Cobwebs

Movieland - Chapter 13

Backstage in the Theater of the Imagination.

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The Second Class

13

Cobwebs

“Go ahead. Touch it,” Tom told Eden as they stood behind the screen. 

Eden shrank back, as she had shrunk back when they first came up on the stage, when she had to be coaxed to venture beyond the wings. To show her there was nothing to fear, Tom had gone into the darkness behind the screen and stumbled about until he found the “ghost” lamp, a tall floor lamp with a naked bulb in a wire cage that was standard to working stages but no longer lit in these diminished days of the Palatine. Tom snapped the switch, and a dusty incandescent glow shone out.

In the dull, dim light, the backstage was a wreck.

Eden remained rooted to where she stood, huddling against the curtain in the wings. Tom came back to escort her. Worried, hesitating, Eden yielded, partly to please him but mostly because “Here, take my arm” sounded so clearly like a direction. 

Behind the screen, the illumination from the naked bulb dissipated quickly as it spread across the epic-sized stage, which, impassive, retained its deeply shadowed recesses. Props lay helter-skelter as if the prop man had thrown them about in a drunken spree. Painted scenery slumped about on slack riggings. And ropes … ropes everywhere … heavy fibrous ropes hanging loose, unmoored to the hitching posts where they should have been knotted up tight. 

The theater had been left to its own ways for too many years. And though Miriam and her crew had done a heroic job restoring the lobby and the auditorium to its regal Roman splendor, no one had touched the part of the theater that was always meant to remain unseen. Backstage a gothic network of ghostly cobwebs prevailed, draping over the clutter.

As Tom guided the anxious Eden through an obstacle course of hanging screens and overturned props, he noticed a trapdoor outlined in the planks. He remembered a story about the Palatine and wondered if this was the trapdoor that had been used when the trickster Orson Welles, grown fat but never dull, performed a notorious disappearing act in a Japanese cabinet for a long-ago premiere audience.

The photos from that night were part of the Welles legend. Staring out in a madly theatrical Fu Manchu moustache applied with spirit gum, he was magnificently enormous in a black mandarin robe with a high collar grazing his chin and a hem that swept the floor, embroidered with sprays of plum blossoms in gold brocade.

According to the tale, recounted with relish by scurrilous movie tabloids,  the mammoth-sized director had gotten stuck trying to push himself through the narrow trapdoor beneath the false bottom of the cabinet and found he couldn’t reappear as he was supposed to on the other side of the stage, where he was to burst forth from an elaborate Japanese shrine, ornamented with scrolling dragons, that would split in half as if by Orsonian mind control. 

On stage, his two assistants in kabuki face and kimonos waited on either side of the shrine, assuming quaint geisha-girl poses, their smiles frozen in a mask of Japanese composure. Time ticked away. The audience shifted in its seats. A bead of sweat left a track through whiteface as one Madame Butterfly eyed the other. Clearly, something had gone wrong. 

Suddenly, with a growing ruckus, the doors at the back of the auditorium flung open, and Welles rampaged through like a wild bull, bellowing “He’s arisen!” Two flustered teenage ushers grabbed at him, thinking he was some maniac who had crashed the rope line. The tabloids were only too happy to humiliate the director by exposing how the trick was done: He had powered his way through the trap door and exited under the stage, of course, out the stage door into the alley.

Tom and Eden now stood before the screen, and though he directed her to touch it, something new and immediate in Eden gave her the power to resist. She shook her head no.

“You’re never going to be free of this delusion,” Tom told her, “unless you risk touching this screen.”

She extended a tentative forefinger, at the same time bracing herself against him. Cringing into this arm, she barely tapped the canvas.

“See,” said Tom sympathetically, “No caves. No iridescent caverns. Just a movie screen.” But she didn’t look convinced. He took her hand. “Open your palm … please, Eden, open your palm.” With force, he shoved her hand into the screen. The canvas rippled majestically, and she gasped. Then, losing strength, the mighty ripple settled. 

Was it really as he said? 

Her voice came huskily. “Why is everything so wrong here?”

“We’re going to find that out, Eden, I promise you.”

The problem was someone might recognize Eden.

One of his students, one of the relentless ones who had grilled Miriam Thorncraft during the first class and prided themselves on being amateur experts on her father’s career. 

They might see his Eden sitting at the back of the theater and imagine she was the real — if that was the right word — Eden Windess from Fog. More likely they’d assume, as he had, that she was some actress in a French twist, the main player in a skit of some sort that would be sprung upon the class. They would turn, they would ogle, make a fuss that would only send the poor troubled woman deeper into her dangerous illusion.

To prevent this, at least as much as he could, Tom had brought Eden to the Palatine a half hour before the lobby doors would be unlocked by Kashi, the student projectionist. In the silence of the empty theater, Tom and Eden had explored the backstage without distraction, after which he escorted her to a row, well under the shadow of the balcony.

As it turned out, the class was filing in now, checking their phones, finding seats close to the front, or in the middle range because today a movie would be shown on the big screen, taking no notice of the lone woman at the back, who seemed to sit in her own muted pool of light. 

Tom waited at the lectern, feeling virtuous. He had exposed the ordinariness of the backstage to Eden, and she seemed to take it to heart. Now he could help her. Now he could lead her gently but firmly back to reality in a way, he insisted to himself, no one else could, for he alone was the authority on her delusional San Francisco with its drifting fogs and Thorncraftian intrigues, schooled in the very identity she had chosen for her own: a haunted, hunted heiress.

But as he stared down into the wood grain of the lectern, the whorls began to reveal the darker convolutions of his own mind. Did he really want to dispel the strange, wonderful Eden character that had walked so sincerely into his life? Or was it closer to the truth that he wouldn’t mind supporting her for however long she needed to live in this charmed fantasy. No rush to find out who she really was or what had led her to him.

