Flicker (31 page)

Then, after a lumpy splice, another brighter scene cut in. Blurred and at a distance, it looked at first like a long line of dolls. The camera came closer, the film cleared, and I saw.

These weren't dolls. They were human heads mounted higgledy-piggledy on long poles. Heads, half heads, skulls picked clean, jawbones. Where there were faces left, they were black and grotesquely primitive. Surely these were dummies carved from wood or shaped from
papier mâché …
but in the camera's perhaps deliberately fuzzy focus, they looked nauseatingly real. Suddenly the panning camera veered and moved in on one head, taking it in close-up. A fresh kill, still wet at the throat. The lifeless eyes goggled in terrible astonishment, the mouth gaped as if it might be struggling to voice a final scream left behind forever in its sundered body. The camera, advancing rapidly and precisely (it was a patented Zip Lipsky hand-held maneuver), homed in on that hideous mouth, approached it,
entered
it. Swallowed. Darkness. A long darkness that allowed me time to remember … that fence. I knew that fence. Joseph Conrad had described it. He called it “that symbolic row of stakes” topped by “heads, black, dried, sunken.” It stood in the deep jungle surrounding the encampment where Mr. Kurtz, the embodiment of white, western civilization at its highest, reverts to savagery.

So I'd discovered the footage Castle shot for his aborted
Heart of Darkness
—or as much of it as survived. When Zip had mentioned the project, I immediately got hold of the book and reread it. The fence was an image no one could forget. Apparently Castle had begun filming at just that point in the novel. I could see why Zip, with his sense of craftsmanship, had been unwilling to show the reel; it was a crude, preliminary effort, an assembly print at best, still waiting for choices to be made, effects to be introduced. Yet it let me see something of the story as Castle had understood it: the brooding
jungle, the ghastly fence, the severed head that eats the audience alive.

Meanwhile, the darkness on the screen had given way to a new sequence roughly spliced into place. Eyes. Shot after shot of eyes, hard and hostile, the eyes of sullen natives who didn't trust the camera or those who had intruded it into their lives. Zip had said Castle wanted to fill the jungle with eyes. Here they were, though I had no idea how they might be integrated (“composited,” wasn't that the word Zip used?) into the film. The eyes went on for several minutes, one pair following another. Toward the end of the sequence, the images began to skip back and forth between film positive and film negative: white-black, black-white, at first slowly, then more rapidly until the effect took on a dizzy, hypnotic attraction.

And then the eyes were gone, giving way to a badly fogged stretch of film. Dimly, I could make out an image, a human form that seemed to be dancing in slow motion, bending, turning. There were several takes of this sequence. In the fifth, the image was just bright enough for me to identify the figure as a woman. No doubt about that: she was totally naked, striking a number of startlingly lascivious postures. Her hair, long and blond, was whipped back across her face so that I had no chance of telling who this might be. But I gathered it must be Olga Tell, Castle's lovely and ever-compliant lady friend. If so, her reputation as one of the great screen beauties was well deserved. Even with her face obscured, she was displaying the most magnificent body I'd ever seen, and disporting it more wantonly than any queen of burlesque.

In the sixth take, there was a change. This time Olga was holding something between her jostling breasts. It glinted in the light revealing itself as a sword held inverted, the blade pumping rhythmically up and down between her thighs. She was maneuvering the nasty-looking weapon across and around her torso in a way that managed to be both menacing and erotic.

The seventh take was badly washed-out. Olga was just barely visible doing her phallic sword dance. But now she had company. A large, dark figure loomed up in the shadows behind her. By the quality of its movement—forceful, muscular—I judged it was a man. He wore a mask, but its features were wholly indistinct. His costume had loose, flapping sleeves that might almost have been wings. Embracing Olga from behind, he wrapped her in his flowing garment, drew her down
upon some kind of platform or table, and appeared to mount her. From that point on, as blurred as the film might be, there was no mistaking what was going on between the two figures: something that would never have cleared the censors of that day or this. Though there was no soundtrack, I could almost hear the ecstatic panting as the action reached its increasingly violent culmination. In its last several seconds, this portion of the film also began to oscillate between positive and negative, the alternation rhythmically timed to the accelerating climax of the sex act. Black-white, white-black, an intoxicating flicker that made the rough, fitful intercourse of man and woman all the more throbbingly powerful.

