My mom, a lifelong artist and crafter, chronically has unfinished projects in various places around her house: a painting on an easel, a pattern pinned to some odd-shaped fabric, quilt squares pieced but apart, a half-repainted hobby horse. Once she can visualize the finished product, she all but loses interest in finishing it. I can relate to that feeling with my writing. I often approach with a question I want to answer or a curiosity that hasn’t found its end. Once I have an answer, my interest wanes.
Kubrick and his camera.
Master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick once said, “You start something because you are interested in it, but you actually do it to find out about it.”1 Once you find out about it, there’s usually still work to do. Creation is its own reward, but you could discover the best thing in a category or a new category altogether. If no one knows, it won’t matter. Follow through and spread the word or you’re depriving the world of your work.2 Sometimes we don’t even know what we’ve created until we share it. Kubrick added at another time, “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it.”
Screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz used to say that a well-written script had already been directed. That is, if it’s put on the page properly, there isn’t much for actors or directors to improve upon. According his Eyes Wide Shut cowriter Frederic Raphael, that’s not the kind of script Kubrick ever wanted. And actor Malcolm McDowell, who played Alex the droog in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), said that Kubrick never knew what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t.
“To restrain man is not to redeem him.” — Stanley Kubrick
He knew it when he saw it though. I am fond of saying that as long as one keeps their options open, options is all one will have. It’s okay to let them breathe though. Raphael wrote of Kubrick, “Kubrick was not indecisive; he was postponing a decision, which is by no means the same thing.”3 Postponing a decision can be action in itself, but a decision must be made. As the song goes, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”4
In his book, Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness (Stalking Horse Press, 2025), D. Harlan Wilson deploys several critical constructs in order to investigate Kubrick’s forays into science fiction. Never a fan of the genre, Kubrick nonetheless made four films that are either squarely science fiction or more sci-fi than they are anything else: Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and the posthumous A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). At least one of them—2001—outright redefined the genre, which was kid’s stuff prior to his sprawling opus.
“In all things mysterious—never explain.” — H.P. Lovecraft
And redefining science fiction is more and more difficult since, given the increasingly sci-fi reality we live in. Wilson writes,
Our media encourages us to view ourselves as characters to be viewed by other characters in a filmic realm whose social networks remake the self, identity, reality, and community. A manifestation of weaponized desire, cinematic thinking allows us to exist in our own highly mediatized diegesis.
We’ve been living as if—as if there’s an audience watching—for so long now that it’s difficult to imagine otherwise. Try it though. Post less. Save more for yourself. As Raphael wrote of Kubrick, “He is morbidly afraid of giving away his secrets, the best of which may be that he has none.” You don’t have to have a secret to act like you do. That’s a secret unto itself. Mystery loves company.
I was a frightened child. I would be accosted by a clip or a trailer from a horror movie while watching TV and then freaked out for weeks. You’ve already read my reaction to seeing Bambi in the theater. That experience did nothing to encourage my movie watching, much less scary-movie watching. I distinctly remember glimpses of It’s Alive (1974), The Legacy (1978), The Fog (1980), The Children (1980), and Friday the 13th (1980) tormenting my young mind.
The final icon: Ken Kirzinger as Jason Voorhees in Freddy vs Jason (2003).
A decade or so ago, my sister and I were digging through DVDs at a pawn shop and came across six Children of the Corn movies. It was the franchise in its entirety at the time. Those movies are probably not the best place to start as several of them are just a retelling of the original Stephen King short story, but they set me on a path of watching slasher franchises. Soon to follow were A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, and others, but it was Friday the 13th that I found most compelling, perhaps because the trailer had so terrified me as a child, but maybe there’s more to it than that unshakeable memory.
There are different schools of thought about when the slasher subgenre emerged. Some cite proto-slashers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Some say the first true slasher was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and others say it was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), but most people agree that the movie that really launched the subgenre proper was John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). After Michael Myers terrorized the babysitters and children of Haddonfield, Illinois, a flood of holiday-themed slashers emerged: Prom Night (1980), New Year’s Evil (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Graduation Day (1981), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), among many others all celebrated their respective holidays with bodies, blood, and some slice-happy killer. Non-holiday slashers followed Halloween as well. They included Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls (1979), Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), Bill Lustig’s Maniac (1980), and the future-star-studded The Burning (1981; the movie debut of Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, and Fisher Stevens).
Even among such a saturated line-up, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th was 1980’s most commercially successful slasher, grossing nearly $60 million worldwide. It was also the first independent horror film to secure distribution by a major studio in the United States.
Friday the 13th posters from the vaults of the Logan Theater in Chicago on display in 2017. Original illustrations by Alex Ebel.
There are better original slashers (Halloween) and better franchises (Scream), but something about watching the first few Fridays find their feet is way more intriguing. In the pantheon of slasher killers, Halloween is built around Michael Myers, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is nothing without Freddy Krueger, and in TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre the chainsaw is brandished by no one but Leatherface. But on the Mount Rushmore of these murderers, there was one late arrival.
In Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees only has a cameo in the first movie, he doesn’t become the machete-wielding killer until the second movie, and he doesn’t don his signature hockey mask until the third. What we talk about when we talk about Friday the 13th took at least three movies to fully form. The 2009 reboot combines elements of the first four movies into a foggy, nihilistic film with an extremely territorial killer, unlike the original lumbering menace in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. The remake lacks any sense of levity, which I think is a major misstep. Horror and humor are adjacent universes with a very tenuous separation. That separation is even smaller between slashers and slapstick.
Horror and humor: my mashup of Friday the 13th and the Cure.
Another difference between Friday the 13th and most other slasher franchises: The first movie isn’t the best one. Most fans agree that even if a franchise comes back with a decent second and maybe third movie, the original is still superior (Silent Night, Deadly Night doesn’t get really good until deep into the franchise, but that’s for another discussion). Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all have decent follow-ups, but none can touch the first of the bunch. Not so with Friday the 13th. The second movie is the best, and again, Jason had just become the killer, and he hadn’t even found his iconic hockey mask yet (There is an argument for The Final Chapter and Jason Lives being better and scarier, but that’s also for another discussion).
