Flicker (76 page)

Wasted …

Ripped and torn,

Unwanted …

Never born.

We see great gloved hands wielding menacing and bizarre instruments: prongs, pincers, tubes, clamps. Behind them, sweating and straining faces, all women. At last, the suggestive fragments take on meaning. These are the sounds and images of abortion. There is nothing clear or graphic, yet we are seeing the essence of the act captured at its most grueling extreme. It was more than I cared to watch. I looked away until the sound told me the scene had changed. Now the screen was filled with a dizzy swirl of stained water, the embryos being flushed away by the hundreds. The camera goes into a drunken spin following them down and down into darkness. The scene descends into a yawning void. The only light is a damp glimmer here and there reflected off water. All around there are high, whining voices chattering in a vastly echoing abyss.

Where are we? In the dank sewers of the city, a subaqueous labyrinth,
the perfect Cathar symbol of our earthly condition. Here the embryos survive to become the sewer babies. They huddle together in clusters and grow into gelatinous creatures with sad human eyes. They feed and fight among themselves; swim, wallow, and creep along the walls looking for light. The film as a work-in-progress became somewhat jumbled at this point, a collection of shots upon shots of the babies in their noisome habitat. Though I assumed much of this would be mercifully edited from the finished version, the camera carefully investigates every fetid inch of this infernal landscape. At last the film breaks off in the inconclusive middle of a struggle between the embryos and the indigenous rat population for control of the sewers. There is every indication that the predatory vermin will prevail over the defenseless babies who seem able to do little more than wail and retreat.

Vile as the mewling, grublike embryos were to watch, they were a remarkable screen effect. Though they riveted my attention, for the life of me, I couldn't make out what they really were. Obviously not costumed actors; their diminutive size ruled that out. Nor were they animations; they were far too organically mobile. They looked like actual living things. But if they were, I was glad to say I'd never come upon their like. I asked Simon what they were while we waited for the reels to be changed.

“G-guess,” he challenged me.

“Some sort of puppet … ?”

He gave a dismissive smirk. “You c-can't guess?”

“No, I can't.”

“N-n-nobody will,” he answered smugly. “It t-took a long time to grow them,” he added, but would say no more.

In the second section of the film—also still in rough cut—the embryos have made their way back into the world. But what a world! Simon managed to suffuse the scene with an oppressive yellowishgray atmosphere, an acidic twilight that might be the last glimmer of a dying sun. It left ominous gulfs and pits of shadow everywhere. What little color remained in the streets was a mix of diseased greens and purples. People moved in this sickly half-light like zombies in the making, the life being slowly drained from them. The effect was a variation on the split-lighting I'd seen in so many of Max Castle's films, but much more expertly achieved. Simon later referred to the result as “granulated light,” a term I hoped he would get around to explaining.

In this darkling environment, the desperate embryos emerge timidly from the sewers and storm drains to slither along the gutters and lurk in unlit corners. They don't mean to menace or attack; they do worse. Pathetically, they beg for a love they are too hideous to reclaim. Still, when the chance comes their way, they approach, stroke, cling—especially to sleeping women. We have scene after scene of the babies squeezing under doors, creeping over the bedclothes, fastening themselves to the mothers who have rejected them. In the background, The Stinks take up their wailing chant, sounding now like bats in the night sky.

Love you so much,
Ooh wanna touch,
Love you a lot,
You all I got,
Luba, luba, luba,
Gluba, gluba, gluba.

Where the film breaks off, the lovelorn embryos have become unintentionally menacing in their futile pursuit of acceptance. In their numbers, they too often choke the life out of those they would caress. Simon had no idea as yet how he would end the story, but my sense was that he had in mind a sort of lethal worldwide pestilence, the human race smothered with love by its aborted progeny.

