Hard Light (18 page)

But other than a few token pictures that showed the Carlisles as a happy bohemian couple, Tamsin had been edited out of the movie's history. Only Grindarcana.com had a lengthy essay by film historian Nicholas Rombes, who not only credited Tamsin with providing the setting for
Thanatrope,
but also speculated that she might have edited the movie after her husband's breakdown, and even shot new footage that she incorporated into the original.

Back before VHS or the Internet, there were only two ways you could see
Thanatrope
: You could own a print, or you could wait for it to be trotted out every few years at some avant garde film festival. The movie consisted of forty-seven minutes of disturbing images, mostly shot on deteriorating film stock. A time-lapse sequence of human corpses rotting in a field; pigs being slaughtered by a grinning figure who wore a PEACE NOW! T-shirt beneath a blood-spattered butcher's apron; naked teenage girls cavorting in a garden, having sex with each other and a series of boys and older men.

Yeah, those were different times.

The deteriorating film stock had been a deliberate choice on Carlisle's part. His old pal Cammell came across a hoard of unused thirty-five-millimeter film canisters, stored in a warehouse not far from Ealing, and tipped off Leith. Rumor had it the film had been set aside by Michael Powell in the 1960s for
The Living Room,
Powell's unproduced movie based on a Graham Greene play. Heat and time had damaged the raw stock, but Carlisle insisted it was the only way he could afford to shoot on thirty-five millimeter, prohibitively expensive for an independent project in the early 1970s. He also thought the damaged film would be the ideal medium on which to represent images of a disintegrating consciousness.

He was right.

When the footage was processed, it looked as though it had been shot through a series of unfocused lenses smeared with blood, the camera pointed at the sun. Carlisle made no effort to create the conditions preferred by the famous directors he'd worked with over the years. This, as much as his transgressive subject matter, is what destroyed his career when the movie was released. David Lean famously excoriated him during an interview broadcast from a BFI event, accusing Carlisle of betraying the ideals of the British Film Academy.

Even Michael Powell, who you'd think might have stood up for him, considering Powell's experience with
Peeping Tom,
chided Carlisle when they were on a panel together at the same BFI event.

“It's an ugly movie, Leith. Not
what
you're showing us, but
how.
Why make such an ugly movie?”

There's no magic hour in
Thanatrope,
no diffuse sunlight or lens correction. Like his decision to use ruined film, this was all deliberate on Carlisle's part. Even the film's poster was ugly: a rusted pylon, like an electrical tower, silhouetted against a blood-red sky. The pylon's tip skewered a single dark cloud; it was only if you looked closely that you saw the cloud was in fact the photograph of a human eye imposed upon the background. Some of the movie was so underlit it was like watching a movie filmed beneath the surface of the Gowanus Canal.

But most was shot under hard light so glaring that you couldn't actually see what was being depicted, only the stark interplay of shadow and sun, figures irradiated in a flare of crimson or blinding white.

You'd think this might be a good thing, when what you were staring at was maggots and blowflies crawling through a man's skeletal ribcage. Of course it had the opposite effect: You'd imagine what you couldn't quite see there on the screen, and that was invariably worse.

I assumed it was worse, anyway—god knows what actually went on with those bodies in the field. In a
Sight and Sound
interview, Carlisle claimed that Scotland Yard brought him in for questioning. He calmly told them the corpses were all special effects.

“Like Roger Corman, you understand?
Night of the Living Dead
—those aren't real zombies.”

Whatever Carlisle was up to, no bodies were ever found. Not in the field, anyway.

The fire was a different thing. The cause was never determined, but the likely suspect was a stack of film canisters stored in the pantry at Kethelwite Manor, some of which contained cellulose nitrate film dating to the early 1900s. Cellulose nitrate film is notoriously volatile, made from the same material used in nineteenth-century explosives. The buildup of gases inside the canisters can cause them to detonate like a bomb. It's one reason so few films from the early twentieth century have survived. Those that did were eventually transferred to cellulose triacetate, and then onto videotape or digital formats.