Aside from the successful and superb Scream and Terrifier franchises, most would say that the slasher era is far in the past. Yet send-ups like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and The Final Girls (2015) and arty updates like Midsommar (2019) and In a Violent Nature (2024) show that where there are weapon-wielding maniacs hiding in the shadows and brutally innovative ends awaiting adventurous young people, we’re still watching.
Accompanying their stunning, fever-dream visuals, the films of David Lynch roar with sound, what Madison Bloom at Pitchfork calls a “bowel-deep grumble.” From visceral, industrial rumbles to crackling near-silence, sound is an aspect of his movies that he valued as much as the images. “The sound design can be subliminal where you barely hear it, or sometimes you can get hit over the head with it,” said his main composer and collaborator Angelo Badalamenti in Brad Dukes’ Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (Short/Tall Press, 2014). “He creates a remarkable aural experience.”
David Lynch as the “King of Wands” from the Philly Tarot Deck by James Boyle and Gina Tomaine.
Though I watch his movies and shows regularly, since his passing I’ve been revisiting them anew. Understandably, most of Lynch’s critics and fans focus on the visuals of his work, but there’s been a renewed interest in his attention to sound. “All the way back to Eraserhead,” said Badalamenti, who, starting as Isabella Rosselinni’s vocal coach on 1986’s Blue Velvet, composed music for almost all of Lynch’s projects. “David has loved to play and experiment with music and sound,” he said. Lynch said repeatedly that Badalamenti was the one “who really brought me into the world of music, right into the middle of it.”
Lynch explained the sound of Eraserhead in a 1977 interview:
Alan Splet and I worked together in a little garage studio with a big console and two or three tape recorders, and worked with a couple of different sound libraries for organic effects. Then we fed them through the console. It’s all natural sounds. No Moog synthesizers. Just changes like with a graphic equalizer, reverb, a Little Dipper filter set for peaking certain frequencies and dipping out things or reversing things or cutting things together. We had a machine to vary the pitch but not the speed. We could make the sounds the way we wanted them to be. It took several months to do it and six months to a year to edit it.
In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch told the story of how he first conceived of film and sound through painting:
I was painting a painting about four-foot square, and it was mostly black, but it had some green plant leaves coming out of the black. And I was sitting back, probably taking a smoke, looking at it, and from the painting I heard a wind, and the green started moving. And I thought, ‘oh, a moving painting, but with sound.’ And that idea stuck in my head. A moving painting.
Miguel Ferrer, who played the principled and persnickety Special Agent Albert Rosenfield in all three seasons of Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks said, “The music was unlike any music you’d ever heard on television. […] It was so radically different and so evocative. It almost became another character.” Frequent musical collaborator Julee Cruise added, “You could scan the channels and know it was David Lynch, just three seconds in and you knew who it was. He pushes everything to the metal.”
“Oh, just let it float, like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space and time, timeless and endless.” — David Lynch describing a composition to Angelo Badalamenti
In addition to Badalamenti and Cruise, Lynch worked with Toto and Brian Eno (on the Dune soundtrack), Chris Isaak (both as a musician on Wild at Heart and an actor in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson (on Lost Highway), Karen O (sang on Lynch’s “Pinky’s Dream”), Moby (DJed his wedding), Lykke Li (sang on Lynch’s “I’m Waiting Here”) and his own band with Badalamenti, Thought Gang (named after the Tibor Fisher book?). Almost every episode of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return ended with a different musical act performing at the Roadhouse: everyone from acts he’d worked with before like Rebekah Del Rio (who performed in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, perhaps as an homage, on the Treer Jenny von Westphalen Megazeppelin in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, easily his most Lynchian film), Cruise (in two episodes), and Reznor and Atticus Ross (as the Nine Inch Nails), to newcomers like the Veils, Lissie, Eddie Vedder (as Edward Louis Severson III), Au Revoir Simone, and the Chromatics (in three episodes).
Emerging from an event at the United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles on April 1, 2015, the book,Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J.C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley (Hat & Beard Press, 2016), explores the music Lynch loved and the transcendental meditation he practiced for most of his life. As the above list of artists and collaborators indicates, Lynch was one heck of a curator. Beyond the Beyond includes interviews with many of his musical collaborators, followers, and fans.
“Haunting” is an easy but apt description of Lynch’s own music but also the music he chose from other artists. He used songs by This Mortal Coil, Roy Orbison, and many others, but Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” which appeared in Lynch and Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart (1990), is perhaps the best example. Somehow both twangy and gothic, with its deep sense of longing and loss, the song was not only a big hit for Isaak but struck the core musical chord for Lynch’s on-screen images. His own “Ghost of Love” echoes a lot of Isaak’s aching darkness, billowing like a cold wind blowing through your bowels.
“I play the guitar upside down and backwards,” Lynch said in Beyond the Beyond. “I’m not a musician. It’s more about sound effects for me. I just love the sound of it.” His pure ear for sound is obviously astute. The etherial vocals of Julee Cruise illustrate the point. She put an otherworldly lilt to several of his most iconic projects.
Cruise sang on a song for Blue Velvet called “Mysteries of Love,” and her song “Falling” from her 1989 debut record Floating Into the Night, which features compositions and production by Badalamenti and Lynch, became the main theme for Twin Peaks. About that record, she told Trey Taylor at Dazed and Confused, “I’m so proud that so many young girls have picked up on it, like Lana Del Rey. And fuck anyone who says anything bad about her, because she always credits me and I think that’s the greatest honor I’ve ever received.” The clip below is from “Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted,” a play directed by Lynch, with music by Badalamenti and Cruise.
