Flicker (97 page)

“It's a pity you had to spend your career hiding things. Don't you wish you might've simply said what you had to say, shown what you had to show?”

He was jarred by the words. “Never! The art of it all is in the hiding. Don't you know by now? One works always under the surface. That's the only way you get inside their minds: when they don't see you coming.”

That's his main criticism of Simon Dunkle's work. The
Sad Sewer Babies
arrived about a month back. He watched it through three times—the only film to be so honored by him since I've been here. He found it clever, but his conclusion was negative. “The sport has gone out of it,” he commented. “There's less and less to conceal.”

Apropos of Simon, it seems that somebody sees fit to keep me abreast of his ever-prospering career. Probably it's Brother Eduardo. About once a year I receive a packet of reviews and clippings that detail the boy's steady, meteoric rise in the world. (Ah, but he's not a boy anymore, is he?) He moves farther into the mainstream all the time. At last report, Fox Studios had signed him to do a cablevision series described as “serio-comic Grand Guignol.”

Accompanying this bulletin was an item that could only have been sent to rub salt in the wound. It was a feature from
The New York Times Magazine
dating all the way back to the summer of my unexplained disappearance, in fact to before my disappearance had been officially noted and announced. I have no idea how long ago that was. My organic clock—graying hair, dimming eyesight—tells me several years. The subject of the piece was the then boy genius Simon Dunkle, described as “the most daringly original and controversial film talent to appear since Orson Welles.”

So described by whom? Why, of course, Jonathan Gates, Professor of Film Studies at UCLA. And Professor Gates goes on to praise the courage and candor with which this superbly gifted youth is throwing open new frontiers of once-forbidden subject matter … and clichés to that effect. It was the article Angelotti once persuaded me to use as leverage with Brother Justin. The orphans had given it a neat ending and submitted it for publication. They probably even pocketed my fee.

I complained about the matter to the only audience I had available to hear my grievances. “I wouldn't be caught dead saying things like
this about that little monster. I don't want to be implicated in his success.”

He listened sympathetically, assuring me I had no reason to concern myself. “Nobody pays attention to scholars and critics.”

Maybe we'll go on like this for years and years—until he drops dead of old age or I fall victim to tropical fever. In time, I'm sure I won't even remember that once I used to think of our experiments in Stone Age cinema as shared insanity. It will simply become my way of life, the normal routine for the population of an island where time has ceased. That's become my principal means of survival. Killing time. Killing it dead. Nothing can be crazy or wicked or worth worrying over when there is no “before” or “after” to distinguish cause from effect, means from end, hope from disappointment. I'm at the point now that the only trace of time's arrow I can still detect is the almost nonexistent seasonal variation that passes over us. Sometimes it rains a lot; sometimes it rains a lot more. One of these means spring, one means winter. I'm no longer sure which is which, nor can I remember how many springs or winters have passed since I last tried to recall how many springs or winters had passed. There's only one landmark I'm watching for on the event-horizon of the black hole I inhabit. If one day I wake to find the sky on fire, I'll know it's 2014 and that the orphans' death wish has been granted.

On the other hand, the fateful day may pass so unobtrusively I won't know it has come and gone until some old newspaper arrives bearing a later date. Of course that's how I should hope things will turn out. But over the years, I've soaked up too much of the Great Heresy. I've come to see that all wisdom lies in what may have been the first muffled lines of dialogue to reach my fetal sensibilities before I too was born into death.

“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”

He turned out to be right about the memoirs. They started happening just the other day, while he was on the dope pipe. Doodling on the flyleaf of a book (it was the S. J. Perelman anthology, reread for the dozenth time), I discovered I'd written a sentence.

“I saw my first Max Castle movie in a stuffy basement in west Los Angeles… .”

Stuffy? Or grubby? Or grungy? Or all of the above?

Whichever … it makes as good a beginning as any. I scrounged around for some paper, found a few scrap sheets, and pressed on. By
the time he came back from never-never land, I was describing my first encounter with Clare. Now I am sorry I wasted so much paper. I've begun scrubbing old newspapers and letting them bleach in the sun. If I slow myself down to about five pages a week, I may be able to stretch the job out over the next ten years. And then what? Perhaps I'll stuff the pages in bottles and float them out to sea.

With my luck, they'll wind up heading south. Entertainment for the penguins.

At UFA Studios, Germany

As Art Director

As Director

In the United States

Uncredited collaboration as director, production adviser, screenwriter

Novels, like movies, have their outtakes—passages and chapters that never make it into the final cut. The following are outtakes from
Flicker,
items Jonathan Gates elected to delete from his study of Max Castle. Fortunately this lost literary footage survived among his notes. It serves to remind us that some highly intriguing material often winds up on the cutting-room floor.

[The following document recounting the inquisition of Raymond Lizier was passed to Jonathan by Eduardo Angelotti, Dominican friar, film buff, and militant member of Oculus Dei. Copied by Angelotti from faded originals in the archives of the Dominican Court at Comte de Foix, the report describes a case that took place in 1324 at the height of the Albigensian Crusade. Angelotti came across Lizier's case while he was preparing his study of heretical Manichaean communities in Eastern Anatolia. His interest at the time was in tracing the heresy into western Europe. As he explained to Jonathan, “Here you will see how cleverly, indeed how subliminally the Great Heresy put down roots in the western world. What do we have here? A mere plaything, as innocent as the flip books of ancient times. Gradually, over the centuries, cunning moving-picture machines of this kind spread throughout the south of France into the Moorish Kingdom of Grenada and from there further east. They ranked among the most popular courtly amusements of the High Middle Ages. As for the lower orders, there were more primitive versions of such mechanisms like that described in this account. Except for the ever-watchful inquisitors—members of my own order—who would have raised the least objection
to such harmless pleasures? We can imagine the unsuspecting peasants gathering for the show, completely enthralled by this remarkable device, never realizing the spiritual poison that was being introduced through their eyes and into their minds. After all, what do they see? A fox chasing a hare, the dance of Salome. A bit naughty perhaps, but all in good fun. For what does any of this have to do with religion? Of course, they knew nothing of persistence of vision, the optical trick that the heretics were exploiting below the level of awareness. Stupid clods, we might say. Ah, but what do the moviegoers of our own sophisticated age know of the diabolical corruption that is insinuating itself into their very souls as they sit watching a love scene, a shoot-out, a car chase on the screen? Are they any less mesmerized by Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Mickey Mouse? They laugh, they thrill, they gaze with amazement at the delightful dance of light and shadow. Have they any inkling that they are taking the bait? That they are descending to their damnation?” The translation is by Father Angelotti.]

Here follows the sworn deposition of Raymond Lizier, millwright of the village of Junac in the principality of Comte de Foix, taken down at the diocesan court held at the château of Allemans, Thursday, the feast of St. Lawrence in the year of Our Lord 1324. The said Raymond, being vehemently suspected of the heresy of the Cathari, was brought before the Reverend Father in Christ Monseigneur Jacques Fournier, by the grace of God Bishop of Pamiers, to be questioned with the assistance of the venerable and religious person Brother Arnaud de Beaune, chief inquisitor of heretical depravity in the kingdom of France as commissioned by the Apostolic See. Also present were diverse other worships of the court wishing to make inquiry of a certain diabolical device said to be of Raymond Lizier's invention and purported to have a pernicious effect upon the mind and soul with respect to assailing the faith and unity of the Roman church.