And there the reel broke off.

Now I knew why Zip had been so defensively quick to deny that he and Castle had filmed any “porn” in their sessions with Olga. Because if this wasn't porn, it was the next thing to it. Nevertheless, I made sure to convey his denial to Clare when she viewed the reel. As I expected, she scoffed. “Naked ladies doing bumps and grinds are always porn,” she insisted. “Especially when they wind up underneath some muscular stud. Not remarkable that Castle should use his girlfriend that way. Pretty young things are always getting exploited in Hollywood. What mystifies me is what he expected to do with this stuff, except show it at private parties. He shot this in 1939, 1940. Even skin flicks back then weren't full frontal. Your Mr. Castle was a very kinky customer, Jonny.”

I hazarded a few words in defense of the footage. “But the other things are pretty impressive, don't you think? The eyes, the fence … ”

Clare shrugged. “A big maybe. All we have here is raw material. Who knows how Max Castle or Orson Welles might have used it? I certainly can't get a fix on what I've seen. It's like trying to guess what Van Gogh's next painting might be by studying the colors in his paint chest. In this case, we've got porn and gore and lots of big, scary eyes. Myself, I don't even like what I see on the palette. Somebody should turn
Heart of Darkness
into a movie. I'm glad Max Castle didn't.”

“It might have been his best picture,” I protested.

“That's what worries me.
Heart of Darkness
made by a brilliant nut who's on the side of the darkness.”

Once there was a time—how many can still remember?—when a Coke bottle qualified nowhere in the world as an aesthetic object. When Superman lay locked away and forgotten in children's comic books. When, though you searched the city (any city) from end to end, you couldn't find a single movie poster to decorate your walls or a T-shirt bearing James Dean's picture. When nobody except the sort of movie nut I had become could have told you from where Woody Allen got the line “Play it again, Sam,” much less that he got it wrong.

In the university, at least in its more cloistered quarters, where I was busy carving a comfortable niche for myself, all this was as it should be. In the view of my academic masters, there was, between the fine and vulgar arts, a great gulf fixed. That gulf defined their role in life—which was to dig the ditch deeper, the better to defend high standards and good taste. To use an image they would have deplored: Culture-with-a-capital-C was Fay Wray, the unsullied virgin forever endangered by the King Kong of commerce and the mass media. In my habitual desire to please and succeed, I went along with that purpose; it seemed like a noble cause. I never dreamed that I might one day be among those who would betray the maiden to the ape. But I would. My love of movies—more specifically my fascination with Max Castle—was soon to make me a traitor within the citadel of intellect.

I can still remember the day when Clare began recruiting me for the job. Quite casually, she broke the news: King Kong had leapt the gulf and would soon have the frail and fainting beauty in his hairy paws. Did I know? Did I care? Were we to weep or cheer? Clare was giving me no cues, but remaining provocatively ambivalent.

The scene is a familiar one. Clare and I at breakfast. Before us, the usual meager fare. Mercilessly potent French coffee and toasted bagels. The two of us immersed in the Sunday
New York Times.
Having finished the Arts and Leisure section (always her prerogative
to read it first), Clare passed it across the table to me with a self-satisfied grin.

“They're finally catching up with us,” she announced, leaving me to work out her meaning.

I took the paper from her and began to thumb through it. It was, of course, the
previous
Sunday's
Times.
In those days—the early sixties—it took four days for the Sunday edition to reach the provinces. Clare would buy it at the Farmers Market newsstand every Thursday, but never so much as glance at the headlines until Sunday morning. Then, ritualistically, that great, sagging, many-segmented carcass of a journal would be laid across the table and dissected layer by layer until breakfast had been prolonged into a reasonable facsimile of brunch. It didn't matter to Clare that the paper was a week out of date; when it came to film, her main reading matter, she operated from the assumption that the nation at large lagged behind the tastes she championed by a good five years.