So, rest in peace to David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Frank Silva, Jack Nance, Frances Bay, Catherine E. Coulson, Pamela Gidley, Peggy Lipton, Lenny Von Dohlen, Miguel Ferrer, Walter Olkewicz, Kenneth Welsh, Tom Sizemore, Piper Laurie, David Bowie, Warren Frost, Michael Parks, Don S. Davis, Robert Forster, Harry Dean Stanton, and all the other passed-away alumni of Lynch Land. As Lynch himself said in a BBC interview upon the passing of Badalamenti, “I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies; they just drop their physical body, and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad, but it’s not devastating if you think like that […] It’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”
When I think of gritty, punk filmmaking, the first few movies that come to mind are Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver (1976), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), James Merendino’s SLC Punk! (1998), and, of course, Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979). References to the latter have popped up in everything from Wu-Tang Clan songs and Tarantino movies to Simpsons and Community episodes, but the punk-rock aesthetic and street-light ambiance of the gangland narrative linger as well. The film critic Pauline Kael described the movie as “visual rock.”
New York City gangs and their territories (Daily News, June 15, 1954).
In 1954, long before he was a science-fiction legend, Harlan Ellison set out to write a novel about the street gangs of New York City. As research, he joined the Brooklyn gang The Barons in Red Hook, considered to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Web of the City—originally published under the title Rumble—was Ellison’s first novel, and his nonfiction account of that time and the book’s writing was published in 1961 as Memos from Purgatory. We tend to think of the 1950s in this country as quaint and innocent. Ellison’s early work illustrates otherwise.
The gangs of New York were plentiful in the decades leading up to the release of The Warriors in 1979. During its second weekend in theaters, the lines between the screen and the street blurred as lines of gang members came out to play. Two hundred theaters hired extra security and many others pulled the movie for fears of public safety. A lot of those rowdy youths wanted to see this movie.
In addition to playing a Baseball Fury in The Warriors, Rob Ryder started on the film as a production assistant but was quickly promoted to location scout. As he writes in his book, Purple Fury: Rumbling with the Warriors (Ryder, 2023), “So, the scene where they blow up the car,” came one of his tasks. “You need to find that street.” Ryder’s book is a candid look at the chaos behind the scenes, revealing some of the lesser known tasks of filmmaking, illuminating its dark alleys like a streetlamp.
“The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet.” — Harlan Ellison, Web of the City
It takes a rare filmmaker to build a legacy like Walter Hill’s, but The Warriors wasn’t his first, and he hasn’t stopped bringing similarly unique stories to the big screen. Quentin Tarantino credits Hill’s script for Hard Times (1975) for showing him what a screenplay could be—that it could be more than just the instructions for making a movie, that the script could be an end in itself. In his book,A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023), Walter Chaw takes a long look at Hill’s legacy.
A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023) by Walter Chaw. Cover illustration by Ganzeer.
Hill produced all of the Alien movies and wrote a couple of them,1 as well as The Long Riders (1980), 48 Hrs (1982), Streets of Fire (1984), and Red Heat (1988), among many others. He’s produced and directed an even longer list. Fellow writer and director Edgar Wright cites Hill’s The Driver (1978) as a major influence on his own movie Baby Driver (2017). Hill even cameos in that movie as a courtroom interpreter, and the numbers on Baby’s prison jumpsuit at the end refer to the release date of The Driver: 28071978. Walter Hill is one of our great filmmakers—a filmmaker’s filmmaker—and Walter Chaw has written a comprehensive account of his work.
Chaw also wrote a great little book about Steve de Jarnatt’s 1988 movie, Miracle Mile (Lulu, 2012), a movie he rented and watched so often that the lady at his local video store eventually just gave him the VHS tape. Little did she know, she helped saved his life.
Steve de Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988).
Chaw had a rough 1989, ultimately attempting to kill himself that summer. He gives partial credit to Miracle Mile for keeping him alive and figuring out why as the impetus for this book. He digs deep into every aspect of it, enlisting writer/director de Jarnatt’s participation. It’s a thoughtful meditation on life, death, youth, writing, film in general, and this one in particular.
We’re toast. Landa checks her CliffNotes a.k.a. “The Key.“
I would be remiss not to mention Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) here. Years ago, William Gibson posted a picture of the CliffsNotes for Pynchon’s sprawling novel online with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether this particular volume of CliffsNotes existed. A couple of years later, I found out that the CliffsNotes volume on Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work was a prop for Miracle Mile. Chaw even reprinted one of Zak Smith’s illustrations (#738) from his book, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (2006; archived here), in this book on the movie.
Steve de Jarnatt’s having written and directed Miracle Mile and written a great collection of short stories—Grace After Grace (Acre, 2020)—reminds me of one of my other favorite screenwriters, Hampton Fancher. Fancher wrote the screenplay for both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, and he wrote and directed the wildly underrated film, The Minus Man (1999). Like de Jarnatt, he has a fabulous short story collection out called The Shape of the Final Dog (Blue Rider Press, 2012), as well as a profound and pithy little book about screenwriting called The Wall Will Tell You (Melville House, 2019).
Film is still our most powerful medium for storytelling. Television is more prevalent and novels are deeper, but the movie is easily accessible and quickly consumed, giving us glimpses of gangs in faraway city streets or totally alternate timelines, taking us places other forms, platforms, and formats cannot. At the very least, it decorates our lives, but sometimes it reaches out and saves them.
My favorite actors tend to play minor characters. There’s something truly special about the MVPs on the sidelines who score wins for the team without much notice. They get bonus points if they’re also writers behind the scenes. DC Pierson has haunted the edges of my psyche for years. He’s popped up on Community, 2 Broke Girls, Key and Peele, Weeds, and a few Verizon commercials, among other places. Somewhere along the way, I started following his social media antics, subscribed to his newsletter, and found his books. A creator in the true Renaissance style, Pierson can do anything — and make it funny.
DC Pierson. Photo by Ari Scott.
I first saw Pierson in 2009’s Mystery Team, a collaboration between him Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, Donald Glover, and the inimitable Meggie McFadden, that also features Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Bobby Moynihan, John Daly, Neil Casey, Kay Cannon, and Matt Walsh, among others. It’s a juvenile adventure that feels like hanging out with your friends, causing mischief during a summer in middle school.
Pierson has also written for the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards. A veteran of improv comedy, his latest creations, “The Architect Who Built New York” video series and an adaptation of his first novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To(Vintage, 2010), are no less silly than his first— and no less serious.
