Work Text:
I.
A real film represents | AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION | Of visual phenomena
Matt’s brow is pinched in concentration like this is the most important moment of his life. It might be, if just for now. He's got that crazed look in his eyes that fits him like nothing else, and which would never fit anyone else. His hands hold the N64 controller like a lifeline, fingers flying over every single button expertly.
“You know, it’s crazy how people will lose their shit over this track when it’s like… like, yes, the aesthetic is so great, and the music’s real good. So you’re like, ‘oh, let’s play this cup, yay, it’ll be fun’. It’s long, that’s what it fucking is. And it’s no Koopa Troopa Beach.” He pauses to cough. “What are the like, in-lore implications of Koopa Troopa Beach, though? You ever think about that? Is it like the Golden Horseshoe, where they… named it after the shape? ‘Cause you’ve got a big Koopa Troopa-shaped rock in the middle there. And maybe when the Mushroom Kingdom… colonized it… Unless this is a natural habitat for Koopa Troopas and they built it. Like the Easter… Easter Island. Oh, shit.” He’s been brought down to fourth place. “Fuck! Come on, Birdie, hit me.”
Jay’s hands hover over the keys. “Well, shut up! I'm thinking! You’re distracting me.”
“Dude, no, I'm almost on Lap 2, and you've only played like two songs!”
“I played more than two. I played Home Alone, then Indiana Jones… and this one was Star Wars… No, before that it was—”
“Oh, oh! Luigi thinks he's got me. Fucking bitch. Oh, he doesn’t know what’s coming for him.”
“You got a shell?”
“You bet your fucking ass I’ve got a shell.”
“He’s real good at aiming his shells,” Jay clarifies towards Luca’s camera.
The tension is rising. Matt’s far too focused to react to the compliment. He taps the Down-C button with more rage than necessary. The shell spins in all its low-poly glory, shoving its way through the screen until it successfully crashes against Luigi where he was running right ahead, securing Matt in third place.
“Yes! Fuck you! Little green… Italian plumber… Is that offensive to plumbers? If I say the word plumber with disdain? It’s a respectable job. But it’s true, eh, like, he is a— Jay! Lap 2! Play something!”
Music begins to spring from the piano as Jay finally thinks of something new. The game is simple—Matt has to go full out on Rainbow Road, the long one in the original 1996 release, while guessing whatever it is that Jay is playing. His John Williams streak is apparently boring to Matt, so he starts spicing it up with television show intros and videogame OSTs. Matt crudely sings along to the tunes before frantically spitting out the names between insults about how shitty this track is and how the main theme for Speed sounds the same as The Rock’s with just a single instrument, and that movie also isn’t that good anyways, with Jay halting to complain Hans Zimmer is Hans Zimmer and he will take no insult towards him. Jay gives it a closing finish with a beautiful rendition of E.T. flying in the air at the same time Matt stands up on the couch to celebrate his surpassing Mario once and for all and winning in first place.
“Yes! Oh my God. That was fucking awesome!” The controller lays abandoned on the floor. He’s about to jump off the couch in celebration, but instead stops in place and tries to balance himself with his own arms. He finally whips his head towards you, pointing with the marker he apparently produced from his sleeve. “You got that, right?”
With a practiced press to the on/off button of your camera, you turn it off and give him a thumbs up. He grins and cheers and jumps down until he can wrap his arms around an unexpecting Jay, who was halfway through standing up from the piano bench. Their laughter quickly turns into yelling as they try not to stumble to the ground. You only lower your camera and get yourself out of the possible field of collision before looking over to Luca. He’s far more mesmerized by the boyish struggle happening in front of you. He shifts his turned off camera in his hands, like he’s subconsciously filming this as well. You silently get his attention and then gesture upstairs with your head. He nods and follows you up.
CAM 1
It's not an easy job, if you sit down to think about it. You have to keep your eyes (and lenses) on everything. Which is a lot.
You guess at first it did feel smaller and personal in the way that it was clearer you were the only thing they could rely on. Of course, throughout the years, you were never the only cameraman, but you’re the only one that's stayed this long. Even then, the difference has always been clear to you. There was something about you specifically that wasn’t as important in the others. No insult meant towards Andy or Luca or whomever else has eventually worked with (and later for) you. But it used to be you right there, sharing every moment for the first time and being the perfect curator for everything. Everything that you do for/to/because of them might be much bigger now, the house is bigger and the plot is bigger, hell, the budget too, but it's closer to being not much more than a special secret you can call yours.