Putting it that way might make the film seem like an exercise in antiabortion propaganda. But that it surely isn't. The movie isn't “pro-life.” Like all Simon's work, but this time more crushingly than ever, it is
anti.
Anti everything. Antisex, antimotherhood, antilove … antilife. In Simon's hands abortion becomes a visual metaphor of contempt and loathing. The babies are the quintessential Cathar vision of physical existence: the blind animal rage to survive at all costs, the maniacal appetite of the flesh that devours the spirit within. They don't enlist our sympathy, they aren't victims but persecuting little monstrosities. Their hunger for love is wholly repulsive. One longs to see them flushed away, expunged.

But that hardly puts Simon on the side of the hounded mothers in his film. Without exception, they are bovine, stupid-faced women, the female type Simon so often features, especially in the role of mothers. Gross physical specimens, they would seem to have no function in life but to make babies. Yet that role is made to seem
thoroughly disgusting. One simply wants to see the entire cycle of begetting, birthing, dying, come to a merciful end.

This, then, was the stew of life-denying imagery I carried home in my head to Jeanette. I sat through only that one screening of the film, but it was enough to cripple my vitality. Max Castle, with the benefit of all the subliminal motifs at his command, couldn't have done a better job of that.

Simon, of course, was eager to know my opinion of his work, but I wouldn't give him a quick answer. Instead, I resorted to peripheral questions.

“How long did you say you've been working on this?”

“F-four years.”

“Why so long?” I asked. As far as I could estimate, Simon rarely spent more than three or four months on a movie. Many were true quickies, done in a few days.

He screwed his face up in annoyance. “L-lots of dumb tech-technical things.”

That puzzled me. Simon had never referred to “technical things” before. Though there was a great deal in the way of special effects and tricky editing in all his work, these matters seemed almost routine for him, never the sort of difficulty that held up production. “Seemed quite effective to me,” I commented, hoping to draw him out. “Some very powerful images. The lighting, the sound … ”

“Oh yeah. The f-film's okay.”

“Well then?”

“It's the tr-tr-transfer.”

I'd never heard this term before. “Transfer. To what?”

“T-T-TV.”

“TV? You mean this is supposed to be a
television
movie?”

“Yeah. That's why we g-got to get it tr-transferred just right.”

“Transfer,” he went on to explain, meant preparing the movie so that it could be shown on a television screen with no loss of power. Simon had never talked technicalities with me before, and he wasn't the easiest person to follow when he did. But I got the main point. Television, although still an art of light and shadow, significantly altered the characteristics of a film, especially the flicker. The flicker was still there, but it required a different treatment. Simon went into the engineering fine points of the matter, running off lots of numbers that meant next to nothing to me. I couldn't help but be impressed, however, by how much he knew about the medium.

I'd always smugly regarded television, especially its technical side, as unworthy of serious artistic attention. Not so Simon. He was intensely concerned about the problem of transfer. As I understood it from his hasty and stammering exposition, the little video screen was very unlike the big movie screen. On the big screen, the dark and light alternated in time as the film flipped through the projector. On the little screen, the dark and light—which still embodied “the war”—were simultaneously present at every moment as a result of the rapid scanning action that went on inside the picture tube. The flicker was thus laced across the entire screen.

From Simon's viewpoint as an orphan filmmaker, this made a big difference. It meant that whole scenarios had to be handled in ways for which the movies provided no guide. The deep darks and sharp lights of the film screen had to yield to more intricate blendings, muted grays, fuzzy contours. Images and sound had to be scaled down and made more sensuously intimate. More had to be done with closeups and interiors. The edges of the picture tube, being beveled, could be exploited for a new range of effects.

Above all, there was the phenomenon Simon called “beaming.” In film, light is projected from behind the viewer upon the screen and there perceived by reflection. In video, the light is invasive, almost like an assault; it is beamed directly at the viewer from the front. The human retina is the screen. The pictures are shot straight through the optic nerve into the brain—“like millions and millions of little needles,” as Simon put it. Potentially, that drives every cinematic effect more deeply and surely into the mind. From Simon's viewpoint, this made television a far more potent medium—if it was properly used. “Movies're gonna be dead,” Simon predicted confidently and without a tinge of regret. “Everybody's gonna s-stay home w-w-watching the TV all day. Hours and hours. You g-got ‘em sitting there like t-t-targets. You c-can just keep zapping it at ‘em, wham, wham, wham!”