Roy Christopher:I first saw you in Mystery Team (2009), which you co-wrote. In the meantime, the cast and crew of that movie has become a who’s who of modern comedy. How did that project come about?
DC Pierson: That project was the (probably? We’ll see) culminating effort of DERRICK comedy, a sketch group I was in with Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, and Meggie McFadden. We’d made a lot of videos that got popular at the dawn of the YouTube era and pooled any money we made from touring, merchandising, and the barest beginnings of monetization, and along with some money from friends and family were able to shoot a feature. Prior to that we’d written a feature we wanted to try and get made the traditional way, and when it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen we wrote something we could conceivably make on an indie budget, including using Meggie’s parents’ house or Dan’s uncles’ hardware store / warehouse in Manchester, NH as shooting locations.
Dominic Dierkes, D.C. Pierson, and Donald Glover in Mystery Team (2009).
Production scrappiness aside the most important part of that process was the writing. Time being money and all we knew we weren’t going to have the chance to improvise a bunch on set and do a bunch of takes. There were a few opportunities to do a little of that i.e., Matt Walsh’s scene with Jon Lutz at the office party late in the movie or Bobby Moynihan’s scenes in the supermarket, but at that point it’s not like you’re rolling for ten minutes hoping somebody will find what’s funny about the scene. You already have something serviceable written and are just watching a couple genius actor-improvisers make it even better like five times in a row and then you get to pick the best one. Going into it with a script where the story, characters, and especially jokes were all solid on the page was key. A lot of that was down to Dan and Meggie’s sense of what was feasible and achievable on a production level — and it deserves to be said, Dan’s ambition and visual sense really kind of made the videos and movie what they were in many ways, and Meggie figuring out how we could actually do stuff in a professional way really none of us were qualified to do in our late teens and early, early 20s — combined with Donald‘s experiences writing for 30 Rock that very much set the tone and the bar for the writing process.
And as for the casting, as you mentioned, we were really just pulling from people in the UCB community in New York that we were part of at that time. It was an incredibly cool scene to be a part of, and I’m still super grateful for it.
RC: That was right at the beginning of the social-media age, and you’ve leveraged several platforms for comedic purposes. Have you had a plan for those or do you just improvise as needed?
DCP: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, no. It’s more like just keep swimming and try to stay visible. I think I took to Twitter because for better or for worse, I like wordplay and obscure pop culture references, and those both happened to be things that were valuable in that medium. It’s been a slower time adjusting to things like Instagram and TikTok, but I think I’m getting there now especially since I’ve decided to embrace making essentially short short solo sketch videos. It’s a combination of where the technology’s at, that I can just make them and edit them on my phone and the computer and don’t have to be terrifically skilled, with the fact that I come from a sketch background. And even though I don’t think it will become as bigger universal as Twitter was in a day, I am having a lot of fun on Bluesky, which is largely a text based platform like Twitter. We’ll see how it plays out, but at the moment it has a good community vibe.
I also have to say I share a certain weariness. A lot of people who are freelancers of various stripes, be they visual artists or actors or journalists or Drag performers of constantly having to schlep our wares from platform to platform, most of which seem Paternally hostile to promotion of any kind, even though we’re told that’s what we have to do and to be honest it is what we have to do. I guess in my case, maybe it karmically balances out because what we were making in DERRICK really did come along exactly the right time for how small YouTube was but that it existed at all. Granted, none of these things were as developed or capricious or even pernicious as they are these days and maybe that’s part of what was so lucky.
RC:You’ve been very prolific, and your newsletter is especially erudite and hilarious. Do you publish or perform everything you come up with, or do you save some things for longer or larger releases?
DCP: Thank you! I have fun doing it, but haven’t done it as much in the last year for various scarcity of bandwidth reasons. I would say in all forms I probably execute like 10% of the ideas I come up with, but that might be a very generous definition of the word idea. I also think — and here I’m quoting Tom Scharpling, author and host of The Best Show who I think is quoting someone else from his life: The execution is really all that matters, ideas are cheap. Of things I actually execute, like write a draft or shoot some of, most of those get out there. I’m not sitting on like a giant archive of unpublished work, though weirdly network effects and internet attention spans being what they are, it’s kind of like anyone who makes things is sitting on a giant archive of unpublished work because it seems like if you’re not constantly surfacing your own stuff, the kind of attention span Eye of Sauron immediately moves off of them. That said, I do have a an essay about going to see the Postal Service and Death Cab like a year ago that I wrote around that time and just never sent out for whatever reason, so thanks for the reminder.
Oh also, even as I say that I have a rough draft of a new book completed, and I need to like lower myself into the whale carcass of that at some point and finish it. More than anything it’s just a debt of honor I owe myself at this point.
RC: “Execution over ideas.” Did you find that as hard to hear as I did?
DCP: Oh, for sure! And if you’re like me — which we all are, in this way — you’re getting older. So if you think about it for two seconds, or stop trying not to think about it, you realize that the horizon for doing all the ideas is getting smaller. That’s a panicky feeling but there’s also something freeing about it. Less time for doing things that seem like a generically good idea rather than the most You idea, the thing that you’re the most excited about.
RC:Your books were the next thing I was going to ask about. I don’t agree with them, but writers always seem to talk about how hard and thankless it is. Do you enjoy the practice of writing?
DCP: I do! I think I’ve even gotten quasi defensive of it in the post ChatGPT era — like, as long as we’ve been putting pen to paper or pushing the cursor forward writers have been complaining about the drudgery and the solitude of writing, and now all the sudden all these tech bros are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have “solved” it and it’s like, hold on — that’s our solitude and drudgery! It’s like the line from some 90s kids movie — “nobody hits my brother but me!”
There was a line in Top Gun: Maverick that resonated with me (a lot actually! I loved that movie!) about how even with all this modern war-fighting technology, success or failure in one of these insane dogfights those Top Gun rascals are always getting themselves into still comes down to “the man in the box,” i.e., the human being in the really expensive fighter plane. The movie is a really thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s own feelings about old-fashioned movie craftsmanship and exhibition vs. the new degraded and rapidly diminishing versions of those things, feelings I happen to strongly share, so that helped. But also, the phrase immediately resonated with me as a good way to explain that ineffable and sometimes frustrating feeling of being a writer who is actually sitting down and writing.
