00:03:27:29
THE STEM OF Miguel Gonzalez’s brain becomes an electrical squall as his fingertips contact the crevice forming the intersection of Angelica Encinas’s upper thigh and lower groin. The soft, miraculous nexus is damply warm. A centimeter more, and Miguel encounters the resistance of her cotton panties. He has imagined this instant hundreds of times over the last month and a half. It is just how he imagined it. He slips his forefinger beneath the hem and meets the first stiff curls of pubic hair. He brings to mind all the occasions he has pictured slipping his forefinger beneath this hem and closes his eyes to savor the sensation fully. Then there is an explosion on the screen so loud Miguel tastes tinfoil. Angelica, hot palm on Miguel’s crotch, recoils.
00:03:28:06
A JAMES-BONDISH guy is drinking champagne with this top-heavy woman in a dining car. Next he’s attacked by a yakuza, thrown out a window, shinnies back in through a trap door, gets thrown out another window by a huge black man, clambers through a second trap door that leads, not onto the roof, as logic dictates, but into some submarine rapidly filling with water. Scrambling for air, he’s shot out a torpedo tube, not into the ocean, but a pastel-blue swimming pool sparkling like a serene Hockney painting in a sunny pink-and-white resort. Currently he’s surrounded by tiger sharks, one of which just blew up. Blew up? This is precisely what Garrett Keeter despises about American films in particular and American culture in general. Both are just too fast and too noisy. How did he let Jaci talk him into this? All he wanted was to pick up some athletic socks, go home, and catch a nap. Despite that handful of dried mushrooms called his jetlagged mind, Garrett has to get busy tomorrow on his travel piece about Uganda. It’s due in New York on Thursday. Ten days ago Jaci and he flew to ZÜrich, from ZÜrich to Cairo, and from Cairo to Kampala, where they hired a guide at the Sheraton to drive them eight hours southeast on increasingly narrow, rutted, red-dirt roads into the mountains of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. That night they stayed in a tented camp and at dawn were joined by four other trekkers, two trackers, and a dozen soldiers carrying machineguns to dissuade the local rebels from taking potshots at the tourist economy. They rode in back of a rickety troop carrier to the edge of a pasture, then hiked up a trail past thatched huts into brush so dense the trackers had to machete open paths grown over since the day before. Five sweaty hours, and they came across leaf beds marked with scat, then broke through into a clearing alive with gorillas. Mothers with babies. Young males playing among branches. A pot-bellied silverback reclining sprawl-legged against the trunk of a tree like an old drunk. It rose languidly, scratched itself, snorted, and bolted forward in a fake charge, halting fewer than eighteen inches from Garrett’s face. Garrett averted his eyes and covered his teeth like the trackers instructed. Grunting, the gorilla inspected him meticulously. It was the most astonishing thirty seconds in his life. Garrett Keeter from Bloomington, Minnesota, was smelling a silverback’s breath. It smelled exactly like…what? Exactly like
00:03:33:03
UM, ISN’T THAT Josh Hartnett over there? Jaci wonders. Nope. No way. What would a guy like Josh Hartnett be doing in Blooming bumblefucknowhere? Only… She smiles to herself, clearing her head, and cozies once again into the rhythms of the trailer unfurling before her. Something just blew up. But what? Jaci missed it. She was miles away, hanging in a state of gray relaxation. She’s almost certain the feature will be a light romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant. Hugh Grant or one of those other cute charming English types, sophisticated, witty, boyishly vulnerable, whose names are eluding her at present. How long has she been sitting here? She isn’t sure. This is how jetlag works. Jetlag makes time smear. Jaci reaches out for her husband’s arm and pats it contentedly, unaware this is the last significant gesture she will perform in her life. In two hours and forty-seven minutes, Garrett and she will die of injuries sustained in a car crash on their drive home. Yep, Jaci Keeter concludes, sneaking another peek, proud of herself. No doubt about it. Look. That’s him, all right.
