FILM BUFF

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1973.

In the sixth grade Dillard Trayler stripped the clothes off Miss Starkey. Miss Starkey, chalking another problem on the blackboard at the time, heard gasping and giggling. She turned slowly, giving the kids a chance to blank their faces and bend to their figuring.

But she found the pupils sitting upright, eyes bigging and bugging. She followed the converging gazes to the wall space above the blackboard. The chalk snapped in her hand. There on the wall, as on a movie screen, showed a medium shot of a naked woman.

It took Theodora Starky a moment to know what she was viewing. Then she screamed and threw an eraser at it.

It winked out. But the image had burned into her brain—the image of herself, naked for the whole world to see.

Though it was beyond her how anyone could be working a hidden projector. And how anyone had captured that likeness of her in the first place was even harder to resolve. She had certainly never knowingly fallen into such a suggestive pose. Never. So it had to be either fake or delusion.

Miss Starkey went hot all over at having blown her cool. She had only imagined viewing herself in the altogether. And she knew why. The au naturel was only natural; Miss Starkey planned to marry soon, and so of course her mind would be less on teaching and more on…

She tightened her kissable lips and looked at her class. The monsters had gasped and giggled about something. But damned if she’d ask them just what. She had framed it rationally in her own mind and didn’t want it unframed.

Her eyes focused on Dillard Trayler because he looked so obviously innocent.

Dillard tried even harder to look as if what everyone had just seen had nothing to do with him, or as if he too found it dazzling and puzzling. For a long free-frame minute Dillard thought Miss Starkey had turned on him because she divined he was the cause. But it was merely that the usually nice Miss Starkey needed a scapegoat.

“Dillard Trayler. Dillard, look at me when I talk to you.” He had a way of not meeting eyes, of looking down or away as if afraid others could read his thoughts. “Stop daydreaming, Dillard, and get on with your math. If you hadn’t skipped so many classes, you wouldn’t find the work so hard. It wouldn’t be work, it would be play.”

That was true, he did play hooky a lot. He hoped Miss Starkey wasn’t going to put two and two together; he sighed as she turned again to the blackboard and went on chalking with a stub a seemingly harder problem. He had got hooked on films and, as often as he dared, he spent his school time and his lunch money on moviegoing. Even if a film was a hard ticket for a minor, that didn’t keep him from viewing it; he had found ways of sneaking into the movie houses.

The truant officer—she had a higher sounding title but was a truant officer all the same—theorized that Dillard had taken to movies as an escape from an unhappy home situation.

But Dillard’s home situation wasn’t all that unhappy, even though the truant officer tried to stir up trouble between Dillard’s parents to make the theory fit.

It was simply that the art of film clicked with the make-up of Dillard’s mind. And there was a freakish something else in the make-up of Dillard’s mind, a wild talent that enabled him to project his inner visions.

As, in spite of himself, he picked up some knowledge of science in school, he came to understand how this wild talent must work. His brain waves excited the molecules of the wall he stared at and its coating, and the molecules danced to his tune, moved to his measure, shadowed forth his thoughts. He feared to go into it too deeply—if he analyzed it he might lose it. But that did not keep him from exercising it. And his visualizations, blurry to begin with, came into sharp focus as he mastered detail.

Of course the whole town talked about Miss Starkey running around naked in the classroom. But no one—except Dillard Trayler, and he wasn’t coming forward with the answer—could be sure what had taken place. Confused accounts of two Miss Starkeys, like Goya’s clothed and unclothed Duchess of Alba, only deepened the mystery and made it seem something of a mass hallucination, and Miss Starkey was quitting anyway to get married and move, and so the talk died down.

After this public undressing of Miss Starkey, Dillard learned not to look at a blank wall while daydreaming. He would stare instead at the blank end papers of a book in his hands or at a shielded sheet of white paper on his desk. But it lacked something when the screen stood at a nontheatrical distance. Too, it was safer to project his fancies onto ready-made images in the dark, where no one could tell the doing was his. So he kept on playing hooky to steal into the movie houses. Or, more truly in keeping with their magic, the movie palaces.

“Your son’s studying to be a dropout.”

“My son? He’s just as much your son.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about that. I can’t see that coming out of my genes.”