I also have done a fair amount of writing for award shows and things, and when I got to the point where I was head-writing the shows, I realized what a lot of people who’ve done something long enough to ascend into a quasi-management position learn: You get separated from the thing you love that got you there in the first place. I would spend 99% of my time delegating or fielding emails from other people in charge of other parts of the show or in meetings or on calls. I’d be desperate to have time to just sit down and bang out drafts of things we needed for the show but wouldn’t really be able to. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I think I’m pretty good at all that other stuff too, but it’s way less specialized. A gajillion people can type “circling back” in an email window. Not everybody can be (or wants to be) the proverbial Man in the Box. Also the world will intercede in infinite ways to keep you from being that (hu)Man. That line in the Top Gun sequel was a good reminder to try and maximize my time in the box.
RC:My parents were never into music and subsequently have never really understood my life-long love and interest in it. You had a very different experience. Can you tell me a little about that?
DCP: Dang!! Well I’m sorry it wasn’t something you grew up with in the house very much but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you getting immersed in it — maybe because it was something you had to actively seek out or used to define yourself as a separate entity. (That unsolicited uncredentialed faux-therapy will be $125, please). I didn’t grow up in a musical household the same way many friends of mine who themselves are way more “musical,” as in, playing instruments or singing, did — like, it wasn’t a thing where my mom played piano or my dad and uncle would get guitars out and jam at family gatherings. But my parents were both pretty typical boomers (complimentary, in this instance) in that they both had really close relationships to the music they grew up on (The Beatles in my mom’s case and 70s rock in my dad’s) and my dad maintained an active interest in new music his whole life (my mom probably would’ve as well but she died when I was 12 — you can actually just repay me in some therapy about that).
The times I’m most grateful for now, as I wrote about in this essay, are evenings when I’d be visiting home as an adult and some combination of me, my dad, and my brothers would hang out on the couch in the living room in front of my dad and stepmom’s state-of-the-art-at-the-time home entertainment system and switch off playing songs from our laptops. It was a lucky collision of where the technology was at — the peak iPod / iTunes era — and where we were at in our lives as father and adult / college / older teenage sons, and a lot of emotional conversations that might not have happened otherwise were had. Those are the times I most value and the thing I’d most like to have back, though my dad’s gone now too. ROY, MAKE WITH THE THERAPY, PLEASE!!
It’s funny, I’ve been realizing recently that some music has gone from “this reminds me of my dad” — like, folky, quasi-ambient Windham Hill records or cool jazz played by white dorks who looked like NASA engineers — to “this is just music I like and actively want to seek out.” They say you become your parents and if this a form it takes for me, great. I will be listening to some of the mellowest shit of all time.
RC:What else is coming up in the DC Universe?
DCP: So much, I hope! Continuing to work on a feature script adaptation of my first book The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To with my pals Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden. It’s a process that’s had various fits, starts, and tantalizing near-misses with fruition over the years — and along we made this proof of concept short that still rules imo — and it’s at a phase where it’s the most exciting it’s been a long time <knock on wood>.
I’m working on a live show with my very talented writer, actor friend Robbie Sublett that I’m also super excited about. It kind of ties in with exactly where we are in our lives and careers while also — hopefully — having a hook that gets people in the door. To be announced on that front.
I’ve also been posting a lot more short comedy videos to Instagram and TikTok and such, particularly a series where I play “The Architect Who Designed New York,” basically an excuse to walk around and make short, silly, one-liners I can then cut together based around stuff I see. Been really enjoying that. Every time I set out to shoot one I end up with enough material for almost two, so it keeps rolling.
My own sketchy rendering of Frank the Rabbit from ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001).
Story structure helps us recognize a story as a story, but how are there so many stories? How do they stay interesting to us if all of them have the same basic structure? I feel like another task of a good story is to overload our perceptive buffer and sneak the rest of the goods in unnoticed. But how?
In a 2005 interview with Daniel Robert Epstein (R.I.P.), Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar, so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.”
Now, when watching a movie or reading a book, I often find myself trying to break down its constituent parts. Also, when writing or creating, I sometimes try to establish a loose taxonomy of the elements involved in the project, a list of the salient aspects of the story. These are orthogonal to the usual concerns about structure (e.g., the three acts, beat map, midpoint, climax, etc.), but they’re as important. Necessary but not sufficient.
Here are a few examples:
Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) contains the following concepts:
Animal wrangling
Hollywood context
Electronic surveillance
Carnival sideshows
Spectacle
UFOs
Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), my favorite movie, contains the following:
High-school context
Pookah legend
Time-travel
Literature
Psychosis
Superhero ideology
And Aronofsky’s own Pi (1998) contains these:
Chaos theory
Stock market
Go
Migraines
Kabbalah
Computer technology
There is a limit, a rule of the grammar, of the number of elements that the average story can carry. There’s a point, a threshold, at which too many elements cause one story (or one “page,” in the design scenario) to fall apart, a line across which something else (e.g., another page, a sequel, etc.) is needed. This limit is qualitative to be sure, but it’s not hard to tell when it’s been exceeded. There are exceptions, of course (think Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Magnolia or Thomas Pynchon’s almost intractable Gravity’s Rainbow).
Though this might ultimately be an aesthetic idea, and this could be considered the outer limits of it, scientists such as Richard Feynman, Bucky Fuller, and Albert Einstein have often spoken of the “beauty” of the right solution to a problem. Fuller once said, “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” And Einstein professed, “The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”
Calling the idea “beauty” is a bit oversimplified and not helpful, but one can see where a working theory can only contain a certain number of elements (i.e., constructs or concepts) before it becomes operationally unmanageable. And while building a theory and weaving a narrative are very different pursuits, one can see parallels in the number of elements each will afford. It’s less like the chronological restrictions we place on certain activities (e.g., you must be 18 to vote, 21 to drink, etc.) and more like having enough cream and sugar in your coffee. It’s a difference like the one between hair and fur.