Carlisle claimed he had no idea there was cellulose nitrate on the premises, but there's no doubt he was the one responsible for bringing the canisters onsite. Late one August night when the cast and crew and hangers-on associated with
Thanatrope
were passed out in Kethelwite Manor, one of the canisters of nitrate film exploded. The resulting fire swept through the house as though it were a haystack. A young film student working as Carlisle's cameraman was killed, along with three of the teenage actors, and Leith and Tamsin's infant son. Kethelwite Manor was destroyed.

Miraculously, however, the movie itself survived. All of Carlisle's equipment—film, cameras, tape recorders, editing deck—had been stored half a mile away, in the barn at one of the manor's old farmsteads.

After that, everyone associated with
Thanatrope
dispersed. Carlisle and Tamsin decamped to London, where Leith had a nervous breakdown. Yet less than a year later, he and Tamsin returned to Cornwall and settled at the old farmstead, along with a few of the crew members who'd worked on
Thanatrope.
Within a few months, a dozen people were living in the shadow of the ruins of Kethelwite Manor, including two of the girls who'd been filmed frolicking on the open moor: Poppy Teasel and Morven Tempest.

 

22

I spent about forty-five minutes on Quinn's laptop, reading everything I could about Leith Carlisle and
Thanatrope
. There's not a huge amount of information, but you can watch the movie in its entirety on the avant garde site Ubuweb, and read commentary by Derek Jarman, Nicholas Rombes, and Sally Mann. Elsewhere, you can find a few conspiracy theorists who believe there's an arcane message encoded into the film, or a curse activated every time the movie's shown.

“Hey. What're you doing?” I slid over on the couch so Quinn could sit beside me, a bathrobe hanging loosely from his lanky frame. He lit a cigarette, peering at the laptop. “Come back to bed.”

“I want to see this first.”

“What the hell is it?”

“It's a movie, shut up.”

The sound quality wasn't good, but that didn't matter. Carlisle had shot it without sound, later dubbing in buzzing flies, random laughter and conversations, snatches of music. Rundgren's opening guitar riff from “Juice It Up.”

“Right!” I turned up the sound. Quinn looked at me curiously. “Poppy Teasel would've cleared that song for him. And she knew Rundgren. And—wait.”

The screen showed a field, high grass bleached out to a lunar white, red-streaked clouds. Blobs and shimmers of violet appeared and disappeared like birds shot out of the sky, or silent explosions in the grass. Three long-haired teenage boys walked in a line, followed by three young girls, all of them naked. Occasionally one of them would turn to face the camera, smiling beatifically. In the background shone the sunlit towers of what I now recognized as Kethelwite Manor, the castle in an acid-fueled waking dream.

If you factored out the visual effects caused by lens flare and damaged film stock, it was an idyllic scene. That wholesome adolescent frolicking in the nude, proto–Ryan McGinley stuff. Yet the overdubbed soundtrack, that aural mosaic of random sounds, was unnerving—birdsong, the drone of bees, snatches of conversation, none of it miked at the same level.

And while I could remember that whole Free Love vibe from when I was a teenager, right now I felt complicit in Leith Carlisle's brand of seedy voyeurism, and not my own.

There was something else going on, too; something that made me wonder if those conspiracy theorists, with their chatter about subliminal images, might not be so crazy.

The double-exposed scenes of people were disquieting, as if I stared at a cave wall and only gradually became aware of the human figures painted there. I felt a strange queasiness, like seasickness and also what I can only describe as a kind of moral nausea. It was a sensation I'd experienced once before, when I'd taken THC that turned out to be PCP—angel dust—and felt my consciousness reduced to a spark in a yawning abyss, the closest I've ever come to believing in hell.

“You okay?” Quinn touched the back of my neck. “Your skin is clammy.”

“Yeah.” I tore my gaze from the screen. “It's giving me vertigo or something.”

“Probably the aspect ratio's wrong. Gives me a headache.”