To Matt and Jay, it all originated as something far too serious, though it has de-escalated into something they barely question. The day they first had you “work” for them, it was the most fascinating experience you had ever had. You'd filmed just hours and hours of them bickering about what to tell you to do, process which you could summarize as Matt trying to live out an all-American director fantasy with you, a singular guy with a camcorder in 2008, and Jay seeing you as someone to live out a getting-to-boss-someone-around fantasy with, but consisted mostly of him being mean with no pretense or reason to his suggestions and orders. By the end of the day, they had all but forgotten about you, almost killing each other (literally, as in someone may or may not have smashed an expensive bottle of wine in the direction of someone else's head because this other someone may or may not have had broken someone else's DS in a fit of rage over the debate of whether it is distasteful to reference Triumph of the Will, since it is straight up nazi propaganda, or progressive, since it is a female-directed staple of cinematic history,) and somehow reconciling almost immediately after. During their entire argument/assault on each other, you didn't stop filming, and when Matt noticed, he stepped over the purple stained wallpaper and floor to approach you, and he clapped you in the back and said, “Birdie, we're keeping this one!”
So it feels like they've naturalized your permanent presence in every single step they take as a basis of reality, for example, “we live in Toronto” or “every day we try to get a show at the Rivoli”, or “Jared is always, always there.” But it was the other way around for you. Over time, you've become more and more invested in their bullshit and you've reached highs and lows in order to keep your cameras on them that you hadn't ever thought of.
In a way, their lack of progress has only motivated you to dedicate your entire life to it. How much can you film, what new way can you use to approach it, what new way will they give you themselves? How long will they let you? Jay has been the only one to ever protest or attempt to send you off. Funny that he even tries. With that sense of ownership and control that Matt has, one would guess it'd be him trying to keep a private world for himself and Jay. You guess you should be flattered if you're allowed inside. You're uncertain Jay even understands what it is you do, and if he'd dare act the same if he were properly aware of how closely you keep a record of his every everything, of the shocking fact that there is, in fact, a person through that small screen, watching him.
You know them better than they know themselves. You know them better than they know each other. You get to experience the dramatic irony, know just what they're hiding from each other at all times. They're two kids with secrets. Matt's taking you to a corner of the playground, tracing letters on the sand with a stick, and you race to the other corner for when it’s Jay’s turn to use you as someone to talk to, except the only thing he’ll tell you, if he even speaks, is “where did Matt go?”
It's hard not to be smug about it. You are keeping the limits of their world traced very minutely, in a way. This private world of their own making, this dome, encloses their home, and the Rivoli. They expand it to their desire and their free will, sometimes even forcing you to go into underground tunnels or climb up the CN Tower with them, only to return to the warmth of where they started, is this maybe the vanishing point? You try to draw the lines in your head. You have two-dimensional projections of parallel lines in your three-dimensional space, which converge, or they look like they do, or you make them look like they do.
Two-dimensional projections. Is that Matt and Jay? They’re so… weird, and they’re keeping themselves illogically tied to these flat versions of a human brain. Not because they’re necessarily stupid, although they are, more often than not, but because the way they think about reality is the problem. Two-dimensional projections. Is that the spaces they wander off to? A projection can't be bent, though, and they treat it all like it's a rubber band they stretch to its limits before it contracts again. Two-dimensional projections. There’s a pianist and there's a planner. There's a bird in a cage and a cat that's still too small for the world. There's a witty boy and his imaginary tiger best friend. There's a stick in the mud and a child playing with it. There's Nirvanna the Band.
Three-dimensional space. Well, that’s life, of course.
It's important for these questions to come to you. They want themselves on camera, you want to watch them, and that is all that there should be. In this scope, of course. They seem to think that there is no other truth out there other than the world you hold together for them, but you can always walk away, turn the monitors off, step into your own reality and form your own connections and live a normal life. You tell yourself you don’t care about them, really. Even then, there’s just something about them that keeps drawing you in, that fills you with a want to jump in, to be free by virtue of being trapped, to let fiction abide by anything you could ever set out to do. But you must ask yourself these questions. You cannot be so fully engrossed in it all. Although you let them drag you along for some time, first.