I find RZA’s The Wu-Tang Manual (Riverhead, 2005) a perfect case study of how to build a modern mythology. One cannot deny the mystique surrounding the Wu-Tang Clan, and this book spells out the elements involved in creating that mystique without rendering it obsolete. When creating my own taxonomies, I will often refer to The Wu-Tang Manual to get an idea of whether or not my project possesses the proper amount of simplicity, complexity, and balance. The RZA’s is not a flawless system, but it’s damn solid.
I started doing these lists just as a writing exercise, and one I haven’t seen in any of the writing books. Along with traditional structural concerns, these lists help keep the story on the skeleton.
After a successful run of movies in the 1980s, Spike Lee used to say “Make Black Film” like a mantra, and we saw it in the 1990s with Matty Rich, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Lee himself. It looks like it’s in effect again with boundary-bombing work by Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Arthur Jafa, Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, and Boots Riley. The latter’s Sorry to Bother You is not just the movie of the moment, it’s a statement, a stance, and a hopeful catalyst for change.
— Lakeith Stanfield is Cassius Green [sketchy sketch by Roy Christopher]Like any worthwhile project, Boots Riley has been working on this one for a while. The screenplay itself was finished in 2012 and published by McSweeney’s in 2014. I got it and started reading it before I knew it was a movie. Once I heard it got made, I had to stop.
At times—for obvious reasons, I know—you can hear Riley talking directly through these characters. For instance, when Squeeze tells Cassius that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that when they feel powerless to fix a problem, they learn to live with it. As surreal and wacky as this movie often is, social commentary rarely gets more germane than that.
Earlier this year I started a screenwriting class. I started trying to write a screenplay several years ago just to see if I could do it. It’s a very different kind of writing than I’m used to, and I wondered what exactly you put on a page to make things happen on a screen. I never finished the script I started, so I thought a class might help me get it done.
Anyway, the teacher of this class made me very uncomfortable. It took me several days after our first class meeting to figure out what it was. I am not easily offended, nor do I do passive-aggressive online reviews (I emailed the institution about this teacher; in fact, much of the description in this post is excerpted from that email), but I couldn’t shake my unease after that one class. My instructor had some very odd attitudes toward movies, stories, and, more specifically, people. His frequent jokes about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Woody Allen bordered on apologist, while his views on anyone who wasn’t a straight, white male were heteronormative in the extreme and bordered on the sexist, racist, and outright intolerant. He was a nice enough guy and a knowledgeable teacher, so I was trying to figure out what had me so on-edge after the one class. I kept coming back to things he’d said: subtle references, jokes, comments, and recommendations that I finally found I couldn’t ignore. I was unable to attend his class again.
One specific thing that instructor said is relevant here. He made the argument that if you’re telling a universal story (i.e., one about love, loss, coming of age, etc.), it doesn’t matter what your background is, your story will connect with an audience. While this assertion is true and could be the basis for a great argument for diversity, he used it to defend the longstanding white-male dominance of storytelling!
One of my other writing heroes, Tina Fey, does a great job of diplomatically explaining this issue to David Letterman on his My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. She uses the SNL writers’ room as a microcosm or cross-section of the audience at large. Explaining that things that might not have played well with mostly (white) men in the room, did when the room became more diverse. So, sketches that had never made it to dress rehearsal before started making it onto the show once there were more women and people of color in the room to laugh at them. That is such an important shift in gate-keeping, and it applies to all such gates, not just those in comedy.
While I’m writing here about voices in the figurative form, Sorry to Bother You uses them much more directly though still metonymically to make a similar point. The phrase “Sorry to Bother You” applies not only to the telemarketing refrain on which it’s based but also to the hegemony against which it stands. It’s in theaters now. Go see it!
My favorite actors tend to be those just outside the spotlight. I like character actors and supporting roles. Nicky Katt, Max Perlich, Kevin Corrigan, Steven Weber, Bradley Whitford, Don McManus, and Daryl Mitchell are some of my favorites.
A little further afield, I’m always paying attention to the background. I love Norman Brenner, who was Michael Richards’ stand-in on all nine seasons Seinfeld, and popped up on camera as an extra in 29 episodes. Ruthie Cohen, who aside from the the four main characters, was in more episodes of that show than anyone (101). How about that long-haired guy in the background damn near every scene of 30 Rock? Those are the real heroes.
My absolute favorite is Bob Stephenson. He was the priest-cum-football coach in Lady Bird (2017). You might recognize him as the airport security guy in Fight Club (1999), but he’s been in many other movies and shows you’ve probably seen: Felicity, Judging Amy, Without a Trace, Ally McBeal, In addition to Fight Club, he was also in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), and Zodiac (2007). He was in both incarnations of Twin Peaks (1991/2017). He’s been on the current number-one comedy (Big Bang Theory) and number-one drama (NCIS) in the country. And he was Ted the pilot in the greatest movie of all time, Con Air (1997).
Bob also has a deep punk-rock background, but we just talked about filmmaking.
Roy Christopher:How did you get started acting?
Bob Stephenson: I was a production assistant. I did that for about four and a half years. It was really my film school. I always knew I wanted to act, but I didn’t want to wait tables. I wanted to be in the thick of it – learn by experience.
RC:I have often aspired to act in many small roles. I always thought it would be great to have a résumé that read “Guy in Coffee Shop,” “Second Cop,” “Man #3,” and so on [I was a Papal Emissary on 2 episodes of The Exorcist on Fox and a Bike Messanger in a scene that was cut from an episode of Empire, so it’s coming slowly]. While your career has definitely surpassed that, do you want the Big Leading Roles?
BS: Heck yes! Of course I do. I would love that. I write quite a bit so I often write roles for myself that I’d love to play.
Bob in Fight Club (1999): “Nine times out of ten it’s an electric razor, but every once in a while… “
RC:Prior to your Father Walther character in Lady Bird, my favorite of your performances was in Fight Club. Both of those roles really display your keen sense of comedic timing and delivery. Do you feel a leaning either toward comedy or drama?
BS: Comedy for sure. But I like it all.
Bob in Twin Peaks (1990/2017).
RC:You’ve worked with the best directors doing it, or at least the best Davids (e.g., David Fincher and David Lynch). Is there someone else you’d most like to work with?
