Earlier Merlin and Jacoby had been in an argument, Merlin talking about the indispensability of action and story in a film. Jacoby talking in a much fancier way about “cinematographic language,” “the semiotics of film,” “Griffith as master of denotative language.” “Metz as the only critic who understands the connotative film,” and so forth. What junk. I refused to pay attention.
Merlin finally shrugged and fell silent. I couldn’t tell whether Jacoby was trying to (1) upstage Merlin, (2) impress Margot, (3) do both, or (4) was speaking honestly.
Nor could I be sure whether Merlin was withdrawn because (1) Jacoby was paying too much attention to Margot, (2) he was bored by Jacoby’s fancy “cinematographic semiotics.”
Raine and Dana listened glumly. My daughter Lucy had managed to get herself between them and was in a transport of happiness, happy to be next to Troy Dana, whom she said she was in love with, but maybe even happier to be next to Raine, whom she worshipped as the casual possessor of those qualities most prized by Lucy and therefore, it seemed to her, most unattainable: beauty, fame, and that special “niceness” which Lucy could scarcely believe, Raine’s way of remembering the film crews’ names, the film crews’ wives’ names, servants’ names, and even the servants’ children’s names, taking time with her, Lucy’s friends. Raine’s ability to “act like anybody else, a real person” seemed to Lucy to surpass the most miraculous deeds of the saints. “She is the most wonderful person I have ever known,” Lucy told me.
I didn’t think Raine was wonderful. She was amazingly pretty, with a pure heart-shaped face and violet-cobalt eyes which seemed to look from her depths into yours, a trick I came to learn, that steady violet gaze, chin resting on the back of her bent hand. Her depths were vacant. But she flirted with me and that was pleasant. Her single enthusiasm, beside her niceness, was her absorption with a California cult called I.P.D., or something like that — Ideo-Personal-Dynamics maybe. She told me of it at length. I remember very little except that she said it was more scientific than astrology, being based not merely on the influence of the stars but on evidence of magnetic fields surrounding people. The existence of these fields or auras had been proved, she said, by special photography.
Cobalt eyes gazing straight into mine one foot away: “Did you know your magnetic field is as unique as your fingerprints?”
“No.”
“It is more exact than astrology because though we are both Capricorns, we are different.”
“Yes?”
“Many people are skeptical of astrology but there is scientific proof of this.”
“I understand.”
“Don’t you see the possibilities?”
“Possibilities?”
“For the future, for mankind, for preventing wars.”
“How’s that?”
“Everyone could have his ideogram, which is a scientific reading of his magnetic field. Some ideograms are clearly stronger than others or incompatible with others. If the President of the United States has a weak ideogram, it would be stupid to send him to a summit meeting. It’s the ultimate weapon against Communism.”
“I can see how it would be.”
The actors, I noticed, took a light passing interest in everything, current events, Scientology, politics. They were hardly here at all, in Louisiana that is, but were blown about this way and that, like puffballs, in and out of their roles, “into” Christian Science, back out again.
“I find it a tremendous help in both my personal and professional life. Wouldn’t you like to have a reading? You know. I think you underrate yourself.” She said it all in a single breath.
“Well, no, that is, yes, sure. Will you give me a reading?”
“Will I ever give you a reading!”
The trouble was that even when she was on this, her favorite subject, her voice went flat and trailed off. Her eyes were steady but unfocused. I had the feeling she wasn’t listening to herself. Could it be that her I.P.D. was a trick too, not a trick she played on me but on herself, a way of filling up time?
Merlin and Jacoby argued about the movies they were making, or rather Jacoby seemed to be making, because although Merlin was the producer-director and Jacoby co-director, it was Jacoby who ran the set, yelling at actors and grips, even ordering local residents out of their own houses. It amazed me how meekly, even joyfully, the locals received these bad manners. Anything to be in a movie, or somehow connected with a movie. Then I thought: Listen who’s talking and who’s been kicked out of his own house.
They were arguing about the scene where the poor white sharecropper rapes the aristocratic girl in the loft of the pigeonnier.
“Of course you must realize”—said Jacoby, leaning over Margot, drawling and moving his lips muscularly—“that at this point something very important happens, Bob. Because what starts out to be a rape, an act of violence which comes from his own — how do you say, being caught—”
“Trapped,” said Margot, pulling back slightly from Jacoby’s face.
“Yes! Trapped by being a sharecropper and so hitting out at those people, his—”
“Oppressors.”
“Right! But a moment occurs when all this disappears and the girl through her own femaleness, feminineness, what? turns this moment into something else, that is, a man and a woman—”
“Don’t you mean, Jan,” said Margot, her eyes glowing, “that the girl with her own gift for tenderness and caring converts a moment of violence into a moment of love? Isn’t it a transformation of a political act by an erotic act?”
“Oh, Margot, you are right!” She made him happy. “Exactly. It is a transforming of the political into the erotic.”
Merlin roused slightly. “It is true, I agree. Margot speaks of love. Very well. Love is great. Love conquers all. But here we are content with the erotic — this pair hardly know each other. But the point is that violence, rape or murder, or whatever, is always death-dealing whereas the erotic, in any form at all, is always life-enhancing.”
“Yes! That’s the nice swing, what you say, switch, don’t you see, Margot?” Jacoby turned his black eyes on her. “It is the aristocrat in this case who has the life-enhancing principle and not the sharecropper, as is usually the case, since he is usually shown as coming from the dirt.”
“Soil,” said Margot.
Was he from the Bronx or Brno?
“Yes, and even though she comes from racism, which is equally death-dealing since it is geno—”
“Genocidal. Since a whole race is involved.”
When Janos searched for a word, his eyes roamed past me, through me, to the dark corners of the room. I felt like an actor.
“And the sharecropper is always wavering between the two, the life and death principle. The girl guides him toward life through the erotic. She is his Beatrice.” Bay-ah-tree-chay.
What irritated me was that despite myself I wanted to be noticed by Janos Jacoby — why for God’s sake? for Margot’s sake? and found myself trying to think of something impressive like “cinematographic semiotics.” But when his eyes swept past me, through me, for the fifth time, I gave it up and decided to satisfy my own curiosity.
So I asked him: “What about the scene between the sheriff and the black sharecropper’s daughter?”
“Eh?” Jacoby swung around as if to locate the origin of this unfamiliar voice. “Ah. I am not sure I know what you mean, ah — what about it?” I swear I don’t think he knew my name.
“Well, he is both erotic and racist and therefore both life-enhancing and death-dealing. Having had intercourse with her, which was by no means rape, where does that leave him, canceled out so to speak, half bad half good, back at zero?”