You call it bullshit, but that doesn't mean you don't have a genuine appreciation for it. You wouldn't admit how close you've held Matt's, well, attention. His long and winding elaborations and connected rambles, when they're dedicated to you and no one else is in the room, start making a lot of sense. And you like seeing the giddy look in his eyes when he sees you understand him, even if he still wants no response from you, just understanding him is enough. Or listening to Jay rehearse songs when Matt's already asleep and he hasn't been struck with the same urge yet, propping yourself up with the camera and struggling to keep your eyes open, just to see as well as hear, as he sings in a beautiful and quiet voice tinted with his practically characteristic sleepiness, a mix of songs only he can lace together. But he does. He manages to. You have almost lost yourself before as he murmurs, “she's a brick and I'm drowning slowly… off the coast and I'm headed nowhere…”
You sometimes get ideas that don’t feel like your own. You think of songs of mysterious longing, of friendship kidnappings, of perpetual children, and of real selves allowed to be honest with each other in the scope of fiction. Of screens and cameras at your disposal in the blink of an eye. Of Watson being Doyle's reduced, core self, and thus the character's descriptions of Holmes then maybe revealing something true about the author. You’re not sure where it comes from. You know no author.
But what you do is at their service. You're just doing what you first got called to do. It simply took a long time for it to take a proper shape. In this world Matt has designed for the both of them (for just one of them, really, and it's not himself) and which Jay continues to provide music for, you're helping hold their unrealistic, stupid, sickening union together. Even when you go mostly unacknowledged, there's a unique enjoyment to what you do.
And someday they're gonna stop, right? They have to. Just how long can they go in circles around each other? They’ve gotten impressively far, but how much longer? Can you film this? What about this? Holy shit, even that? How long until it's over? Can they just be honest with each other for once? Can they tell you why you're there? What if you said something? What if you intervened? What then? Seriously, how much longer? How much time do you have left? You kind of hope they’re the first two to ever figure it out. You hope it's forever.
II.
I've been following you all around the block/The trends are funny ‘til someone gets shot/And the boys on the bikes and their frizzy hair/They look so soft/And don’t you see all the cues in their hands?/The boys in bands, the fights in the helms/And the bottles that make them untrained/There's nowt to say...
FILE: 2013-03-09 [02:39:11.58]
The plan was precise. If you didn't quite appear in the movie, no one would be able to attribute any sort of involvement to you, and you could make sure you got to edit it and distribute it. This was supremely easy to achieve.
Once you had some options for a final shot, you left. Really, you knew it when Matt said it, when he let such a cinematic line fall from his lips, that this was it. He had trained himself well to give a good performance, after all. Later, you'd question this, mainly because he fumbled earlier lines and the angle he placed those cameras at was not quite right, but what did you know, huh? You were not needed anymore, you didn’t actually care for having a shot of everything the police were gonna get to showing in every news programme on a loop for the following week. Matt or Owen's endings in this circumstance was not something you particularly cared about.
So when you blinked you were gone. You climbed into your bedroom through the window and got to your job.
“Jared, do not stop filming. We could be using everything.” That’s Matt, of course. On day one. Owen was standing there, blinking in the way one does when they're thinking about something, and it made you think about how uniquely human he is, in a way that inherently isolated him from Matt. You're pretty sure neither of them knew that.
Matt only ever looks at two things: at Owen (always, even when he's not looking at Owen he's looking at Owen, everything is about Owen and he looks at other things like he looks at Owen, except one thing:) and at you. He tries to look somewhere else and he never likes what he sees. The world looks back at him with reproach. He runs out of observable artifacts. And then he looks at himself, and he says, “oh.”
Owen could say “stop” and “this isn’t funny” and “this isn’t a joke” and “I don’t like you filming me right now” all he wanted. If Matt laughs, it's a joke. If Matt says to film, you film. You're not one to step in the field of artistic vision. Or whatever the fuck Matt thinks is the definition of that term. It's laughable, honestly, and the easiest way to keep him going is to let him spiral around his own thoughts, to just let one word topple into the other and let him sink, sink, sink. The deeper he thinks he goes, the more two-dimensional he becomes. And the closer you look into the camera, the more three-dimensional the backgrounds look. Whenever you peer away your reality looks faker than what you're viewing through the screen. The vanishing point is indiscernible to you. They say if you can't cover a tornado with your thumb, it means it's coming towards you. Ah, he doesn’t want you to talk back to him, anyway. That'd be ridiculous. You’re just watching this. It wouldn’t be a film if you were really there.