BS: John C Reilly.
RC:You’ve also written and produced projects yourself. Do you aspire to exact a vision from behind the scenes over being in the scenes?
BS: Like I said, I write. I love writing and producing. Think I’ll leave the directing to someone else (though it would be fun to do that as well).
RC:What’s coming up next?
BS: About to pitch a TV pilot to studios. Writing another one as we speak. Both comedies.
In the creative process, constraints are often seen as burdens. Budgets are too small, locations inaccessible, resources unavailable. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true. Sometimes, a multiplicity of options can be the burden. “In my experience,” writes Brian Eno, “the instruments and tools that endure… have limited options.” Working with less forces us to find better, more creative ways to accomplish our goals. As sprawling and sometimes unwieldy as movies can be, low-budget and purposefully limited projects provide excellent examples of doing more with less.
Like many of us, James Wan and Leigh Whannell started off with no money. The two recent film-school graduates wrote their Saw (2004) script to take place mostly in one room. Inspired by the simplicity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the pair set out not to write the torture-porn the Saw franchise is known for, but a mystery thriller, a one-room puzzle box. Interestingly, like concentric circles, the seven subsequent movies all revolve around the events that happen in that first room. They’re less a sequence and more ripples right from that first rock. And let’s not forget that the original Saw is still one of the most profitable horror movies of all time, bettered by the twig-thin budget of The Blair Witch Project and the house-bound Paranormal Activity (2007), two further studies in constraint.
James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2013) is also the product of pulling back. After working on big-budget movies (e.g., Rango, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, etc.), Byrkit wanted to strip the process down to as few pieces as possible. Instead of a traditional screenplay, he spent a year writing a 12-page treatment. Filmed over five nights in his own house, Coherence documents a dinner party gone astray as a comet flies by setting off all sorts of quantum weirdness. The story is small enough to tell among friends over dinner but big enough to disrupt their beliefs about reality. With the dialog unscripted, the film unfolds like a game. Each actor was fed notecards with short paragraphs about their character’s moves and motivations. Like a version of Clue written by Erwin Schrödinger, Coherence works because of its limited initial conditions — not in spite of them.
When producer David W. Higgins was developing the film Hard Candy (2005), he knew the story should play out in the tight space of a single room or small house, so he hired playwright Brian Nelson to write the script. Not as cosmic as Coherence, Hard Candy nonetheless tells a big story in as small a space and with fewer people. The budget was intentionally kept below $1 million to keep the studio from asking for changes to the controversial final product — another self-imposed constraint in the service of freedom. Tellingly, Nelson also wrote the screenplay for Devil (2010), which transpires almost entirely in the confines of an elevator.
Narratives have personalities we have relationships with. An audience can’t get to know something that continually evolves into something else. Eno concludes, “A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.” Personalities have limits. Intimacy requires constraints. Don’t let lack of resources stop you from pursuing a project. The end result might be better anyway.
The time-travel trope, if employed well, never seems to wear thin. Several of my favorite narratives — Donnie Darko (2001), Primer (2004), Source Code (2011), and The Shining Girls (2013), to name a few — all involve time travel to some extent. “Part of the fascination of time travel concerns the stark paradoxes that threaten as soon as travel into the past is considered,” writes theoretical physicist Paul Davies (2001). “Perhaps causal loops can be made self-consistent. Perhaps reality consists of multiple universes” (pp. 123-124). These thought experiments are rife with unanswered and unanswerable questions, which are the very stuff of great stories.
Time is a game
played beautifully
by children.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 79
Most recently, Project Almanac (2015) illustrates those paradoxes and their intrigue while still being a fairly mediocre movie, but it fails in spite of the time travel rather than because of it. 2009’s Triangle also loops time in a muddy and often confusing story. Time travel is such a huge cognitive load that it’s difficult to get right in a movie with much else going on and even harder to make feel real.
In contrast, Timecrimes(Los Cronocrímenes; 2007) capitalizes on its causal loops and suspenseful twists rather than wasting them. The film contains exactly four actors, and its action takes place over the course of about an hour and a half. In its handling of causality, Timecrimes is somewhere between Shane Carruth‘s Primer (2004) and the popular Back to the Future franchise of the 1980s, both of which feature extensive backwards time travel. Like Primer, which uses time travel as the pretext for the study of larger issues (Taubin, 2008), Timecrimes evokes themes of voyeurism and ethics in addition to its time-looping structure and the subsequent questions of causality. This is Spanish director/actor Nacho Vigalondo’s first non-comedic film and his sure-handed direction makes this condensed, pressure-cooker of a temporal thriller an imminently watchable and intriguing film.
One’s bearing
shapes one’s fate.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 121
Timecrimes tells the story of Héctor (played by Karra Elejalde), a lazy middle-aged man who has, with his beloved wife Clara, moved into a freshly built house in the rolling hills. After attempting to nap and receiving a strange phone call (he calls the number back, getting a machine with an outgoing message that says, “This is a restricted terminal. Leave your message or enter your access code”), Héctor is left lounging in his backyard, peeking in on the neighboring countryside with his binoculars. As Clara heads into town to buy groceries for the evening meal, Héctor catches a glimpse of a sultry scene-in-progress. Through his binoculars, he sees a half-naked young woman posed, poised, and undressing in a clearing in the woods. Upon closer inspection, fumbling through the woods as he goes, Héctor finds her naked and asleep. He attempts to awaken the helpless young woman, but is stabbed in the arm with scissors by a man in a ratty trench coat with pink bandages covering his head and face.
The event that sets the action in motion in this film is Héctor’s spotting the young woman in the woods. There’s no reason evident for his initial scoping of the landscape through his binoculars. We can only assume that he’s driven by the desire to see what surrounds his new environs. Once the young woman comes into view, his purpose changes. Héctor’s motivation shifts from the desire to see to the desire to see more. His intentions may have been pure at the onset, but upon seeing glimpses of the young woman’s naked body, Héctor becomes a voyeur. Voyeurism is the act of watching the activities of others without their knowledge (Hayward, 1996), and while cinema is inherently sexual via voyeurism (Metz, 1994), Timecrimes adds actual sexual voyeurism to its plot.
