth is what goes into the camera. And there can be only one truth. That,” he said, pausing, the way he’d rehearsed this moment before his mirror so many times, “was my vision.”

“That’s...amazing,” I said. “So, in each movie you make, the star—”

“The catalyst,” he said. “Not the star. In noir vérité, there are no stars. Because there are no limits, do you see?”

“Not...really.”

“The ultimate control is the director’s. In noir vérité, the director directs . Not just the lines, or the sets. He directs reality. The catalyst—there can be more than one—their job is to create the opportunity for conduct. But the conduct itself is real.”

“So if you let the...person think they’re the catalyst, but they’re really playing the role of catalyst...?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Everything I heard about you was gospel,” I told him, admiringly. “This is a new concept. Nobody’s got this one. And it truly has no limits. You could do...anything with it.”

“No limits,” he agreed.

“Couldn’t it ever get...I don’t know, out of hand?”

“Even if it did,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “whatever happened, it wouldn’t be real. It would be something else entirely. My creation. Noir vérité .”

Before he left, he inked the deal memo Michelle handed him.

“I’ll just sign it ‘Vision,’ if that’s all right,” he said. “It’s the name I’ll be known by.”

“Oh, you already are,” I promised him. “We just need your Social Security number for the accounting department. You know, the tax boys. You better get used to a lot of attention from them, Vision.”