It wouldn’t be a film if you weren’t there at all, either. Matt is pathetically obsessed with Owen, but he needs you more. He told you once, trying to put on a tie, looking straight at the camera instead of your face, “you know, you're real cool, eh? That's why you get to see all this.” Get to. It was almost boring at first. Matt and Owen just standing around, sitting around, looking around, walking around. That’s not to say you didn’t enjoy making the original cut, you did love to film and you thought the movie was fun and you liked being included, but you didn't really care for the same things they cared about that much and you just tended to stick around because it felt like that’s what you had to do to be “in”. It wasn’t until Matt's let's-make-this-real plan started forming in his head and he was having you really film him all day long that you realized, oh, this is it, this is what is making all of it worth it. It's fucked up and you love it.
It took you far too long to realize Owen didn’t particularly care either.
In the footage you don't use for the movie, Owen has a little habit. His mouth pulls to the side for just a moment whenever Matt says things he doesn’t understand, references something, drops a name like Irreversible or A Serbian Film.
(Matt looks between the both of you and assumes you know what he's talking about, or he doesn't find it worth clarifying, or when he talks towards the camera he's not talking to you, either, he's talking to a non-existent someone who does get everything he says effortlessly. Until you realized that, you had always sort of liked to think he was saying it for you.)
In the footage you don’t use for the movie, when Owen’s asleep, he buries his face against the pillow and his hand reaches over the sheets to place itself over Matt’s, like he’s afraid he’ll drift away in the ocean currents, like Matt’s his dearest stuffed animal he’s getting too old to sleep with anymore and it’ll get thrown away by his mother one of these days.
(Since you don’t use it for the movie, Matt doesn’t know any of it is real.)
“You know what this one does?” Owen asked once, laying Magic cards on the floor while waiting for Matt to come back from the upstairs bathroom. You didn't know what to say, so you didn't say anything. He explained it anyway, although he did so under his breath, as if he wasn't expecting you to listen. Another time he turned around and saw you and flinched and he said, “you scared me. When did… when did you get here?” He said it like you were a stranger. He was hunched over himself, changing into some costume for the movie, suddenly embarrassed by noticing you. He looked strangely childlike and he looked like an adult. You were rolling before you should have and the shot came out weird, incorrect, not aligned with the character of Owen Williams. You didn’t know what to say then, either. You’ve always been fairly good at saying nothing.
And you've heard him say, “when did you get here?” and “wait, are we shooting already?” and “this isn’t a movie, this is just you and me.” Do you understand that? Because Matt doesn't, so someone might as well. “Never acting” is not a possibility. Everyone is acting and putting a camera in front of them already guarantees it. No one is normal for the camera. Even if they don’t know the camera is there, there’s an inescapable staple of performance in every tiny action. Do you understand? Matt's voice says, “can you hear me from there?” Okay, it's okay, let's explain it one more time, let’s play it all over again, let's take it from the top:
You are woken up very suddenly by arms wrapping themselves around you from behind and shaking you. The woman to whom they belong is pressing your back to her chest, leaning over you, and the only thing you can see is a mop of her black hair and glimpses of your computer screen. There's a movie. The movie. Matt's movie. It's just a black screen. The timer at the bottom marks 01:22:45/01:22:45. Did you fall asleep editing the renders in? Your groans of protest are muffled by the arm of your mother's coat, fuzzy and far too raspy against your lips. There’s too much feeling all at once. You cannot recall the last time you've been hugged by someone, least of all by her, and it's so overwhelming you almost scream at her to stop.
“Honey, I'm so glad you’re home,” she tearfully mutters into your ear.
You wrestle your head free from her grip and ask her what the hell her issue is. She takes some time before she says, “there was a shooting at your school,” and at first you want to roll your eyes, you want say that no, you weren’t in danger, he was just there for the bad guys, but then she holds you very tightly to her chest, trying and failing to hold herself together. One of her hands pets your hair and the other squeezes your back. You are a fragile object that could break into shards and everything you've recorded will have been in vain. It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to realize that’s not true, you have arms and legs and a heartbeat of your own. Your nose twitches. Your fingers are trembling and you become acutely aware of a throbbing pain on your back, on your shoulder, and at the bottom of your chest.