“Don’t talk dirty.”

“That’s gee-ee-en-ee-ess.”

“It still sounds dirty.”

Dillard wanted to lie down and die when he overheard his mother and father go at it like that over him. After he was dead they would be sorry, but it would be too late.

He brightened. All at once he knew how Eddie Bracken had felt in Hail the Conquering Hero. Woodrow LaFayette Pershing Truesmith had felt like dying because the Marines had turned him down. That was why the film had opened with a tap dance—“Taps“!—and why six Marines had carried him home.

“What’s he up to now? He’s too quiet.”

No privacy even at home. Why, he found greater privacy on the streets! He smiled. His greatest feat was, on passing an array of sheets on a clothesline, projecting simultaneously four different shots. Though, as the images showed pale in the broad daylight, they passed for a flow of wind-whipped colors; Dillard was the only one to know what he was staring at. And people had to spoil even that.

“What’s so interesting about my washing, boy? Ain’t you never seen ladies’ underwear? Go on, you dirty-minded thing, move along.”

The years went by as a dream, as a series of movie dreams.

He still went to the movies almost daily but even so had to draw more and more on himself to make even the real movies satisfying. He took to changing the flow of images on the theatrical screen, giving neorealistic films happy endings, art films a boost of movement, skin flicks a touch of slapstick. But for the strong union, more than one projectionist would have lost his job.

Dillard liked playing with montage. He changed the order of shots so that the hero seemed to smile not at an angelically sleeping child but at an old woman slipping and falling. And he tinkered with the action. In High Noon Dillard had Gary Cooper hook his thumbs in his gunbelt and find himself unable at the showdown to pry them loose. In Gilda Dillard had Rita Hayworth lose her castanets and take a set of false teeth from her mouth to click as she flamenco’d. Afterwards, Dillard always felt ashamed of himself. But while it lasted…

For, while it lasted, he lived in another world, a world in which he was blind to the difference between reality and fantasy—just as in Symphonie Pastorale the mirror and the window were the same to Michele Morgan playing the blind orphan girl.

Why did he transform the dreams of others? Why did he impose his own dreams on others? Why not simply dream alone and as unashamedly wildly as he pleased? He needed the stimulus of other people; he wanted to feel he shared his vision with others; in a way he drew power from their presence.

While he felt that power, he knew he held the key to a life beyond life. It made him shiver as when he heard the last two words of The Man in the White Suit. Those words not only resolve the story but also tell who Alec Guinness is: “I see.” I.C., Iesus Christus. It wasn’t the religion that got Dillard but the touch of art; though you might say art—the art of film—was his religion.

Sometimes he had the feeling he ought to stop—if he could still stop. The thing might get out of hand, become a Frankenstein’s monster. Was it already too late? Had he set in motion something there was now no stopping? Did the image of Karloff live though no one looked at it? Did the molecules making up the light and shadow of Dillard’s visions form a neural network of their own, take on something approaching a life force, and carry on when Dillard turned away or let his attention fade? He thought that might be; often he seemed to sense motion beyond his frame of vision.

It might have been merely the motion of time passing.

Dillard took to haunting the New York Public Library, reading all the books he could find on film technique. He had come to the Big Apple to lose himself in the worm holes and had worked his way up to assistant manager of a sleazy movie palace on 42nd Street and seemed content.

He had given up on real life and lived now only for his moments in the dark. His theater’s patrons were mainly men sleeping off a drunk or a fix, and his visual tinkering with the cheap films that showed there meant nothing to them.

And then he met Iris. They met cute; it would have made a good sight gag. Both arms full of books, she backs into a swinging door to open it…and keeps backing, unaware Dillard has opened it for her. They fell for each other, literally, in a tumble of books.

Iris Cameron. He murmured her name over and over. He seemed to have fallen in love with the name as much as with the girl. But what really set him up was that she appeared immune to his visions. They were out dining.

“What are you looking at?” He came to with a start and saw he had projected her, nude, on the far wall. Luckily it was a psychedelic joint—night spot, that is—and no one else noticed anything out of the way. Yet he had done it again; this was the end of their affair as it had been the end of it with all the girls he ever dated. But he eyed her uncertainly; she did not seem angry.

