Anyway, tonight, this might not’ve been a great flick, but it wasn’t for laughs. That’s not why you laid down eight or ten bucks. If all you’d wanted was a bit of diversion, you’ve got that at home, the smaller screens, the handy remotes. Hey, don’t they call it a “ joystick”?
Tonight, you came out for something bigger and more mindless. The full in-the-round. And look where you wound up, with credits that turn cannibal. Big letters that go all Godzilla on the little ones. You never realized the letter F posed such a threat, you never noticed its Tyrannosaur overbite, but here the F has erupted out of some perfectly well-behaved word, some tidy and justified line of print. Somehow the dinosaur DNA got in and the F has ’shroomed and gone carnivore. It’s chomping out chunks of the rest and gobbling them down. It’s not just tearing into the stuff up-screen, the information you might’ve gotten through already, if you gave two hoots, it’s taking the attack down-screen. Ripping away the recognition that’s yet to come! Imagine the crushed hopes, for some fringe player in the industry. Some guy listed as Octopus Wrangler, maybe Tattoo Finagler, he’s sitting in the theater waiting for just one name to scroll into view, and he glimpses its penumbra, the glow that peeks above the screen floor, the rising of the dream. His own immortal name. But then out of the black’n’white above, in a ruckus too fast to follow, this mass-murdering blind raptor of an F rears and snaps and tears it away.
Imagine the crush and bewilderment. Except, wow, you don’t have to imagine. You’re there. Shrinking in your seat, wondering about the people in tech, wondering about 3-D. Hullaballoo-cination.
There’s the F run amok, and okay, F as in freak and fierce and fuck-all. But what’s this one, an R? That letter’s always seemed a peaceable galoot, the better half of purr. Look at it now, though, R as in fuck-arr, a capital that towers over the rest, galumphing around and using that long front strut like a tentacle. The letter yanks smaller ones out in clusters and scoops them up into its belly bulge. It’s complicated. First the names and name fragments get plucked up and shoveled into a black belly, then inside that white outline the white nubbins cook down, in enzymes or something, and then as those crumbs of captured chalk evaporate the chalk outline around them grows denser. The breakdown of one seems to buttress the other. It’s complicated, it’s not uninteresting—and it’s not even the weirdest thing. You’ve got the shreds of former signifiers frittering away inside the R’s parabolic gut, and you’ve got an F ripping out dreams before they happen, and it looks as if the party’s just beginning.
Also there’s a kind of vacuum U, just look, a U wildly overgrown and schlupping down chunks of credits. Wherever the U rumbles into place, above it the rows of print start to tremble, for a while they resist, but soon there’s some slippage, a little a, or is that an @, part of a logo or website. Once that piece drops into the maw beneath, into the rattling U, as in fuck U, other rivets start to give, the lines crumble, and there’s that chalk circle of life again. The fallen frags evaporate, their cook-pot waxes stronger, and from there things only get crazier. In a couple of spots where the white flotsam and jetsam have been sucked away, the letters and what-have-you sucked into the big vowel’s gape, whoosh, in a couple spots the black doesn’t hold out either. Not only the credits themselves get vacuumed from the screen—also the credits’ backdrop, the black, rips loose and tumbles into the vacuum. The very earth beneath our feet!
Or something like that, if you can picture our eyeballs having feet. It leaves you wondering: what’s underneath? Behind the black, the border of our universe, if eight or ten bucks could buy you the universe—what?
Not much of the backdrop tears away, a scrap here and there, and beneath it the most you can make out is more scraps, fragments again, this time composed of color and jitter. Fire ants and Daisy Dukes? What are you watching? The movie, it could be, under there, where the black’s been torn away. The flick you thought you came out to see. It could be, as you sort out a detail or two more, Kalashnikovs and synchronized swimming. It’s something familiar, these tatters, these flashes where the black used to be. Granted, the edit is à la nutso. That slam dunk for the championship, it’s so far out of sync, no way it could be the work of the people in tech. Still, whoever did this, they couldn’t blast the entire multiplex to smithereens. They had to leave a few stretches of aqueduct above the ruins. And isn’t that what you came out to see? A story with staying power? It’s as if one of the monsters threw a wrench into the works and then the spit-out gears and bolts and sprockets came together as a better mechanism. Wrench-aissance.
Though you’d swear that no machinery could function long among these Zilla-Letters, these Destructo-Glyphs. They’ve got friends, more trouble. They’ve got three Ns running interference, when did that happen, one N pitching in with the F and the U, helping to pry loose a recalcitrant white bit here and there, and the other two running interference around the lumbering, tentacled R. Not quite so large, these auxiliary three. Not so monstrous, but no less of a menace to the lingering credits, the huddled names and brand names. Brand logos, websites, stubborn traces of a former reality. Stubborn, yes. They do appear to be hanging in, now that you’ve hung in, now as you get the larger picture.
They do appear, these bits and symbols here and there, to have banded together into a barricade. Or they’ve made themselves over as, what, a spiderweb? Lines of white print, or what used to be print, have wound themselves into thread and stitched back and forth across a patch of the confounding emergent movie.
When did that happen? How could it happen?
Wherever the backdrop came off, wherever the black split open and erupted in color and drama (isn’t that drama, in those torn spaces?), the white bricabrac must’ve first been stripped. You couldn’t tear out chunks of black, or the U couldn’t, without first cleaning off the white. Yet there’s some kind of comeback afoot. Some kind of resistance, that’s the larger picture. The credits have mustered a counterforce. Those huddles are deliberate, that barricade is holding, and dinosaur DNA alone isn’t enough to turn a few random letters into the Freaks that Devoured the Mall. They may have the size, but the others have the numbers. The others can shake loose of their rank and file, the torpor of reading left to right. A setup like that, left-right-left-right across the colorless flats, wasn’t it ripe for plucking? Wasn’t it bound to shred and crack and flinder and in the end, turn cannibal?
Now that the smaller critters have been set free, they can find ways around the marauding jumbos. Where the fabric of the former universe burst open, where there’s an outbreak of story, no matter how bizarre and pyrotechnic, they can sling lines of containment.
Is the monster R in trouble? Is that what you’re seeing, a brave squad of lowercase w’s and h’s, maybe a t or two, wrapping their arms around each other to create a kind of lasso? You never noticed that about letters before, how they’ve got arms, most of them, loving arms apparently, and extensible too. The way this squad links up, they might be taking that Sistine ceiling touch-of-God to the next level. They’re a rope, a group-grope-rope, and they pitch their loop past the hench-Ns and around the fixed foot of the R. They yoke the big roughhouse and set him flailing and tottering. As it wobbles, wow, look, a few of the bits in its belly tumble out. You never thought of that, how the bastard may be huge but he’s still two-dimensional, he’s got his limits. He spills undigested nubbins of credit.