Zeroville (10 page)

“You have to hand it to Shelley,” Dotty says. “She was supposed to be a bombshell, that’s what the studio was grooming her for—she was going to be Marilyn Monroe, before anyone knew who Marilyn Monroe was. She and Marilyn were roommates when this was made. But she fought for this role, this role of the dowdy little factory mouse who, you know, comes fully alive only when she’s terrified, and she plays it right on that edge between pathos and pathetic. Now watch this.” Montgomery Clift’s eye dissolves into a shot of the rowboat and its passengers in the distance, a faraway glint of light on the dark lake that becomes a glint in Clift’s eye before his face fades altogether. “Like with the close-ups, this picture did things with dissolves no one had seen, not in Hollywood pictures anyway. You had two images dissolving at the same time, one coming in and one going out. There have to be more dissolves in this picture than anything since Murnau. Stevens planned all that—we were measuring the dissolves in
feet
, if you can believe that—and the thing is, this picture doesn’t look like any of Stevens’ others. If anything, Stevens always had been a purist, he liked the idea of stillness, just putting the camera there and watching, especially if he thought, like when Astaire and Rogers dance in
Swing Time
, a cut would just disrupt things. Your boy Preminger is another one like that—no cuts at all, put the camera there and show the audience everything and let them figure out who or what they’re supposed to pay attention to.” Clift and Winters talk in the boat and the camera turns from one to the other. “You see what’s going on here?” she says.

“I’m not sure.”

“Every time we turn to Shelley, she’s right in the middle of the frame. She’s pregnant with Monty’s baby, she’s both threatening and pleading with him to marry her, and when we see her, she almost seems to loom. Overbearing, frantic, somehow she’s not only shrill to the ear but to the eye—hell, shrill to the
soul
. Then every time the camera turns to Monty—”

“—he’s hunched down in the boat,” says Vikar, “at the end—”

“—the far end of the boat. The far,
far
end. Like he wants to crawl out of it. Like he wants to crawl out of not just the boat but the fucking movie. Like he can’t get far enough away.”

“The whole world,” nods Vikar, “is coming down.”

“Half the frame is the dark lake, the dark woods, dark sky behind him, everything dark hovering over him, enveloping him, bearing down on him. Back to Shelley, she almost seems to be growing closer, even though the camera isn’t closing in at all. That’s editing, if I may say so. Choosing the shot. It’s telling us everything. It’s telling us things we don’t even know it’s telling us. It’s not just telling us what these characters think, it’s telling us what we think. It’s manipulative as hell, there’s no getting around it, but then all movies are manipulative. When people complain about a picture that’s ‘manipulative,’ what they really mean is it’s not very good at its manipulations, its manipulation is too obvious. A few minutes ago we thought Monty was going to take Shelley out on the lake and throw her overboard and drown her—and we’re horrified, we’re thinking you can’t do that, she’s pregnant with your child, you have to do right by her. Then in the boat he seems to have changed his mind—hard to know whether it’s conscience or failure of nerve, but he seems to be reconciling himself to a life with her, his dream of Liz slipping farther away, and now we’re thinking, even if we don’t realize it, Jesus, will you please throw this broad in the lake already? Liz is waiting for you! The most beautiful woman in the world is naked in bed, waiting for you to come to her
right now
! Life with Shelley Winters? You would be better off dead—at which point we’ve doomed him, we’ve doomed all of them. The picture’s even gotten the
women
in the audience half-thinking this, which has got to be the mindfuck of all time. Now, the truth is I’m not sure Stevens understood any of it. I think he thought he was making some sociological thing about class in America or something. But everything about the way this picture is shot and cut says this is a dream. This is a dream where you’re guilty not just for what you do but for what you think and feel, where you’re guilty not just for acting on your fantasies but having them in the first place. I mean, this picture couldn’t be more morally absurd. But in some way that we don’t understand, it makes sense. So when you get to the end of the picture and he’s going off to the execution chamber and Liz is going into a
convent
—a complete cliché—giving her life to God because there’s no one left after you’ve fallen in love with Montgomery Clift, that makes sense, too.”