How much progress, I asked, had Simon made so far in transferring any of his films to the TV format?

“Oh, lots. C-course I'm n-not working on it all b-by myself. But there's still problems, so I c-can't f-finish anything yet.” He went on to explain something about the trouble he was having with “blacks.” The black part of a TV movie—shadows, depths—were still not “negative” enough. Television color (which Simon hated) was part of the difficulty. But even if the harsh video color spectrum could be softened,
the beaming made the blacks too luminous. That was where the granulated light came in. It was an experiment seeking to create an eerie gray that might suffice for the time being whenever ghastliness was needed, the effect in which Simon was most interested. But eventually Simon wanted a video-dark that would be as “pitlike” as the darks in a good
film noir.

“Real h-hellish, you know?” That would “strengthen the evil.” As it was, “you r-really can't scare anybody, especially with all the lights on in the room.” What Simon was working toward was a “vampire black” that would “suck all the light right out of the people's heads” and produce an “inside darkness” deeper than any movie theater. “It'll be like the gr-grave,” Simon predicted eagerly. “Then you'll really get the f-f-flicker in there.”

“And you think,” I asked, “that when you get it all worked out, with the vampire black and the beaming and all, that the television networks are going to broadcast movies like the
Sad Sewer Babies?”
I was trying tactfully to remind Simon that he was after all a marginal, avant-garde filmmaker who couldn't be certain of placing his work in first-run theaters or outside the video ghetto of MTV. My skepticism hardly fazed him.

“Oh yeah. They'll be showing everything on the TV, another t-t-t-ten years. All k-kinds of j-junk. There's gonna be so m-many ch-channels. H-h-hundreds of'em.”

“Hundreds?”

“Oh sure. It's being invented. So my stuff will be th-there. The kids'll want it. But th-that's not what matters anyway. That's just broadcasting. Th-that's how the TV is now, but it's gonna be all d-different. Wh-what'll happen is the kids'll b-buy the f-flicks and stick ‘em on at home. Par-parents won't even know what they're w-watching.”

“
Buy
them? Kids are going to
buy
movies?”

“Sure,” he answered in a wised-up tone.

“Simon, I think you're being unrealistic. Do you know what it costs to buy movies for home projection—even if the producers are willing to sell them?”

He gave a knowing little smirk. “That's
now,
you're talking about. But p-pretty soon …”He fished into his pants pocket and drew out a small circular object about the size of a poker chip. Casually, he flipped it toward me. I caught it and turned it over a few times. It was made of plastic with a square hole at the center. Along the edges
there were tiny slots. Otherwise there were no distinguishing features. “… movies'll look like that,” Simon went on. “Even smaller. And re-real cheap. I could stick all my stuff on just that one.”

Simon called the little trinket a “flick pack.” He was convinced that in the near future people would have some means of playing these devices in their own homes on television—as inexpensively as playing phonograph records. All the movies in the world would wind up being fed into television sets and shown at the push of a button. For years I'd been hearing rumors of such a technology; recently, a kind of “cassette” had been put on the market which might one day hold an entire movie. What Simon was describing still lay in the realm of science fiction, but he had no doubt about the matter.

“People'll be b-buying movies like”—he popped a Milk Dud into his chocolate-ringed mouth—“candy. N-nothing special. Th-they'll just be playing in the background all the t-time, every room of the h-house. That's when we'll really
g-g-get
‘em. And my fl-flicks'll be the most popular of all.”

I drove home from St. James School that weekend in a condition of emotional and intellectual overload. The images of Simon's film were swimming through my memory, reminding me that I'd seen a true masterpiece of morbidity. But what I carried away of the movie jostled for attention with what Simon had told me about his plans. I understood very little of what he'd said about the possibilities of video technology, but I'd learned better than to dismiss anything the orphans had to say about the cinematic arts. Their skill at manipulating the medium was formidable.