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“Listen,” he continues, “I can help you. By putting you into a state of deep hypgnotic relaxation, I can help you access memories you feel certain are forever lost. You should know that in addition to working with alien abductees and past-lifers—both of which I believe in, by the way—I also work with the NYPD and several other major police departments.”
“Oh,” I say, impressed. “What is your success rate?”
“I do filing for them and I’m pretty damn accurate. The point is,” Barassini says, “that for this to work, I need you to trust me fully. Are there any concerns you have about me or the process at this point that I can try to assuage?”
“The chair is hard. I feel it pressing into my buttock bones. The room is dark, musty. I feel anxiety. I want this movie to be great. I want it to change my life, both in the watching and in the eventual heralding. If it’s terrible, I have gained nothing. I am where I was. Worse off because time has passed and I am that much closer to my grave. And I’ll have to tell Ingo that I loved it when it will be clear that I did not. I am not a good actor in that I cannot be dishonest. It is my curse that others always know exactly how I feel. I guess in a way that might make me a brilliant actor, but only if I am playing a character who is scripted to feel exactly as I feel at every moment of the filming. Maybe then I would be the best actor who has ever lived. I’m certain I would. I should audition for that role. I’ll look in Backstage later. The projector starts up. It whirs and sputters as a rectangle of light appears before me on the screen, followed by the scratchy black leader, followed by the China Girl. Wait, was that Tsai? Go back!”
So this will not be a novelization. A novelization is a lesser thing. Just as the book is always better than the movie (with the exception of Truffaut’s one decent film, Tirez sur le Pianiste [1960]), the movie is always better than the novelization. There must be a term for what I am about to do. What do you call something that is an interpretation, a critique, an embellishment, a deepening? Something that compares favorably to the experience of a moviegoer. I am, after all, a critic who will watch a movie only once and, whenever possible, in a public theater with a paying audience. I insist on paying fair-market value. That is the true moviegoing experience. A movie is not only the image on the screen, the sound from the speakers. It is the translation of all this by the brain. It is the social milieu. It is the year you see it, your age, the state of your marriage. It is what happened on the way to the theater, what you expect to happen after, it is who is next to you on each side. It is how they smell. It is who sits in front of you. Who is or isn’t kicking your seat from behind. It is your worry about the call from the doctor. It is that you got laid. Or didn’t. Or are about to. Or know you never will again. It is your envy: of the filmmaker, of the couple necking down front. It is the popcorn. The Goobers. That you have to go to the bathroom. That someone is eating a smelly tuna sandwich. Did they smuggle it in? It doesn’t seem fair, that the cheaters get the sandwiches and the rest of us get shit on. It is your suspension of disbelief. The scene that motivates an eye roll. It is your critique of the acting. It is you trying to remember where you’ve seen that actor before. It is your prediction of what’s going to happen next in the film. It is your pride when you are proven correct. It is your surprise when the filmmaker defies your expectation. It is life, which you only get to live once. You prepare for it, but it will surprise you anyway. The film is predetermined but revealed to you only through time, incrementally. This makes you think it is a living thing, a thing for which you can change the outcome. You yell at the actors onscreen. You clench your teeth as if it will help. And even though the movie is predetermined, the world is not. So the movie can change in this way, too. The projector could break down. Maybe this screening has a loud laugher. Maybe there will be a shooter. These chance elements are layered upon the chanceless film. So a text that encompasses all of this outer and inner experience is not a novelization. It is so much more. It is a witnessing, and it should be called that, bearing witness to the human experience—this plastic, this light, this clackety 1⁄24th of a second through time that the film and I are traveling together but separate, neighboring solitudes. The original meaning of the word martyr is witness and that seems about right. A viewer is a witness; a witness is one who testifies. This will be a witnessing. Or, wait, don’t I watch films seven times? By myself? In my living room? Don’t I turn the television upside down? Suddenly, I’m confused. I don’t—
Like a party favor, a thought pops into my head: My daughter coming home from school. She is, what, twelve or eleven. I don’t know. She wants to be with me, and I’m working, watching Talfan’s Dysgu i gi Bach Gachu backward. It is one of the most significant films in all of Welsh cinema, and that is saying something. There are those who believe there is no important Cinema of Wales, but they are, as always, dead wrong. Dyfodwg, Powys, Iwan, Gwilym, Gruffudd, Fardd, Gwilym (no relation), Cadwaladr, Clymneb, Dylfedmed, Prydudd, Gwilym (no relation), and Clydarfrg to name just a few essential directors. And I have been waiting all day for the chance to watch Talfan’s masterwork in reverse. My daughter at eleven is barely competent in Gymraeg so will most likely not understand even a word of it backward. I know she will be bored. And then I will feel responsible for her boredom, which will not allow me to properly enjoy the film. I tell her Daddy has to work, which makes me so terribly guilty, especially when I see the look in her eyes, hopeless, unloved, abandoned. This is not the case, of course. It is simply that I need to do my work. A child of eleven cannot understand how, as an adult, one’s very identity hinges on one’s work, how one would likely dissolve into a fog of nothingness without it. I need to ignore her so I can continue to exist for her. She stares out the window at the rainy day. Esme…
unbelievable
"I’ll have a whisker,” I say.