Vikar reaches over and turns on the light, even though the movie isn’t over. “God,” he says, “doesn’t deserve her.”

Each scene is in all times, Vikar tells himself, and all times are in each scene. Each shot, each set-up, each sequence is in all times, all times are in each shot, each set-up, each sequence. The scenes of a movie can be shot out of sequence not because it’s more convenient, but because all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time. No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other. No scene is really shot “out of order.” It’s a false concern that a scene must anticipate another that follows, even if it’s not been shot yet, or that a scene must reflect a scene that precedes it, even if it’s not been shot yet, because all scenes anticipate and reflect each other. Scenes reflect what has not yet happened, scenes anticipate what already has happened. Scenes that have not yet happened, have. “Continuity” is one of the myths of film; in film, time is round, like a reel. Fuck, as Dotty would say, continuity.

Seven years after coming to Los Angeles, Vikar will meet at a party in Laurel Canyon, not far from the cave where he slept that morning the police came for him, a famously renegade director trying to get another feature off the ground. His previous movie was something of a hit and the director was nominated for an Academy Award, along with the star of the movie who’s his wife—but now he’s back to struggling again. His new movie is ostensibly about a strip-club owner trying to protect his establishment and his dancers from gangsters. Really it’s about the director protecting his dreams from Hollywood.

The director will stare at Vikar’s head with a wild lopsided grin and tell him about the time he was a young actor just out of the army in the early fifties, about to enroll in the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and he went to see
A Place in the Sun
in a theater downtown. God I hate this movie, the young actor thought when the lights came up. The next afternoon he went back to see it again. He went back to see it again the next afternoon and the next and the next, the theater getting emptier around him, each time telling himself, God I hate this movie, until finally, halfway through the eighth consecutive time seeing it, he whispered to himself in the dark: God I love this movie.

One night Vikar cheats on Elizabeth Taylor. He finds the air around her too thin to breathe anymore, which is to say he finds the air of his own dreams too thin to breathe. Defied and thwarted and driven to distraction by her, he feels no choice but to back away and give her up, and find someone else—the later Elizabeth, perhaps, the Elizabeth of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
or
Butterfield 8
. That Elizabeth would lie between his legs and take him in her mouth. But that Elizabeth has no hold on him.

He’s captivated by Ann-Margret’s sexual malevolence in
Kitten With a Whip
. In a fifties Mob movie called
The Big Combo
, he’s fascinated by Jean Wallace coolly performing oral sex on Richard Conte below the camera frame. In the opening shot of a Godard movie at the Fox Venice, the camera pans the length of a nude blonde, next to the Elizabeth Taylor of
A Place in the Sun
, the most beautiful woman Vikar has seen in the movies. She reminds him of the same nude he saw years before in the movie about the spy, except now washed clean of the gold paint and resurrected, glowing with an amber of her own.

But it’s with another blonde, less beautiful than Bardot but somehow less resistible as well, that Vikar cheats on Elizabeth. Perhaps Vikar wants the blonde in
Strangers When We Meet
because, in the way that he has added a k to his name, she could have dropped the k from hers, such was the nova of her career. In three years in the mid-fifties, she went from being Miss Deepfreeze—a small-time Midwest beauty queen selling refrigerators—to the world’s biggest female star, Marilyn notwithstanding. She bruises as easily as Marilyn but is not felled by the blow, as is Marilyn; surviving what Marilyn could not, she’s denied the martyrdom of goddesses. At the end of
Strangers When We Meet
, a sadness lingers about her both enduring and inevitable. Flung from the Old California mission steeple in the earlier movie about the private eye who’s obsessed with her, it’s as if she somehow peeled herself up off the ground, coolly gathered her dignity, and moved on to another town in another movie, just in time to be devastated anew by Kirk Douglas. Her golden hair in his grip as she lies between his legs, Vikar feels he’s cheating not only on Elizabeth Taylor but Soledad Palladin.

As on the night he left the Japanese gangster movie with an erection, Vikar takes to riding the bus. He rides across the whirling grids of Los Angeles, east to west. He rides into the early morning hours until the buses stop running, at which point often he must figure out a way home. For a while, all the bus drivers watch him in their rear-view mirrors. But soon he becomes a familiar passenger and they ignore him.

