“Actually Helena, it’s about Karen.”
Karen smiles, finishing her coffee, and Helena, who tips two packets of NutraSweet into her au lait which has arrived, pulls her white gloss lips into a shape which resembles one moon smothering another:
“Koo-key!” she says, lighting another cigarette, inhaling. “You’re one weird guy Ciaran.”
5
I think this is totally relevant:
Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.
Also this, more accurately:
Whereas the reading time of a book is up to the reader, the viewing time of a film is set by the filmmaker and the images are perceived as fast or as slowly as editing permits.
(Library Shelf: T055589, Susan Sontag,
On Photography, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1977, 23, 81)
So fab!
6
In the video shop where Karen works there are four other assistants. Neve Campbell, Liv Tyler, David (Duchovny, possibly) and Denise Richards. The place is owned by Nic Cage. I mean, seriously.
Now I know this sounds crazy but you can make of it what you will. I figure everyone has a role model and, to be honest, they could do worse. Also, I just want to set the record straight that I don’t have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. Not even when she was going out with Brad Pitt and starred in Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle, which was filmed in three weeks using three Bolex’s, I’m told, did I have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. The fact is, I can take or leave Gwyneth Paltrow and felt exactly that way when she was interviewed by Film Mania—or was it Cine-Ma?—and said, and I quote, “I need to express every emotion that I have, the second that I’m having it, which is bad.” Actually, I think she should have kept her hair long, too. But, of course, they can do something about that with hair extensions and thinking that she had better hair in Sliding Doors than any other film is no indication that I have a thing about Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s just that very few women look like her. Hell, Karen is trying her best to look like a younger Ingrid Bergman, and she does (enough anyway)!
I crouch in Modern Film Classics while Karen, coming in from the backroom, and from the left, ten minutes after opening, makes some comment about some writer or another looking like Rene Russo. To which I call out: “O, right, who exactly?”
I phone shoot her in medium shot with a wall of films by Scorsese behind her.
I believe the world’s most perfect car is a white 1968 Corvette Stingray convertible. That also is a classic. A Scorsese classic is like that. Definable—to the knowledgeable—by its parts. The ’68 ‘vette has a large block V8 developing a maximum power of 339 bhp at 4800 rpm. The nose style is straight, zippered, like an Empire fighter from Star Wars IV. The motor is blueprinted and the wheels, naturally, are deep dish alloy. There’s a gauge for oil pressure, battery, and a tachometer which redlines at 6000. The instruments are heavily cowled (meaning, they are set back in circular slots). The upholstery is cowhide, in white. I would fit, personally, a twelve disc CD auto-changer or more probably use the MP3 from my phone and plug that into an amp, probably a Class D Monoblock Premium Digital Amplifiers Series Amplifier, though I’m also partial to Kenwood. But that’s another story, and as long as it has dynamic base control and a joystick remote changer then that’s fine by me.
Things seem to go well this morning. Supa-Video is down below the street and, at first, there’s no one much coming in, just a woman of about one hundred and twenty who seems to be looking for a doco on natural dietary fiber and then changes her mind and stands with her wheely bag in front of a dump bin full of 3 for the price of 1’s. I try to defocus dissolve her but for a long time no one else enters and the shelves impose too much contrast of a kind I’m not happy with and I decide on editing the sequence so that when three GI Janes walk in down the stairs I’m ready for some light relief and give them considerable gravity as they move between the bright of the street and the dark of the shop.
“Cast your eyes,” whispers Karen to David Duchovny, with whom she is now loading shelves from a box marked RETURNS, because she can see that the Janes are not from any known university but from the community college, Machin College (named, apparently, after some local poke who discovered, sometime around the last pass of Haleys, the reason why Saturn has its rings and Mars its Martians). They wear zip pocket skirts, strap vests, black, fetish shop pvc, KA boots.
“What are these three looking for,” says Karen to David, “the life and times of the New York Dolls?”
Duchovny, in close-up, begins to sing in a voice which is a mere whisper but certainly masculine and the words that come out are the lyrics to Alison by Elvis Costello. Duchovny was born, as this confirms, in 1960. “This world is killing you. Al-li-son” and all the while he keeps his eyes looking straight at Karen, with a intensity which can’t have just come out of nowhere.”—your aim is true.”
Meaning that Karen must know what’s true. Karen kind of chirps, and dives into the box so quickly that she drops two of the DVDs on the carpet and there burst open, then has to spend a minute picking them up (which I film in ECU to capture her eyes which are relentlessly flickering, as if she’s lost a diamond earring she’s bought but hasn’t yet paid for, and I hope the red tinge of the blush that spreads up her neck from that hollow in her breast bone actually comes out). Until, finally, the Janes make their move downstairs where no doubt they locate Soft Core and Indie Classics and spend some time discussing how good Divine was in Shampoo (not the Travolta version, right?).
Duchovny says, with his hands in his pockets and his head craned back so he can look out the windows, which shows the lower part of the street: “It’s like looking into another world from down here.”
Oh, reeally! . . . Dare I say: Poke alert!
“This,” I say to myself, “I just got to get.” So I come over closer, behind Documentary and Foreign. But Duchovny, who actually knows exactly what I’m looking for here, stares up at me as if I’m trying to assassinate The President.
“Don’t get any closer with that thing, it’s libel to go off,” he says dumbly. I imagine him shot in Panavision with the colors all saturated and the balance wacked. Deep purples. Hard reds. Bug greens. Frozen blues. All primary colors.
“Yep,” says Duchovny, staring up into the street again, “it really is like we’re integral to the street down here.”
Jesus!
“Excuse me,” I whisper desperately, “but this is not a genre film.”
Holding the box, with which I somehow get stuck, I sit my phone on the top of the display for Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, but without a clamp (which worries me, but what choice do I have?). Then I move along next to the two of them while knowing what I’m probably getting, entirely for Karen’s benefit, is completely offset framing and no headroom; but I’m thinking of Hitchcock’s fixed camera in Rope. I’m thinking that Hitchcock did it in Rope, and so maybe something will come of it. Maybe something good will come of it.
Karen is passing along the shelves of Rom-Coms, Thrillers, Sci-Fi, slotting in this DVD and that one, BLU-RAY, old skool, each one, alphabetically!
She says: “I feel like I’m replacing the thoughts of the people in the street.”
I refuse outright to react to this.
Slotting into place a copy of Scholondorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale, she says: “When Margaret Atwood did this it was a great piece of feminist literature, but this. . . .”
“This is crazy,” I’m telling myself. “My film’s going to be a comedy if I’m not careful.”
“It’s like axing the last fingers