“YOU ARE IN Ingo’s apartment. Tell me what you feel,” says Barassini.
“The chair is hard. I feel it pressing into my buttock bones. The room is dark, musty. I feel anxiety. I want this movie to be great. I want it to change my life, both in the watching and in the eventual heralding. If it’s terrible, I have gained nothing. I am where I was. Worse off because time has passed and I am that much closer to my grave. And I’ll have to tell Ingo that I loved it when it will be clear that I did not. I am not a good actor in that I cannot be dishonest. It is my curse that others always know exactly how I feel. I guess in a way that might make me a brilliant actor, but only if I am playing a character who is scripted to feel exactly as I feel at every moment of the filming. Maybe then I would be the best actor who has ever lived. I’m certain I would. I should audition for that role. I’ll look in Backstage later. The projector starts up. It whirs and sputters as a rectangle of light appears before me on the screen, followed by the scratchy black leader, followed by the China Girl. Wait, was that Tsai? Go back!”
But the film continues to unspool, inexorably into the future, the China Girl replaced by a new image every twenty-fourth of a second as a procession of 1/24ths of a second passes before my eyes into history. I must record this fully. Barassini is correct: Every movie is experienced differently by every person, and by rights, each person should get to have his or her or thon’s experience of it. A movie is seen differently by each individual, but a movie that has been seen by no one does not exist. It is as the thoughts of a dead person. They cannot be accessed, so they do not exist. Therefore, for Ingo’s film to exist, I must tell it, and to tell it, I must tell it through the filter of my psyche.
So this will not be a novelization. A novelization is a lesser thing. Just as the book is always better than the movie (with the exception of Truffaut’s one decent film, Tirez sur le Pianiste [1960]), the movie is always better than the novelization. There must be a term for what I am about to do. What do you call something that is an interpretation, a critique, an embellishment, a deepening? Something that compares favorably to the experience of a moviegoer. I am, after all, a critic who will watch a movie only once and, whenever possible, in a public theater with a paying audience. I insist on paying fair-market value. That is the true moviegoing experience. A movie is not only the image on the screen, the sound from the speakers. It is the translation of all this by the brain. It is the social milieu. It is the year you see it, your age, the state of your marriage. It is what happened on the way to the theater, what you expect to happen after, it is who is next to you on each side. It is how they smell. It is who sits in front of you. Who is or isn’t kicking your seat from behind. It is your worry about the call from the doctor. It is that you got laid. Or didn’t. Or are about to. Or know you never will again. It is your envy: of the filmmaker, of the couple necking down front. It is the popcorn. The Goobers. That you have to go to the bathroom. That someone is eating a smelly tuna sandwich. Did they smuggle it in? It doesn’t seem fair, that the cheaters get the sandwiches and the rest of us get shit on. It is your suspension of disbelief. The scene that motivates an eye roll. It is your critique of the acting. It is you trying to remember where you’ve seen that actor before. It is your prediction of what’s going to happen next in the film. It is your pride when you are proven correct. It is your surprise when the filmmaker defies your expectation. It is life, which you only get to live once. You prepare for it, but it will surprise you anyway. The film is predetermined but revealed to you only through time, incrementally. This makes you think it is a living thing, a thing for which you can change the outcome. You yell at the actors onscreen. You clench your teeth as if it will help. And even though the movie is predetermined, the world is not. So the movie can change in this way, too. The projector could break down. Maybe this screening has a loud laugher. Maybe there will be a shooter. These chance elements are layered upon the chanceless film. So a text that encompasses all of this outer and inner experience is not a novelization. It is so much more. It is a witnessing, and it should be called that, bearing witness to the human experience—this plastic, this light, this clackety 1⁄24th of a second through time that the film and I are traveling together but separate, neighboring solitudes. The original meaning of the word martyr is witness and that seems about right. A viewer is a witness; a witness is one who testifies. This will be a witnessing. Or, wait, don’t I watch films seven times? By myself? In my living room? Don’t I turn the television upside down? Suddenly, I’m confused. I don’t—
“You’re not saying anything,” says Barassini.
“I’m not?”
“You’re just sitting there, expressions passing across your face. At one point you looked like you were smelling a tuna sandwich, possibly.”
“Yeah. Actually. Yeah. You got that, huh?”
“You’re a good actor.”
“It’s about being in the moment.”