With each bus Vikar sails farther into a city of neon lily pads floating on an immense black pond. In this city a person can hide from God a long time. He rides past bars and shops, the Frolic Room and the Formosa and the Tiki Ti, Boardner’s and the Firefly on Vine, he rides past the Body Shoppe and Seventh Veil and Jumbo Clown strip joints and the Pussycat Theater at Western, and the streetwalkers on Sunset who become younger and prettier the farther west he gets from La Brea. He rides over old bridges and is struck by how many there are in Los Angeles that cross no water whatsoever, arching over rivers of dust. He rides past the hotels where the stars stay, the Roosevelt and the Marquis and the Landmark on Franklin and the Knickerbocker on Ivar; he gazes up at the Chateau Marmont’s tower and wonders who might be on its parapets, gazes up at the spinning lounge on top of the Holiday Inn on Highland and wonders who looks down at his bus at that moment.

At one point, he gets off at Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax and walks south. Passing Melrose, he comes to a small wooden theater; at the ticket counter the woman says, “You’ve missed the first two hours.”

“It’s all right,” Vikar says.

The woman sells Vikar the ticket and he goes inside. He has to wind through narrow wooden passages like a fun house. He gets to his hard seat just as the screen is filled with white hoods, the Klan thundering on horseback. At the front of the theater, before the silent screen, a small round man in his seventies plays the accompanying organ.

The tiny theater around Vikar is half full. He finds himself riveted less by the images than by the sound of the organ, which thunders along with the Klan’s horses. He can feel the vibration of the sound in the seat beneath him and in his feet on the floor.

The lights go up and the rest of the audience leaves. The small wooden theater is even less imposing with the lights on. Vikar remains in his seat watching the little old man who played the organ, who smiles at him. “Did you like it?” the old man says.

“I liked the sound,” Vikar says.

“You mean me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, thank you,” he says. He looks at Vikar’s head. “Friends of yours?”

“Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.”

The old man shrugs. “Kids to me. I would have said Janet Gaynor and what’s-his-name from
Seventh Heaven
. Didn’t he die?”

“Montgomery Clift?”

“I remember something about a car accident.”

“He didn’t die in the car accident. It was after that. Do you play here all the time?”

“Not all the time. I play out at UCLA a lot when they have screenings.” He walks over to where Vikar sits. “I’m Chauncey.” He puts out his hand.

“I’m Vikar. Did you play for silent movies?”

“Can you believe I’m that old?”

“Yes,” Vikar says. Chauncey laughs. “Did you play for this movie?”

“I don’t remember when I first played for this movie.” Chauncey lowers himself into one of the seats in the row before Vikar’s. “The big pictures had orchestras when they opened.”

“I met a man once who didn’t like this movie. He broke into my apartment.”

“You discussed motion pictures with someone who broke into your apartment?”

“He said it’s jive bullshit.”

“Well, there’s probably something to that, I suppose. Of course I’m from a different era, so maybe not the one to ask—I just see the picture, not the politics. We play it for the kids over at UCLA—you know, long hair,” he pantomimes long hair, “they’re actually quite respectful but I’m sure they also think it’s jive as-you-say. Probably the most sophisticated audiences I’ve ever played for, though God knows they don’t look very sophisticated.”

“John Ford played one of the Klansman.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I used to ride the elevator of the Roosevelt Hotel with D. W. Griffith.”

“Is that right?”

“He was a ghost then,” Vikar says.

Chauncey laughs. “Well, that makes sense. I think he did die in that hotel.”

“He built it with Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.”

“You sound pretty sophisticated, too.”

“I don’t know,” Vikar says. “But I know things about movies.”

It seems to Vikar that Dotty already has made some impact on her Jack Daniels bottle and it’s made some impact on her when she suggests they walk up the street from the studio for a drink. On the corner, Nickodell’s wearily bleats in the night its electric pastels. The blood-red booths of the cavernous interior are like the cells of a dead beehive.