I mean, ask yourself: why does a woman break away from the most fearsome anti-liposuctionist cell in Gotham and go live among the simple fisherfolk of NASCAR-istan?
What’s up with that? Especially when, for a surrogate family, what she’s got is a pair of pudd’nheads who like to catch frogs and throw them to the fire ants?
I’m telling you, I know the questions, and the answers need to include the truly nice. That’s our two-step, first strangeness, then sympathy. First zone out, then zoom in, see the move? Come to think—Balcony, help me here—we need it in the flashback, the warm’n’fuzzies, the high ideals of a High Yaller. So, what, again? Our girl had values? She reserved her punishment, I like it, she chose her targets. The most vain and rapacious. The Trumps and the Barbies and the doctors who, every time they take up a scalpel, first trace a dollar sign and let it bleed.
You got it. It’s in the flashback—but wait, what? Some heartbreak kid? Something else for the flashback, you’re telling me, a pretty little kid? Or pretty for a girl with a cleft lip and a clubfoot. Okay, one minute, I need to make some room up here. So, this kid, this girl. She’s a desperate little freak. Nine years old max, and no need to shout, people. I see her hobbling into Dr. Moloch’s. Down the hall, Salem, lurking. Black full-body leotard, okay, I hear that. Guy Fawkes mask. Then all at once she raises the mask. She’s gaping, shattered, and she cups a hand to her earpiece. Abort, repeat, abort!
Okay, it’s on the board, or pretty much. We’re getting mighty crowded for a flashback. Getting mighty cranky for a wrap session, too, tired and cranky, but, what—you want to keep going with the flashback? You want the bad doc laid out on his own table? Our Camptown Lady stands over him with a hot needle, a whirring hot needle. Let it bleed. The dangling ties of her smock, you’re saying, there’s your ribbons. The glee with which she wrecks his data, slapping defibrillators against his hard drive and wrecking it with a single charge—there’s your Title Scrabble!
Come on, settle down, no need to shout. Whyn’t you try some reading? Whyn’t you take a breather and try the book out in the lobby? It’s all there, chapter and verse: the two-step. Your arc carries you away but also carries you home, the refrain is reassuring, even if the end of the movie is the end of the world. Even if the screen goes black on some gargantuan space cricket rubbing its legs together. Still it’s the dreamsong of an American weekend, the thrum that starts with Friday’s first showtime, and it’s the long and short of why you came to me. It’s what I was put here to teach, the lullaby of the megaplex, the night language of a nation.
Balcony, what, again? You say you’ve got it? The second act, the arc’s comeback—the father?
You’ve got the daddy to darling Cletus. Sometimes at night when the cold winds moan. Though he’s dark, same as her, okay. You’re the boss. The board, don’t worry about the board, I can erase and start over. This country, that kind of thing, isn’t it what we do best? So, okay: Daddy’s got a tat on his throat. A fragment, not the whole tattoo, just what shows above the collar. Though the collar’s mostly rags, sure, a filthy and threadbare set of surgical scrubs. He must’ve worn it all the way down from New York. Only place the aquamarine is still visible is against the tattoo.
Except, what—it’s not a tattoo? It’s fire ants? Insects, venomous, except in symbiosis…
ROYAL JELLY, PITCH & YAW
Silver Lake: The dream begins in incompatibility. How’s that sound? How about we take you there, a place altogether different—incompatibility?
Venice: We know what it’s like for you. All day you’ve got to listen to this stuff.
Silver Lake: All day long you’ve got to listen. People walk in and say, We open on a country road, tumbling down the well of the headlights….They say, We open in the city, smoke, drizzle, fire escapes, the figures amoebic…
Venice: Not that we don’t know how to open. Our first sequence, boom. Everyone thinks they know zombies, the zombie apocalypse. But what we’ve got, the way we open, I mean, not in their wildest dreams.
Silver Lake: Except, in dreams, that’s where it begins, doesn’t it—or shouldn’t it, in dreams in all their incompatibility?
Venice: Like, a zombie wedding. Boom. A zombie wedding, that’s how we open. Beauty. We trash everyone’s expectations.
Silver Lake: The expectations, the clichés, trash them all. How many times do we have to come face to face with a tottering corpse who was formerly our father? Our wife or boyfriend or favorite child? With a knife in its ear? Plus there are always the empty long shots. How many times, a long pan of some empty public space, no one in it except a couple of shambling undead.
Venice: It’s over, it’s so over. I mean, zombies have gone to cable!
Silver Lake: Commercial cable, mark of the plague, might as well carve the credits into a tombstone.
Venice: But we’re off the wall and never before seen. We open on a wedding, one look and anyone can tell. The invitations. The gifts.
Silver Lake: The flowers, the right sort of flowers, and it’s children who hold the flowers. Children in full dress-up, so many little brides and grooms—can’t we pitch that towards the strange? Can’t the kids induce a chill?
Venice: It’s going to get strange, as the camera keeps moving.
Silver Lake: The camera keeps tracking, and what are we seeing, all these disgusting corpselike details?
Venice: An open neck wound above the tuxedo collar. And there, in the knot of the tie, okay the four-in-hand can be tricky, but that’s a finger…
Silver Lake: And how long does it take for a pattern to emerge? We’re thinking, one long tracking shot and everyone gets the picture—it’s the groom’s people. It’s the groom’s lineup. How can you not notice, over on his side of the altar, his side of the stairs? One guy’s standing on two stairs at once. One leg, what, how’s this possible? Is he missing everything below the knee?
Venice: Now the girl, her side of the altar, her people, these are fresh-faced American kids. I mean, it’s got to be the girl who isn’t a zombie.
Silver Lake: How’s this possible?
Venice: It’s got to be, the girl saves the guy.
Silver Lake: The girl saves the guy. Isn’t that the boat that floats? Isn’t that Old Ironsides herself, sailing smack through the middle of our dream?
Venice: See, our concept’s such a risk, big big risk, and the opening sequence goes right to the verge, the consummation, you may kiss the bride…. You’d think you’d walked into an art film.
Silver Lake: But the romantic dynamic? The character arc? That’ll float.
Venice: Always. The girl saves the guy. Always.
Silver Lake: Think of Endymion, one kiss from Goddess of the Moon, and he’s youthful and beautiful forever. Isn’t that what we’ve got here? Isn’t that what our girl can do for her zombie?