After I'd searched several pages of the paper trying to guess which film review she might have had in mind, Clare reached across to stop me. “I mean this,” she said with condescending patience, laying her finger on the lead article. Dutifully, I read the item through. No wonder I'd missed it. It had nothing to do with movies. It dealt with painting. The subject was a young artist, the latest find. A washed-out and vacuous youth, he didn't look like an artist or (judging from the interviewed quotes) talk like an artist. And the picture he had painted didn't look anything like the pictures artists painted. It was a picture of a soup can, an ordinary soup can—Campbell's tomato—but painted with all the loving care that Vermeer might have lavished on a still-life.

When I'd finished reading, I glanced at Clare, put on my most practiced knowing look, and nodded in thoughtful agreement. But she could tell I was faking. “Think about it, Jonny,” she said. “This could solve an important problem for you.”

And that, teasingly, was all she said, until a few days later. During a late-night intermission in our lovemaking, Clare fished a magazine from under the bed and dropped it with a slap across my bare loins. It was a heavy, slick job called
Artforum,
opened to the pages she wanted me to see. “For Chrissake,” she muttered as I began to read, “do we have to wait for a money-grabbing jerk like this to teach us our cultural ABCs?”

The jerk in question was the same blank-faced young man I'd read
about in the
Times
a few days before. He was the magazine's featured subject for the month. There spread before me was another of his works. A faded, muddy-colored portrait of Marilyn Monroe so exactly rendered that it might have been a photograph, but wasn't. It was a silkscreened picture, done not once, not twice, but over and over, like a face on a strip of film.

“You
do
get the point, don't you, lover?” she asked when I had finished reading.

Clare had been offering hints; I'd been pondering them. “You mean … study
Castle?”
I asked.

“Bright boy. If Pop can be art, it can sure as hell be scholarship.”

That was the “problem” Clare had in mind. My graduate dissertation. The time had come for me to choose a topic. I'd been casting about none too brilliantly for some six months, trying to come up with one. My thoughts had been running in the standard academic grooves: something suitably filmological, dealing with respectable cinema. Great directors, masterworks of the screen. Or possibly a bit of high-toned theory. The sort of thing everybody did in film studies in those days. Every time I mentioned one of these possibilities to Clare, whose judgment mattered to me more than that of my professors, she'd respond with a pained expression. “Oh God! You'll die of boredom,” she warned. “Worse,
I'll
die of boredom.”

Now she was suggesting something that brought a glimmer of enthusiasm into her eyes. “Thanks to Nylana the Jungle Girl,” Clare explained, “you practically own Max Castle's Hollywood career. Look what you have to draw on. Your own private collection of his uncut works.”

“But they're only B-movies,” I reminded her with great uncertainty. “I mean … they're junk.”

“So what's Campbell's soup?” she fired back. “What's a smudgy picture of Marilyn Monroe? Don't you see? The Andy Assholes of the world are blurring the lines and winning prizes for doing it. Which means, at best, they're opening up possibilities. Castle is good junk, isn't he? Isn't that what
you
believe?” She emphasized the “you,” as if maybe not
her.

By this time, Clare had viewed all the Castle films I'd brought back from the Lipsky collection. She'd decided to screen them regularly at The Classic, though she insisted that I write the program notes for them. For her own part, she wouldn't offer Castle's films one friendly word of comment. Now she did—grudgingly.

“Take my word for it, Jonny, it's a significant discovery.”

“You think so?”

“Even those tight-assed professors of yours should be able to see that. The barriers are coming down. In another ten years, we're going to have scholarly monographs on the films of Elisha Cook, Jr. What we've got to start doing is sorting out the good junk from the bad. Because the good junk—that's what we've got to make clear—is just the art that the mandarins wouldn't pay attention to. Like Shakespeare, once upon a time. Remember? He worked the wrong side of the river where the pimps and the whores and the groundlings hung out. He was good junk. So was Chaplin. And Keaton. And Groucho and Garbo.”