Aborted Desoto Film Project
While working on Kent, she remembered an underground filmmaker she had first heard about in high school, Bobby Desoto. He made some amazing short films in 1970 and 1971, but he was mostly famous for vanishing after a protest bombing he was involved with in 1972. Meadow attempted to locate him. She spent some time in California, where he grew up, and then later in the Northwest. But she couldn’t get anyone to talk to her. Not his family and not his friends. It was a dead end, and she gave up on it. However it wasn’t a total waste of time: she ended up using clips from his films in Kent State: Recovered.
Play Truman (1993)
Meadow made Play Truman quickly. It was a short speculative film essay about the dropping of the second atomic bomb. Historical footage of Truman and Nagasaki were intercut with an actor in a room, which was Meadow herself in a suit as Truman. She read from Truman’s journal. As Meadow went into Truman’s biography, she showed archival film clips of regular people in their homes, rare films made in the early part of the century with very early hobby cameras, which she hoped conveyed a sense of the American middle-class security that Truman came from. She intercut these with home films of 1940s ordinary Japanese people — not exactly home films, but they appeared that way: a woman in a garden, children playing. She used intertitles and tinted some of the images to make them individual but also of a piece. As she showed these images, she read from Truman’s journal to show how he made the case to himself that the continued fire-bombing of cities was worse than dropping an atom bomb. She let her Truman make his case, but the dropping of the second bomb gave the lie to most of the reasons. Still she caught, somehow, the way this unimaginable and world-changing power fell into Truman’s hands, a man who didn’t even know the bomb existed before his predecessor died. She felt his raw humanness melt away as he decided who would live and who would die. It made her shudder, pretending to be Truman. The film was her hybrid projection, a leap from her earlier reenactments to something else. And no one knew what to make of it. It was fantasia more than documentary, and it hardly got shown, won no prizes. It was clearly not what people wanted from her after her Kent State film, which made her feel pleased in a complicated way.
* * *
After the success of Kent State: Recovered, the failed Desoto project, and the perverse satisfactions of Play Truman, Meadow decided to take some time to consider what her new project might be. She flew home to LA for the first extended visit with her parents in years. Meadow slept in her old room, and she walked through her old life as if she had never left. She wanted to, somehow. She let herself regress a little: watching videos and movies on TV, smoking on the patio in the cool desert night, drinking expensive white wine with her mother, and even going shopping. She spent hours at the flea market looking at old things. She picked up broken vintage electronics, sorted through boxes of ephemera, bought a number of obsolete devices. Whatever caught her eye and interested her. She put the things she bought in her bedroom and arranged them on a low shelf. She flipped through a box of old postcards and read the notes from long-dead people. She spent days like this.
Coming home and staying home was unsettling. It was impossible not to feel like a ghost visiting her old life, because everything in her house and the city seemed the same except for her. She was different, and Los Angeles made Meadow lonely for her grown-up self. All her friends were in New York.
“Meadow!” Carrie said.
“How are you?” Meadow spoke into the handset of her beige plastic cordless phone. She was stretched on the bed and starting a second glass of her mother’s white burgundy.
“It is so nuts right now. We are doing all the postproduction stuff. I can’t believe it is really happening.”
“Oh. Good,” Meadow said. “I am at my parents’ house doing nothing.”
“Why are you staying, then?” Carrie said. “Come back to New York.”
“I will. Soon. I just need to regroup, I think. Watch a bunch of movies and think.”
“What’s that you say? Watch a bunch of movies, you, really?” Carrie said. She laughed. “I wish I could be there. Even if you make me watch some real-time antinarrative film essay about Portuguese fishermen—”
“Actually I was thinking all screwball comedies. Bringing Up Baby, Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday—”
“Very tempting!” Carrie said.
“Why don’t you come here?” Meadow said. “We can watch whatever you want. A Peter Sellers festival. Woody Allen films. I’m up for it.”
“Meadow, I’d love to, but I can’t right now. I am working.”
“All right, all right,” Meadow said.
“Are you okay? Are you working on something new?” Carrie said.
“I’m fine. But I have to go.”
“Well, I am glad you called. We seriously need to hang out when you get back.”
“Yeah. And I really want to see that Portuguese fishermen movie.”
Carrie laughed. “The Way of the Fish, you mean?”
“No, I think it’s called Scales: Eyes.”
“Man with a Fish.”
“Triumph of the Fish.”
“Le Sang des Poissons,” Carrie said. “No, wait. F Is for Fish.”
“You laugh,” Meadow said, “but I would love to see any of those films.”
As soon as she heard Carrie disconnect, she pressed the glowing call button, waited for the dial tone, and punched in Kyle’s number. She offered to pay for his ticket, and her parents let Kyle stay in her room with her. For three days after he arrived they mostly concentrated on having sex during the day while her parents were out. She enjoyed having Kyle on her bed, in her room, surrounded by her books and posters from high school. By the afternoon of the third day, even that grew tiresome.
Meadow got up and pulled on a tiny t-shirt and some panties. She rummaged in her bag for her cigarettes, then sat in a chair by the window. She folded her long legs under her, opened the window, and lit up the cigarette.
Kyle stared at her from the bed.
“What?” she said.
“You realize this is like a full-on suite, right?” he said. Meadow burst out laughing. “It is. You have a luxurious starlet bathroom and then you have a huge bedroom and then you have like an anteroom. A suite.”
Meadow shrugged and blew smoke toward the open window.
“You act like you are from the ghettos of Bombay,” she said.
Kyle yelped out a laugh.
“I am sure,” Meadow continued, “that in the privileged cul-de-sacs of Westchester, a dedicated bathroom is not unheard of.”
“Racist,” Kyle said, smiling. “And it would be a ghetto in Dhaka, not Bombay!”
“But Westchester, in any case,” she said.
“This is a different level of wealth.”
Meadow looked around, imagined the house from the eyes of someone else. It was opulent, partly because her mother had larded the place up with sumptuous, decadent decor: velvet pillows, silky carpets, chandeliers.
“I’m going to make bacon and eggs now,” Meadow said.
Later she took a long run through the hills of Bel-Air, followed by a swim in the pool with the view. Then her parents came home, and as usual, there were guests over for dinner. At first Meadow thought this was for her benefit, or that her parents were showing her off to their friends. But then she realized that this was what they had been doing since she left: entertaining. On the previous evenings, Meadow and Kyle drank too much wine and slipped away after the main course was over to watch movies in her room.