When she makes you stand up from the chair, you wobble like you haven't yet learned to walk. The rest of the day works with a logic you can't fully wrap your head around. Your mother apparently took the day off work because she thought you could've been dead. You don't ask for details on anything and she keeps the television off. You spend the entire day walking around your house from one room to another, stretching your weirdly atrophied legs and keeping your arms to your sides. You only step inside the bathroom once and when you see your own reflection you feel weird, like you can't recall this being your face. It's changed. You just haven't looked in the mirror in a while. (Notes for editing: No matter what the context is it should be clear that this reflection has to look exactly like You. Picture your face. Now, picture the face of everyone you've ever known. That's what you look like.)
But you cannot physically stop yourself from returning to sit at the computer. To keep editing. To move stuff around. For the sake of the movie. You can’t. You keep going back to rewatch it in different orders.
The reasons and memories of it escape you and they are not relevant to your narrative role; the theory of pertinence says if you reverbalize a concept, you are given the choice to omit information in these cases. Nonetheless, you haven't liked your mother for a very long time, and her never being home has always been a good reason and permission to be anywhere that wasn't just your room. Filming Matt and Owen has become your little passtime, your little secret. You could call it escapism if you cared a little bit more.
Saving your whole progress is a big struggle. Editing it on its own was a problem, but transferring the same files from here to there is tedious.
In the footage you don’t use for the movie, Matt never shuts up. In the footage you don’t use for the movie, Matt delivers all of his lines perfectly. They come out of him accurately to their originals, and your camera frames them just the way your director wants them. You want the movie to be true to reality, so the takes that make it in are the takes where Matt stutters and talks for far too long. In the footage you don’t use for the movie, things are plastic, unnatural and cinematically breath-taking. Matt gets to stop being a guy and then stops being a person entirely. You're not a person in the first place.
You are tempted to make a Memento cut of The Dirties, to do it all over again but backwards. To see if Matt has something new to say. You rewatch it as it is.
In the footage you don’t use for the movie, Matt stood in front of the mirror with one of the guns in hand and imitated half a dozen films. Something about the way he switched between one to another reference was closer to the process of trying on clothes he had played out with you in an earlier scene. Nothing convinced him. What had once been the only thing you could get of him on film is now the most boring obligation for his role. His eyes were basically shining as he pointed the gun at his own reflection and looked at you in the same way.
“Do you think dying feels like anything else?” he said.
Nobody moved for a very long time. Nobody blinked, either.
He stepped even closer to the mirror until the barrel of the gun bumped against the glass, making a noise similar to a wireless mic rubbing too hard against clothes and wind and hallway floors.
“Oh. Oh, It looks good.”
You zoomed in on him. There was no camera in your empty hands. The lens focused just right on him as he pressed his forehead to its reflected image. Then he did the same thing with his free hand. He was just looking at you. And then he was trying to merge with it, shoving his body against that fucking thing with such pressure that you were convinced it was going to crack and shards would cover his body, and you wanted to see it. You needed to see it happen.
This was as far as you could zoom in. He breathed out, “it looks so good.”
Then you couldn't not blink anymore. And then there wasn’t any mirror, you were sitting at a computer, at his computer and at your computer at the same time, and he was posing in a singular paused frame on screen, and he was also looking at himself right next to you. You didn’t know what you were doing. Things were happening on the computer, someone was clicking things, but you weren’t even sure if you were the one moving. You panned slowly to Matt and his hands weren’t in charge of the cursor either. The blue light of the screen showered every small pixel of him. Outside, it had gotten to be the middle of the night the moment you were turned away. You opened your mouth to say something before you even thought to do so. And then your mouth stayed open, and nothing came out, and Matt grabbed you by the shoulders and for the next five seconds or five hours, he still hadn't blinked, and the movie kept rewinding. And he just shook you, and he didn’t stop shaking you as he laughed, and over and over and over, he said, “oh my God. Oh my God. This is gonna be the best movie ever made.”
III.