“Whisker?”
“Whiskey?”
“Scotch, rye…?”
Now he is impatient to get back to Tsai.
“Um, rye,” I say, because I heard somewhere it is a thing now.
“Brand?”
“You choose,” I say and immediately feel it comes across as coquettish, something a girl might say to him.
He sizes me up.
“You look like a Crown Royal man,” he says.
It’s astounding how quickly I can go from feeling like a girl to feeling like a big boy, but his calling me a man did just that, which oddly makes me feel like a girl. I am proud. And humiliated. I want him to like me. I would be his buddy; I would be his girl. We could be buddies with benefits.
Amazing. That is indeed forty. It is as if Apatow had a camera in my house when I was that age. Even though I know I did not get the scene verbatim, it’s a testament to the power of the writing (and the performances of Ruddmann, as I have dubbed Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, so organic and believable are they as a couple!) that I still find myself simultaneously laughing and crying as I recall the scene. The raw human emotionality is palpable. But, no, it is not as well-formed a memory as the Abbott and Costello murder plot scene from a movie I have seen only once, and that viewing in Nameless Ape mode. I weep some more. And then I laugh, because the humanity Apatow shows us is also very funny. This is where his gift lies, his ability to reveal to us the tragedy and comedy that is our lives.
lol
BACK AT THE laundromat, I offer to volunteer my time for free every other Sunday, starting for the first two weeks with every Sunday, so as to cover all bases. I explain to the manager that I just enjoy doing laundry. I sell it to her as a win-win situation for us both. She takes this in, nods, pulls out her iPhone, photographs me, then lets me know that I am banned from ever again entering this establishment, that my photograph will be hung on the wall to alert all employees of this development.
I am horrified. My very face has been turned into its own scarlet letter for all the city’s launderers to mock and detest. My secret life laid bare. And, after all, who amongst us doesn’t have a secret life? I am certain that if the rock we call Manhattan were to be overturned, myriad creepy-crawly secret lives would be discovered. I am certain that if— But then it occurs to me: This is perhaps the perfect solution to my issue. Tsai will no doubt see my visage on the laundromat wall. She will understand I have been humiliated in my attempt to secure employment there. I ask the manager if I can see the shot and that if it is flattering, perhaps we could take another one directly under the fluorescents, which tend to be harsh and emphasize my sallow complexion and medically enlarged nose. She tells me she is going to call the police, so I leave. I have not gotten everything I had hoped for, but I have gotten something. For now, there is nothing left to do but wait.
The specialty shoe division has been created to sell specialty shoes, specifically clown shoes, elevator shoes, animal face slippers, and unpaired shoes for the one-footed. For “one-foots,” I propose a service I call “shoe buddies,” in which a single-footed customer could search our database to locate an other-footed customer of similar size and fashion sense to go “halfsies” with. Allen says I’m a genius, perhaps, and that time will tell.
Of course, immediately following this, my co-worker Henrietta proposes “sock buddies,” which is, when all is said and done, still my idea just dressed in a hat. [...]
Wait. Something is coming to me. A conversation with Ingo one night during our dinner break of ramen and reconstituted evaporated milk.
“Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we have never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us. We have jobs. We support economies. We take care of children and the elderly. We are kind to someone. We murder. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people. Your Dardenne brothers, your De Sicas, your Satyajit Rays are honorable, talented filmmakers, decent and, I suspect, caring, but the work they do is wrongheaded. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”
love the gags about the food they eat
I SUSPECT HENRIETTA IS plotting to kill me. I can’t say that I blame her. I am the department favorite and, whereas I have many other irons in the fire, with my book on Ingo soon to be fully remembered, then written, then released, and then my plan to film a live-action remake of the film, this is it for Henrietta. I heard her confide to a colleague in the ladies’ room, while I was secreted in a stall, that she had wanted to work in shoes since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. She actually said “knee-high to a grasshopper.” I was astounded. Meanwhile, I had never even considered a job like this until I was halfway through a masturbation fantasy about being a salesman in a shoe store fitting Tsai into a pair of slightly too-tight red Mary Janes. Oh my Lord. Tsai! In all the distractions of the new division, I had almost forgotten about my reason for being here. It takes Henrietta and her friend so long to leave that I am ready to scream and charge from the stall. But I do not. I am in control.
can't stop laughing at this