THE GREEN PAGES
You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp’d
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding ‘Stay: not yet.’
—Miranda from The Tempest, William Shakespeare
A director only makes one film in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.
—Jean Renoir
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
(Oxblood Films, dir. Severin Unck)
SC3 EXT. ADONIS, VILLAGE GREEN—DAY 13 TWILIGHT POST-PLANETFALL 23:24 [30 NOVEMBER, 1944]
[EXT. Former site of the village of Adonis, on the shores of the Sea of Qadesh. Night. The Divers Memorial is a backlit monstrosity, bulbous and black. Wind buffets the sound and lighting equipment; lanterns swing wild, illuminating splatters of congealed white fluid drenching the site. In twenty-eight months no one has cleared the damage or removed the debris. Beams of illumination land on a series of objects, as briefly as a kiss, then leave them in darkness again: A door with an absurd number of locks—more than anyone could need—stove in. The crumpled, netted face of a diving bell. The mangled head of a carousel horse. A swath of white fabric wadded up like scrap paper—a parachute, perhaps? Tarpaulin? Broken amphorae. Pieces of roof. Broken glass. The child’s slack, catatonic face. The faces of SANTIAGO ZHANG and HORACE ST. JOHN, struggling with cables and the boom mic, which dips into frame with the gusts of wind. MARIANA ALFRIC, her at-waist sound rig turning smoothly, though she has turned her back on the scene. She holds her hands over her face. Her nails are bitten raw. The mic records only wind, rendering SEVERIN’S beloved talking picture a silent film.
SEVERIN is grabbing the child’s hand urgently. He begins to scream, soundlessly, held brutally still in his steps by ERASMO and MAXIMO VARELA, whose muscles bulge with what appears to be a colossal effort—keeping this single, tiny, bird-boned child from his circuit. The boy clutches his hand to his thin chest as though it is a precious possession. His only possession. The boy’s eyes are as wide as an electroshock patient’s, pupils blown, his whole body rigid, erect. He moves his head back and forth: no, no, no. It is hard to tell—the film is damaged, the light levels destroyed, patches of overexposure blossom over the footage like splashes of milk—but the boy is mouthing a word that looks like please. The storm eats up his voice, if he has one.
SEVERIN’S jagged hair, and occasionally her chin, swing in and out of frame as she struggles with him. She turns over the boy’s hand, roughly, to show the camera what she has found there: tiny fronds growing from his skin, tendrils like ferns, seeking, wavering, wet with milk. The film jumps and shudders; the child’s hand vibrates, faster, faster. FILM DAMAGED FOOTAGE OVEREXPOSED SKIP AFFECTED AREA SKIPPING SKIPPING SKIPPING]
Production Meeting,
Doctor Callow’s Dream
(Tranquillity Studios, 1960, dir. Percival Unck)
Audio Recorded for Reference by Vincenza Mako
PERCIVAL UNCK: No, no, you’re wrong, Vince. It’s shit. It doesn’t sit right. He’s too unpleasant, too weak. He’s not likeable. And that curse isn’t adding anything but a stick up his arse. It just sags. Gothic stories will sprawl if you let them, like spilled wine. No writer should go anywhere near the Island of the Lotus-Eaters—you get stuck there. If Odysseus couldn’t get quit of that place, our boy has no hope. It’s got all the right pieces, but the end comes in the middle of the blasted thing. I hate it. I want to get out of my own movie. That can’t be good.
And, I just…I just can’t do it. I can’t give her an ice dragon and a vampire and smack her bottom and tell her to go play. I need something real to hold on to. She’s gone. If it were enough to imagine her killed by a mad magician on the American frontier, I could have done that in my head and not bothered with a script. No. No. It can’t be my story. It can’t be ours.
MAKO: But it can’t be hers, either. The thing about a mysterious disappearance is that it’s mysterious. There’s no answer that will be satisfying enough for the masses. There’s no documentary to be made, no scandal to be exposed.
UNCK: I don’t care. I made The Abduction of Proserpine already. I’m done with that. Christ, I was a young man when Proserpine wrapped. You can’t use the language of your youth to talk about your daughter. It doesn’t work. Maybe we should go back to noir. Or something else. Or fucking quit. It’s never taken us this long, Vince. We’re the king and queen of the quick turnaround. Why can’t I tell a simple story? She was born, she lived, she wanted things, she died. Yes, she died. I’m willing to admit that as a possibility. I can stage her death if that’s the right ending. I can do anything for the right ending. I staged her beginning, so I can place the marks for her end.
[long pause]
MAKO: Then let it be what it always was. What it must be. A child’s story. Not hers. Not ours. But his. Something terrible happened to a little boy in a beautiful place and it kept happening until a woman came from the sky to save him. Came sailing down like Isis with her arms full of roses. It’s a fairy tale. A children’s story. Not a funny or silly one, but one with blood and death and horror, because that’s fairy tales, too. A kid got swallowed by a whale. A little Pinocchio. A little Caliban. It’s all there.
And, you know, in a fairy tale, the maidens are never dead—not really. They’re just sleeping.
Doctor Callow’s Dream
The Land of Milk and Desire
Once upon a time, not so long ago at all, there lived a boy whose wishes never came true. The boy was born in the Land of Milk and Desire and had never known any other country. The Land of Milk and Desire had made him into himself, and he loved it the way some children love a velvet toy with a worn-out tail.
In the Land of Milk and Desire, everything is always wet. Everywhere you might want to step has, at the least, a river running through it; or a rich, golden-blue swamp; or a sweet-green suckling bog; or a bright, rosy lake; or a deep, quiet pond; or a fragrant, iridescent bayou; or one of the many seas, which are all as red as longing. The boy grew up in a little village on the shore of one of these seas: the very biggest one, the Qadesh. He played on the beach, collecting whelks (which are not really whelks, but rather rough, smoky crystals with frilly, fragile, florescent creatures living inside) and driftwood (which is not really driftwood, but the petrified bones of wily, whopping, woolly beasts that once roamed the Land of Milk and Desire before time woke up with a sore head and started ordering everyone about) and listening to the strange yelping songs of the seals (which are not really seals, but two-horned candy-striped aquatic ungulates with whiskers as long as tusks and as fuzzy as your father’s moustache). And he stared out to sea, past headlands cluttered with thick, dripping jungle that smelled like salt and cinnamon and cocoa, past the lights of the boats in the harbour, past the pink breakers and the heavy mist, and out to the long, dark shapes that floated in the deeps of the Qadesh like islands, like places you could get to and climb, explore, lie down on, and dream up at the many, many stars.