A horror soundtrack from a stagnant water-bed/And it sounds just like this/This is the sound of someone losing the plot/And when you’re no longer searching for beauty or love/Just some kind of life with the edges taken off/When you can't even define what it is that you are frightened of—
FOOTAGE FROM NOV 1969 (#04)
You lay on your side, face tucked into your crooked arms. It might only be late in the afternoon but you didn’t have dinner and you don’t plan on it, either. You are entirely misused and you have been spending most of your time in this motel, listening to the owner, Ms. Miller, ramble, or making yourself coffee, or spying out of tightly shut curtains, or curled up in bed, as you are now. You're growing so desperate, feeling like you're going to claw at the wallpaper, running low on the money you brought with you, that you've already sent letters begging to let them gut yourself for a job opportunity to every single channel you saw on television. The message was consistently the same: now that America has landed on the moon, we are moving forward, business will surely pick up these days, much to report and say blah blah blah, if there happens to be help solicited for a cameraman or general assistant or mic operator (as much as the prospect pains you) or literally anything blah blah blah blah kind regards looking forward to a response, insert your name at the end. A new name. You started making one up for each letter, just in case, and only realized by the third one that being inconsistent about your lie wouldn’t be too much of a good idea. You've been jotting them down ever since.
Point is you’re selling out. No one lives more blissfully unaware than a cog in a machine, and if you must become the tool of your destroyer to go unnoticed, then that's what you’ll do.
Matt was your director from moment one, before a project even started gaining an inkling of opportunity, you could just see it shining through his every action. Six years prior, you met him at a college party you had semi-sneaked into with Andy (the college was holding open house, okay, but you had to fabricate fake IDs and that was really easy anyway,) and he was exuberant when he laid eyes on you and said, “oh, shit, you don’t study here, huh,” like you had just confessed to a crime but he had been aching his whole life to meet someone brave enough to do that. He was certainly drunk, but he was focused enough not to let either of you stray from his side during the entire night. There went any teenage hope of meeting the love of your life. Before you knew it, by 1964 you were both following him everywhere for a series of government operations, because that’s how he wanted to do his job and he begged hard enough for Andy, you and his best friend from Yale, Owen Williams, to get hired alongside him. You found out much later the explanation for why he didn’t get his ass kicked for his many endeavors was he got his job through nothing else but nepotism.
That was really just few years ago, but so much happened when you started working for the State that you don't remember exactly how it all went besides the things you used to have recordings of (used to, as since then they have been stored away in a place you are wise enough not to revisit): testing out your first camera with two other classmates you soon drifted apart from; playing pranks on each other; a girl Andy dated but still hadn't moved on from; celebrating Owen getting hired.
You were once determined to follow him like your life depended on it. There was something about his way with words that just drove you in. But then he said you had to go your separate ways. “No point in slowing each other down,” he said. “No point in continuing to be scared.” But now what. Now what. Now what. You don't know what to do with that fear. It's been all that you've been. You know the fear more than you know your own name, which is good, because you're supposed to be someone else now. There was a time you were something else. You were memory and you were art and you were passion and you were someone too. But the fear. You've carried it so close and you don't know where to put it, you can’t unstick it from your body, it's the sweat coming from your pores and your shadow as you walk and the light when it reflects on your eyes and the reels as Andy took them away, as you kept your stare on Matt, as he stood, defeated, as if you couldn't just run out of the car and go talk to him in person. Because you couldn't.
And he repeated it when he said goodbye to you for the very last time, shaking your hand. He’d always had a firm handshake, flowing with excitement through his strong arms and topped off by his eyes crinkling with a smile, but this one was a new kind, a shaky grip and a glassy-eyed frown, and you simply had to turn away. He repeated it, he said, “no point in continuing to be scared, okay?” You're starting to think the reassurance was more for himself than you. He didn’t mean it that way, he had been honest, he was trying to help you, but you can't be helped, not when you've always embodied that fear for the both of you.
See, it was a consented affair, because he was emotion-driven to a fault—if the rest of you held the feelings that could get in his way of thinking, then he'd push ahead for all of you. He'd improvise a good script if you managed to set the ambience. He was your director and you were his camera, so he was your head and you were his fear.