But if that were true, why had he brought her back to the theater at all? To clear away the cobwebs? Or was it for reasons far more primitive? The male desire to have a woman admire him by admiring how masterful he was at what he did.

Tom looked up as the theater darkened, The spotlights were now shining bright upon him.

“Sorry about last time,” he began. “We’ll be running Twisted now from a new print. Just a few words before we start. Let’s think about how calculated the casting is. The actress Lee Saxon, who once famously played a fairytale princess, is dispatched on the stairs at the fortieth second of the forty-seventh minute of the film —forgive me for being so precise, but even the timing is quite famous. You didn’t kill off an expensive big-name star in the middle of the picture. Audiences were jolted. That’s what Thorncraft is going for in Twisted. Life as a shocking tabloid headline.

“Now look at the actor who plays Raymond. This is the film’s big draw, a former teenage heartthrob, the last of that era when young actors were given gimmick names like Rock, Tab, and Troy. His Hollywood name is ‘Slim Putnam,’ and it’s intended to evoke a tall youth of Puritan stock, which is exactly what he was when he was nabbed off the University of New England’s basketball team by Henry Wilson, a talent agent who specialized in handsome male discoveries, somewhat notoriously. 

“So here’s Slim Putnam, peak of his career. Clean cut, conservative, a throwback to the fifties—but it’s 1967! Everything is long hair, love beads, L.S.D! Putnam is still getting cast as the boy next door in the varsity sweater. Worse, he’s twenty-seven! For a teenage heartthrob, he’s a minute or two away from extinction. But Thorncraft sees something in him: the actor has developed an unnerving stare, it was always there, but age has sharpened it. It gives him a high-strung look, exactly what Twisted needs, a boy next door with a hint of something off. 

“Slim Putnam, of course, leaps at the role, sees it as a springboard out of a dead-end career trajectory, which it will be, opening the door to more morally ambiguous roles. But at this moment in time, when Putnam comes on screen as fresh-faced Raymond, he brings with him an expectation from his past roles, an aura of wholesome Americana. Shy, trustworthy, respectful. Even the character’s name: Raymond Shepard. Who wouldn’t trust a good shepherd? An expectation that Thorncraft is about to twist for ultra-shock effect.

“Edward Thorncraft understood, with that sort of sixth sense certain artists have, that post-war America was no longer simple or confident, as it had been during the war years. There’s a new tension in the air, an uncertainty. Let’s remember that in the 1960s, people were still agonizing over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the incineration of whole cities by atomic bombs dropped from American planes. Fresh in the mind were the concentration camps, the Fascist purges of raw power, the eugenic impulse — all nightmarish deeds done by one’s contemporaries, by, as it was sorely felt at the time, ‘people like us.’ 

“And at this moment in time, the Vietnam conflict is bloodying the American landscape. The fighting is all over the TV news, filmed as it’s happening, clearly a proxy war between two atomic gorillas, the U.S. and the Soviets. ‘Stop the War,' ‘Ban the Bomb’ are nervous reactionary nodes on the zeitgeist. People try to flee into a suburban conformity, safety in numbers, telling themselves ‘blondes have more fun’ and ‘things go better with Coke.’ Disney produces a science series for school kids called ‘Our Friend, the Atom.’ All in an effort to mask the underlying dread in the air, that people are living in the last days before their own American Hiroshima. 

“And from this jumble of anxiety, this conflicted malaise, Thorncraft shapes the masterpiece Twisted, a bold work of art about the precariousness of existence, the tabloid cheapness of death, the wild savagery behind the shyest smile. 

“We see this all encapsulated in the film’s most famous scene. The startling fortieth second of the forty-seventh minute. As I mentioned the last time, the Murder on the Stairs is a brilliant manipulation of the audience. The rapid edits overwhelm the eye, pull forth the gestalt power of the imagination to fill in the blanks —in effect, make the audience commit the Murder on the Stairs for the director. 

“In this new world, this ‘Age of Anxiety’ as the post-war years were called, the audience is implicated. Even the boy next door has an edgy look in his eye.”

Under the shadow of the balcony, Eden sat, not quite understanding everything Tom said yet impressed, as he had hoped she would be. But what impressed her was simply his command of language. Had he thought up all those words on the spot? Without a higher voice to coach them? Tom seemed to understand why he said things. It was amazing a person could do that, produce a fast river of thoroughly thought-out words. 

Then the flow stopped. Tom stepped away from the lectern. The red curtains opened with ceremonial slowness as the lights dimmed. 

A moment of panic as Nowhere-Place darkness took over … 

Then:

Sudden light and sound.

Violins raced, shrieked. Words shot across the screen. And Eden, who knew in a vague way what movies were, realized she had never actually seen one. Tom had seated her in the center of the row, telling her it was the best viewing position. Truly, the letters zigzagging about seemed to engulf her. Then the music settled, the credits faded, and it began. 

The images on screen were immense, without color oddly, but arresting. Soon Eden was swept up in the steady pitter-patter of the dialogue… the small lines around the mouths on the big faces, the narrowing eyes, the raise of an eyebrow that telegraphed what the character was thinking. It was so reassuring, so familiar, the way the story was moving along in confident straight lines, scene building on scene, the gathering momentum, the sense of the inevitable. 

Yes, at last, she told herself, order was being restored to the universe. This is the way the world works, should work, did work.

It felt like a reprieve. 

And so Eden settled back into the comfortable plush seat, drifting into the cinematic illusion, finding herself represented up there by the blonde Lee Saxon, completely unprepared for the shocks that were about to batter the heroine and, by extension, Eden herself.

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Preview: Let’s go to the movies!