“Listen,” he continues, “I can help you. But you need to talk while you’re in this state. This is the only way we can make your findings accessible to you once you awaken. I will record all that is said in here. You need to trust me.”
“I guess I do have trust issues.”
“You should know that in addition to working with alien abductees and past-lifers—both of which I believe in, by the way—I also work with the NYPD and several other major police departments.”
“Didn’t you already tell me that?”
“No.”
“Huh.”
I am impressed. In my youth, while on a Fulbright at Cambridge University, I participated in ESP studies led by the great Robert Henry Thouless. He determined that I demonstrated the extraordinary and rare gift of Negative ESP (there has been only one other documented case, that of Johann Gergis, a fifteenth-century Flemish bellows mender). When the Zener card tests were administered to me, the results were undeniable: My guesses were incorrect ninety-nine percent of the time, so far below chance as to be astonishing. In fact, my results were impressive enough that Scotland Yard took notice and employed my talent on several occasions to help determine where they needn’t bother to look for kidnapped children. For a short while, I even performed an act at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, in which I would guess the first initials of randomly chosen audience members.
“Is there someone close to you whose name begins with an X?” I would always ask the volunteer.
I was wrong ninety-nine percent of the time. I was always sure that there was a person in their life whose name began with an X. I could see it as clear as day. When I queried an audience member whose husband turned out to be the governor of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, His Excellency Xander Xavier Xerxes, Exquire, tomatoes were hurled at me and I was booed off the stage.
“The point is,” Barassini says, “that for this to work, I need you to trust me fully. Are there any concerns you still have about me or the process at this point that I can try to assuage?”
“I have been slightly concerned about your pronunciation of the word assuage.”
“Which word?”
“Assuage.”
“Oh, is that how you say it?”
“Yes,” I say.
He stares into my eyes.
“Now how do you say it?”
“Assuage.”
“Good. So shall we begin?”
“Yes. Please!”
“Tell me what you see.”
AND JUST LIKE that, I can see the movie again. The top-hatted doll walking against the wind. On the screen? In my brain? I can’t say. But gone is the distance. Gone are the artifacts of age, the scratches, the dirt, the irregularity in exposures. The doll is here. I could seemingly touch him, but I cannot. I cannot look down and see my hand. I am, in essence, the camera. I believe that this hypnosis experiment is going to work. I watch the scene play out, exhilarated. The little boy on skates rolls by and I follow his path with my eyes. He crashes into a gas streetlamp and falls back onto his behind. He is fine! As he stumbles back up onto his wobbly skates, it occurs to me, I didn’t see this before. Somehow I am looking outside the limits of the frame. I try to think back. Maybe this was in the original film. So much has happened in the film and in my life between this moment and that. But I am almost certain I did not see this in the actual film. I swivel back to the man walking against the wind and attempt an experiment. I try to circle him, to view him from his left side. I am successful. From this angle, I see a different backdrop behind him, this one also painted in Ingo’s style. They are renderings of the very brownstones across East 62nd Street from the Our Lady of Peace church. I recognize those brownstones! I look up. Will I see sky? Indeed! A black-and-white rendering of clouds, but animated, moving fast and swirling. A small dot appears in the sky, soon growing larger. Is it falling? Yes. It is an amorphous blob from the original first scene. It smashes silently to the ground at my “feet.” Black liquid oozes out. From this angle, I can see that it has broken open on top, revealing what appears to be viscera, tiny bones, a skull. I am shocked out of the scene. The hypnotist is watching me.
“Was I telling it this time?” I ask.
“You were.”
“It’s different from the movie I remember remembering.”
“So it seems.”
“Similar, but I feel I’m seeing more, from different angles,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Is that typical?”
“I’ve never worked through this type of issue. Most of what I do involves curbing addictions: smoking, heroin, chronic mastication.”
“Masturbation?”
“No.”
“I need to remember the movie as precisely as possible. This feels problematic,” I say.
“There is no pure objective memory of a work of art to be had.”
“It needs to be Ingo’s work. It must. Maybe if I restrain myself, I can stick to the original camera angles, not stray, not explore.”
“Maybe Ingo wanted you to explore. Isn’t it possible he put this all in there? For you to get lost in?”
“I’m not sure I have the courage to go back,” I say. “I don’t want to get lost.”
But I do go back in. I do get lost.