If someone tells you what to do, there's less things to worry about. You'd love for this not to be the case, you think every man should think for himself, and you had liked to keep up with news from the Students for a Democratic Society in the past few years, even if you had to do so as secretly as possible considering your job position. It drove you insane. You almost wished you had never agreed when Matt said he had “an incredible offer, but, you’re both gonna have to quit your studies.” At the very least, you should have been grateful you didn’t get drafted and you got to jokingly go on about “So Long, Mom” by Tom Lehrer instead. It plays in a loop in your head, its irony punishing you, but while you swelter down there in your shelter, you can see me on your TV… You sort of raised yourself on his music, and walking into work and hearing of Wernher Von Braun made you hold back a mocking smile each time. You remember telling Matt about his songs at that party where you met him, for some damn reason, while you helped Andy not fall over from his chair, and in his drunken state he found it the funniest thing ever conceived.
You're somewhere in Louisiana. You've heard the river runs nearby and anywhere that’s got some sort of body of water close by is nice to take your mind off of things. You're still a little too afraid to be away from your room for more than a few hours on end, but one of these days you’ll get yourself together. You’ll have to stock up, though; you’re more than sure that as soon as you lay eyes on a bayou you’ll film it until you run out of reel.
You place a cigarette between your lips and before you light it you decide you are to play the vinyl that lays on your desk. The Beatles’ White Album, disc 2. Andy had wanted this so badly, when you were all still in the delusion of a successful mission, when you first started getting together at Owen’s house for simple summer parties, Andy turned to you, dipping his feet in the water of the pool, and he said, “we have to buy some music with the money we’re gonna get.”
You were laying down on a chair, it wasn’t a chair for you to lay down in but a chair you had politely asked for permission from Owen to bring outside, and Matt had piped up before he answered to grab two and hoist them over his head and ask you where you wanted them. Only your legs were in the sun, because you still held your camera to your chest and you didn’t want it burning up. Andy traced figures in the water with his toes, looking down at it while he spoke, and he said that, he said to you, “let’s buy that new Beatles album.” And you smiled and you said that your household had always been more leaning towards the Beach Boys, and he smirked and took his foot out of the water and he said, “yeah, my little brother won’t stop sending me letters about how The Monkees are secretly the best thing ever.”
This album made it into your hands eventually and he made the both of you take a break for a weekend, you went to the house of some friend of his who lived nearby and spoke with a loose voice and had his hair grown down to his neck, and he put the album on his record player. The whole thing, because you hadn’t been informed it’d be long as hell. Andy had the time of his life and you sat on the floor, tipping the camera up towards him and his friend as they freaked out about the songs. He tried to get you to dance and you shook your head, keeping the camera as still as possible. He joked you should stop filming and live in the moment for once, and you almost got an ache in your stomach about it that didn't leave you for the rest of the day, even when you got back to the hotel you two and Matt were staying in, because you thought he of all people would understand why you film things. When Andy went to sleep Matt looked at you and shot you a roguish smile, he tapped a finger against your side, and then he said, “something's bothering you,” and you tried to shove him off and bite back a laugh as he poked you, but every time Matt wants a reaction he does exactly that. He says his words only he could ever say, and he pokes and pokes, and then he gets to see what happens. Especially when he's doing it to you. You didn't explain your grievance to him but you were comforted all the same, because you knew that if anyone were to understand it, it'd be him, and he wasn't giving you lines or directions, wasn’t saying, “come on, spit it out,” and your camera wasn't on, so you didn't say anything at all.
As you were reduced to running back and forth, as you stopped thinking to turn off the camera at all, as you made sure every single detail was filmed because you could never know what would be sufficient evidence, the vinyl made it into your suitcase, maybe by accident or maybe because you thought you and Andy would stay together for longer or maybe because you knew this was the one single way to remember him. And now it plays, and you’re no longer the man you used to be, you can’t be, so with an unlit cigarette still sitting between your teeth you stand up and you let your body shiver and shake to the rhythm. Lennon grabs you by the hands and spins you in place. Come on, it’s such a joy, come on and take it easy. You jump up and down in place and repeat some stupid step you did at a party or another, you mimic the moves you recall Andy and his friend doing, you imagine a camera on the floor that you wouldn’t dare turn on. Everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey.