“It’s a dream sequence.”

“Green sequins?”

Could it be she didn’t see it? Hoping against hope, he kept the projection going and had her image do a few bumps and grinds.

“Yes. Green sequins.”

She looked right at herself and shrugged.

“You must be color-blind. I don’t see any.”

“I do.”

Cut to Dillard slipping ring on third finger, left hand of Iris. Cut to over-the-shoulders shot of Dillard and bride reading a mortgage loan form. Cut to tight close-up of dotted line. Just as pen begins signing Dillard’s name, cut to matching shot of another dotted line, a course of bricks. Pull back to show brick facing of a small house in a row of small houses.

Dillard carries Iris across threshold. Hold on door. Dillard and Iris walk out with as much dignity as they can muster, followed by a half dozen kids. The kids stand in the doorway and watch as Dillard enters the house next door. Cut to interior, where Iris props up a weak Dillard. He wipes his brow. “Whew!” They smile at each other. Cut to exterior of house. The blind, presumably of the bedroom, winks.

Only after they married did Dillard learn Iris was terribly near-sighted and too vain to wear glasses.

As time went by (Dooley Wilson as Sam in Casablanca), they both let themselves go. Not that he didn’t try his leftover best to give her what she wanted.

The woman of a lazy stubble-bearded gunslinger nags at him to put Dutch doors in her cabin like those she’s admired in the town banker’s house. At last the gunslinger stirs, snapping strands of cobweb (Mole-Richardson Cobweb Cement, Type 1913). He draws both guns and the woman cringes, fearful she’s nagged too much. Out of the frame, the make-up man gets ready to slosh gouts of Hershey’s chocolate on her as blood. But the gunslinger cuts loose at the front door of the shack. The slugs perforate the door across the middle. He tells her to hold the top half and give the bottom half a good swift kick. She breaks an ammonia capsule for happy tears as he falls back into his morose stupor. The prop man repairs the cobweb.

After more time went by, it struck Dillard that Iris had stopped nagging at him to better himself and to fix up the place and to be more of a husband. He looked at her and saw that she wore glasses. He realized that she must have been wearing them for some time.

In Notorious, when Ingrid Bergman is ill abed and beginning to realize her husband and her mother-in-law are trying to murder her, Hitchcock’s lighting gives her face the look of a death’s-head. That was Iris as he saw her now.

She was going on about something.

“I’m telling you this for the last time, Dillard.”

He stared at her. Telling him what?

She shuttered her eyes.

“I won’t see any more of those terrible naked pictures you’ve been throwing on the walls. You’re trying to drive me crazy, that’s what. I don’t know how you work it and I don’t care. But I won’t let you make me believe I’m losing my mind.”

Dillard smiled dreamily. Gaslight. Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist, Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton, the man she marries and finds trying to convince her she’s going mad.

When he came out of his daydream, he found Iris had taken all his trousers from the closet, stuffed them in a suitcase, and gone, fairly sure he wouldn’t follow.

Dillard Trayler grew aware of the ticking clock. He stirred himself. Time to go to work at the movie palace. But thanks to Iris’s slapstick exit, time caught him with his pants down and out.

He looked into the dresser mirror, really looked. In Olivier’s film Hamlet the head of the shadow of Hamlet-Olivier superimposes upon the skull of Yorick; coming events cast their shadows before. The Quiet American’s quiet for the same reason The Thin Man’s thin—the one’s a corpse, the other’s a skeleton. How would the story of Dillard Trayler end? Would he just grow old and lonely and flicker out?

A confused image filled his mind. Iris had walked out on Charles Boyer. Dillard had to change that. Charles Boyer was a man who had a way with women. Dillard stared at the blank wall. Pepe le Moko sprang to life in Algiers.

Dillard felt new power surge into him, felt it transform his being. He looked around and down at a stupidly smiling half-naked stranger standing in a small dull room. The stranger and the room lost solidity, became two-dimensional. Erasing his frown, he erased the stranger from his mind. He unmoored his being from the small dull room and fixed it where it belonged, in the world of romance. He looked into the eyes of Gaby-Hedy Lamarr and she looked into his.

“Come with me to the Casbah…”