00:03:34:17
THE GUY IN THE fastfood uniform, soles of his Converse All-Stars propped against the back of Jaci’s seat, is Celan Solen. Celan works at the concession stand. On his breaks, he picks a theater at random and sneaks in to catch a couple minutes of whatever happens to be playing. Although he has slipped into this one more than two-dozen times lately, he still isn’t sure what this movie is about. Sometimes it seems to be a historical drama set in the nineteenth-century South, others all aging Bruce Willisesque action-adventure. Once Celan strolled in just as a college hottie in a skimpy bra and panties got disemboweled by a man in a featureless white mask. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. Put Celan in front of a flickering screen and he’s happy. Celan is not especially into narrative, not especially into character, and he feels pretty much anyone can tell one of the nine extant plots in the world. The trick for Celan Solen is always the how and the why of the telling. What he is concerned with is the mind in motion as it is disclosed by celluloid. For him the dominant metaphor for good film derives from the idea of The Persistence of Vision, where the human brain retains images the eye receives for a fraction of a second longer than the eye actually records them. If it didn’t, we would all go crazy with the jump-cut awareness of blinking. What we see in blinking’s place is an unending optical illusion: a coherent, continuous version of reality. To record a single fixed photograph on a frame, the camera’s shutter remains open about one-thirtieth of a second. The shutter exposes sixteen of those images every second in silent film, twenty-four in film with sound. One second of exposed silent film therefore contains only sixteen-thirtieths of a second of exposed action and fourteen-thirtieths of nothingness between frames. Which is to say, Celan continually delights in reminding himself, when we watch a movie in a theater we spend as much as half our time in the dark without knowing it…and yet we make complete sense of the shattered light-blips we perceive. Life flies at us in bright splinters. We turn them into significance. If Celan Solen could somehow capture such an understanding in a film of his own making, he would die satisfied. No matter how hard he tries, however, such an accomplishment will always remain just beyond his grasp. He will strive for it nearly twenty years, but gain international fame only after abandoning his quest and creating a tiny, vapid, forgettable love story steeped in 1970’s nostalgia that will cause vast numbers of viewers to weep uncontrollably during the last twelve minutes by heaping cliche atop cliche in a manner so mercilessly calculated that Celan Solen will never forgive himself. He will stop directing and, a millionaire in his mid-forties, return to his roots behind the glass counter out front because for him right here is what home should always feel like.
00:03:46:08
BIG-BONED COSMETOLOGISL Betsi Bliss accidentally touches elbows with Celan Solen, reflexively twitches free, and whispers a polite apology. She supposed she was watching a preview for a picture until the tall, dark, handsome secret agent climbed the ladder out of that pool into the murky belly of a flying saucer sweating ooze down its unnervingly organic walls. Then she almost stopped supposing altogether. Events had certainly gotten…well, odd, hadn’t they, and Betsi has never been fond of oddness. Oddness is far too odd for Betsi Bliss. The secret agent produced a bottle of green mouthwash, smiling an urbane smile and raising his prize aloft among delighted tentacled space creatures with wobbly purple heads. The space creatures clapped, even though they possessed no hands, and it dawned on Betsi that she had been watching a commercial masquerading as an SF picture masquerading as a secret agent picture. Not that such a recognition made her feel much better. Betsi loves only two things in life: applying just the right amount of rouge on a woman’s cheekbones for that wholesome natural look, and praising Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior. Every Saturday, Betsi and her husband Bobby (presently contemplating the sign in the window of the Chapel of Love one floor below: “Eat, Drink, and Remarry — Ceremonies Start @ $269”) attend the clapboard Church of the Blessed Roadkill. Preacher Pete, rotund man with a flaming white beard like a frozen white blast, tells them how best to serve their Redeemer. Betsi listens to every word, sometimes taking notes in a small spiral bound notebook. One, she once wrote, you got to give Him everything you have because the Redeemer is all about Total Sacrifice with capital letters. B, you got to believe right down to that part of your tummy where fear and desperation dwell. In conclusion, you got to feel Him inside you as if He had set up a tiny radio in the middle of your forehead. During the week, Preacher Pete crisscrosses the county in his Ford pickup, living off what the Lord leaves him along the roadsides because the Lord sustains and maintains and contains but never refrains because He knows best because He sees the whole picture while we see… we see, it occurs to Betsi with a joyful shock, only the trailers, and then only if we’re looking real hard so we can figure out what’s really a trailer and what’s only a commercial masquerading as a trailer. From puberty’s onset, Betsi Bliss has suffered from what Preacher Pete diagnosed as the Strange and Holy Malady of Wickedness Recognition. In times of vague distraction, Betsi becomes aware of itching sensations across her back accompanied by the impression of fluttery kisses. When she investigates the site of irritation in a mirror, she discovers an irruption of stitch-like lesions that, upon closer examination (and interpretation by Preacher Pete at their private sessions on Wednesday afternoons), spell out the chief transgressions she has committed by the very act of being alive in this World of Shame. Betsi Bliss believes her disease is a blessing in disguise. It’s always nice, holds Betsi Bliss, to find out what your sins are without having to think too hard.