It spins and spins and gives you a break to smoke before “Helter Skelter” comes on and you're jumping around faster than you can catch your breath. You're on your third cigarette by “Revolution 1”, sitting on the carpet in an unbuttoned shirt and underwear and socks, resting your head back against the bed and seeing if you can make shapes with the smoke you exhale out of your mouth.
Eventually, there’s a knock at the door at the same time that it opens. You scramble to hide yourself behind the bed as it'll block your body from view. Ms. Miller sticks her tired face into the room and frowns at you as you lay an arm on the bed and try to position yourself in a more presentable way, or as much as you can given she just saw you move like a bug crawling at full-speed from under a rock.
“Jim,” she starts with her worn-out, raspy smoker voice (when you first booked your stay you said James, not Jim, James, but she said oh, got myself a little Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Dean, here, ha ha ha cough choke ha ha, and you tried to laugh with her as if she hadn’t landed on the exact reason that was the first ‘J’ name to come to mind,) “you're one-of-a-kind, kid.” She coughs. “It's gettin’ awful late now. Turn that off, will ya?”
Your voice comes out a little too thin from embarrassment when you apologize to her.
The disc goes back in its fairly beat-up case. A purple-ish light starts to come through the thin curtains, dimly. The sun's almost done going down. When you were a teenager, you thought you'd be the first person to make a movie where the last shot was one of the sunset, with the right music playing and the names scrolling against the screen. In the background, you’d play that Lehrer song, “We Will All Go Together When We Go”. Lehrer said: “When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years,” which used to make you laugh easily. So what do you have? When James Dean was your age, he had been dead for a year. When Owen Williams was your age, he was closing up Operation Code Red and unknowingly had months left to live. Did they knock him out before they hanged him? Did he know he was choking? Did he think of his loved ones, or maybe friends? Were you ever one? You'd like to think your life's not ruined. You’d like to think that there's still time.
You question whether Matt doomed himself. Whatever the lesson is supposed to be on hubris and challenging the gods above. You question whether you were a gateway to these gods. Not out of any sort of egotistical delusion, but because of this shared interest in movies, the way you eased his connection to the press of all things, you being the middleman for his downfall, your camera being a specific motivator to put himself in front of it, to cut himself out for acting and just perform and perform and perform. To be watched. To have records of it. To watch him being watched. To act upon his own acting, to place that mirror at just the right angle and fool the entire country.
And sometimes the sun, in the middle of the day, at least here in Louisiana, looks like cue blips on celluloid, and whenever you walk past any sort of store you have the feeling someone’s staring at you for a little too long—you think if you truly were paranoid you’d think it’s everyone around you, it’s the fact that you only get this feeling with some people, people that hold their bags just a little bit weird, people who just have to be, they must be staring, that makes you scared to just dismiss it all. You’re growing sick. You can’t stop being his fear and memories and life he left behind until you start being someone else’s something else instead.
The following day you haven't even had a coffee before you find a letter for you. Your brain runs through a million worst case scenarios for what it could contain until your mind processes it being addressed to James. You got a job at one of the hundred television stations you tried for. Camera 1, any more offers for Camera 1, that’s Camera 1 in one, Camera 1 in two, and Camera 1 sold to the neediest soul-crushing mass communication company…!
A part of your brain grieves, but you just grin like any good object should. You can’t wait to be used.
IV.
(In general, any movement between fiction and reality, in either direction, is treated with an undertone of terror.)
You are a cameraman/cinematographer/director of photography/editor/concept/character/audience member/thing. Your acting credits include the Man with a Movie Camera; the all-seeing, all-knowing watcher; the fourth wall; the screen; the camera (a) under the train, (b) in the train, (c) against the train, (d) running with the train and jumping before it crashes against you; the Peeping Tom; the Christof of your dear Trumans; the fangirls screaming in the crowd and the eye behind the bathroom cabinet, but let it not be mistaken, you are, too, the Bob Rafelson; the big black box more than what is inside of it; an anachronistic perversion; an ambush predator, if you could consider the act of capturing someone or something (which could then be classified as prey) in film an artificial version of a process so biological such as predation; the CCD and the lens and the viewfinder and the autofocus; literally anything and everything and nothing at all; etc. It's you. The purest you. Say hello.
Your existence is intrinsically connected to the mere concept of art and creation and the moving picture. No one will perform if there is no one to watch. So you just keep your camera on and your eyes open. Your recurring cast will find their way to you again.