I looked back at the laptop. As the kids walked out of the frame, Poppy Teasel's unaccompanied voice echoed eerily from the soundtrack—the sixteen-year-old Poppy, not the ravaged woman I'd seen a few hours ago, her words so high and sweet and charged with yearning that tears filled my eyes.

“The wind, the wind, the wind blows high

Ash comes falling from the sky

And all the children say they'll die

For want of the Golden City.”

As her voice died away, a smaller figure came running up behind the teenagers. A child, three or four years old, with a dandelion puff of dark hair. A little girl, I thought at first, T-shirt flapping to her knees like a tunic. One of the girls turned and swept the child up into her arms.

“Hey!” I leaned forward to pause the film. “That's Poppy.”

It was definitely her, very young—she couldn't have been older than seventeen—and heartbreakingly beautiful. It was almost impossible to reconcile her with the woman I'd seen in Stepney. I thought of the words of the doomed girl in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
: “I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.”

“Yeah, that's her,” said Quinn. “Great tits.”

I hit play and pause, running the same few seconds back and forth. Between the original film quality and the laptop's poor resolution, I couldn't get a good look at the little kid's face.

“Is that Adrian Carlisle?” I asked. “I think it is.”

“Adrian?” Quinn seemed alarmed.

“Why not? They have the same last name. Him and Leith Carlisle. They all seem to have known each other—Leith and Poppy and Morven and Mallo.”

Quinn took a nervous drag at his cigarette. “So this guy, he's Adrian's old man?”

“I don't know. Maybe. Probably.” I looked at Quinn. “What's the deal with Adrian? I don't know a fucking soul in London. He turns up, and now it turns out you know him.”

Quinn stared at the laptop. At last he said, “Yeah, okay, I know Adrian. We used to do business. When it looked like my flight was gonna be delayed I called him and asked him to track down Derek and look out for you. He's owed me for a while. Now I owe him,” he added ruefully.

“You asshole.” I punched Quinn's arm. “I can look out for my own goddamn self.”

“I think we have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that is not the case,” said Quinn, rubbing his arm. “I should have known better. Hurricane Cass.”

“Fuck you.”

I turned back to the frozen image of the child on Quinn's laptop. Was it Adrian? I did the math and yes, he would have been about the right age. I tried to remember what Poppy had said.

He was such a beautiful kid. I always wished we could have stayed close.

“Look, I'm sorry.” Quinn ran a hand along my thigh. “I thought he'd put you up till I got here.”

“He's living in a squat,” I said without looking up. “I slept on his goddamn floor.”

“Yeah, okay, I get it. Next time I'll put you in touch with Ronnie Wood.”

“You know Ronnie Wood?”

“Nope. Can this wait? I don't see you for thirty years and you're gonna spend the night on YouTube?”

“It's not YouTube,” I said, but he'd already closed the laptop.

“Come back to bed.” He finished what was left of my Scotch and stubbed his cigarette out in the empty glass, kissing me as he pulled me to my feet. “Now.”

Afterward, I again watched him sleep, his skin a ruined canvas on which the history of the last thirty years had been carved and inked and burned. What had happened to him back in New York, in Barrow and Oslo, before he ended up in Reykjavík and tracked me down?

I knew better than to ask. Instead I breathed him in, nicotine and alcohol and whatever other chemicals kept him alive. Finally I slept. When I woke, Quinn was seated on the edge of the bed, holding a mug of coffee.

“Here,” he said, and handed it to me. “I've got to go out for a few hours. I'll be back before eleven.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eight.”

The coffee was way too sweet. Every junkie I've known loves sugary coffee and coffee ice cream. I set down the mug and started to my feet. “Give me a couple minutes and I'll be ready.”

Quinn shook his head. “I have some last-minute stuff to finish up. Just be packed and ready to go when I get back, okay?”

I frowned. “Yeah, I guess. Can't I just meet you?”

“No. You need to lay low. You got your passport?”

“I told you—”

“Let me see it.”

I fetched my wallet and showed him the passport. He stared at it, then at my face. “You do look like Dagney in this. I think she's taller, though.”

“Like I give a shit.”