Mulvey (1986) sees the cinema system and its products as inherently patriarchal. Film teaches us to see as men see, to see women as men see women. Timecrimes fits Mulvey’s patriarchal schema not only by making us see literally as Héctor does, but also by making the naked female body the object of Héctor’s viewing. The young woman in the film, as in most films according to Mulvey (1986),
stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (p. 199).
Indeed, the naked young woman in the woods in Timecrimes is the pivotal signifier, sending Héctor into the maelstrom of events that make up the rest of the film.
Schrödinger’s cat shirt.
Sound thinking
is to listen well and choose
one course of action.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 110
“By virtue of its handling of space and time,” Bordwell (1986) writes, “classical narration makes the fabula (story) world an internally consistent construct into which narration seems to step from the outside” (p. 24). In its handling of space and time, Timecrimes violates and simultaneously maintains Bordwell’s idea of the straight corridor. It violates it by looping in upon itself through the plot device of backwards time-travel. Throughout the film, there are three versions of Héctor traversing the same block of time in proximal space.
The film maintains the straight corridor by consistently showing the narrative from Héctor’s point of view as he travels back in time twice. The viewer follows Héctor through the time-traveling and the loops and thereby maintains his singular, linear path. If viewed from the scientist’s point of view, the film would appear chunked backwards, in a Memento-style “crooked corridor,” with the viewer seeing the third Héctor first, the second second, and the first last. By the end of the film, Héctor has passed through the same block of time three times and managed to emerge the singular Héctor.
“Manipulation of the mise-en-scéne,” Bordwell (1986) continues, “creates an apparently independent profilmic event, which can in turn be more or less overt, more or less ‘intrusive’ on the posited homogeneity of the story world” (p. 24). Upon first viewing, Timecrimes appears to be presenting its story in a nonlinear fashion, but this notion is a product of its time-traveling subject matter, not its narrative structure. Like Run, Lola, Run (1998), Timecrimes shows us three versions of the same block of time. It differs in that it’s showing the same block of time from Héctor’s point of view during his three trips through that block of time. In actuality, the film depicts a strictly linear path, albeit with two trips backwards through time (See Fig. 1.).
Fig. 1. The arrow of time as seen through Timecrimes (2007).
Because Héctor’s narrative path overlaps itself in time, Timecrimes violates Bordwell’s straight corridor in attempting to maintain its linearity by following Héctor’s point of view. Bordwell (1986) states, “Causality also motivates temporal principles of organization: the syuzhet [plot] represents the order, frequency, and duration of fabula [story] events in ways which bring out the salient causal relations” (p. 19). Timecrimes twists up Bordwell’s (1986) straight corridor by attempting to show its multiple backwards time-traveling plot as a linear narrative.
Tainted souls who try
to purify themselves with blood
are like the man
who steps in filth and thinks
to bathe in sewage.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 129
In one shot we’re watching Héctor watch through the binoculars. In the next we’re seeing what he’s watching through them. His gaze becomes our gaze. In this way, the apparatus of Timecrimes is made apparent by transposing the camera through the binoculars. In several key scenes, we see what the binoculars see. Since these scenes are pivotal for the film’s plot, they bring the apparatus to the fore and make the act of viewing (or looking or watching) integral to the narrative.
Héctor 1’s seeing the young woman in the woods sets the first part of the narrative in motion. As soon as his wife Clara is gone, he immediately sets off to investigate. His use of the binoculars is the impetus for the action of the film. The lens is the apparatus by which the plot is spurred into motion.
Héctor 2 sees himself (the scientist goes so far as to call Héctor 1 his “mirror image”), setting off the second part of the plot. As Héctor 2 watches Héctor 1 interacting with his wife Clara through the binoculars, he feels that he has been replaced and thereby castrated (Mulvey, 1986). The rest of his actions in the movie are toward one goal: getting rid of Héctor 1 by making sure he gets into the time-machine. Héctor keeps a close watch on himself – both ways – through his ever-present binoculars.
When Héctor 2 accidentally kills Clara (or so he thinks), he realizes he has to travel back again (as Héctor 3) and keep himself (Héctor 2) from killing her. All of these events stem from Héctor’s (and thereby our) voyeurism through the binocular lenses, lenses that show the world as more real than what our naked eyes see.
Just as the river where I step
is not the same, and is,
so am I as I am not.
— Heraclitus, Fragment 81
Timecrimes upholds Mulvey’s (1986) contention that film is inherently voyeuristic, and that it utilizes the male gaze to subjugate the woman’s body for the male’s fantasies. If Héctor hadn’t been combing the countryside with his binoculars, he wouldn’t have seen the naked woman in the woods (ironically being held captive by another version of himself), he wouldn’t have investigated further, and the events of the film wouldn’t have unfolded as they did. The plot preys on Héctor’s voyeurism to propel itself forward.
The film also contains Bordwell’s (1986) notion of double causal structure, with one plot line involving heterosexual romance between Héctor and Clara, and another involving Héctor’s voyeurism and subsequent time-traveling adventure. The double loop of backwards time travel twists up Bordwell’s (1986) straight corridor, that is one of a linear causal plot. Though Timecrimes is shown as linearly as possible (i.e., from the point of view of one character), its causal chaos (i.e., the fact that Héctor 1 is spying on himself, and Héctor 2 is spying on himself, etc.) makes it seem nonlinear.
The apparatus of the lens (both movie camera lens and binocular lens), which is usually assumed to be transparent, is brought to our attention throughout the film by transposing one for the other: The binocular lens shows Héctor – and thereby us – what is real.
References:
Bordwell, D. (1986). Classical Hollywood cinema: Narrational principles and procedures. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader. pp. 17-34. New York: Columbia University Press.
Davies, P. (2001). How to Build a Time Machine. New York: Penguin.
Hayward, S. (1996). Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge.
Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (B. Haxton, Trans.). New York: Penguin.
Ibarretxe, J., Carneros, E., & Ibarretxe, E. (Producers), & Vigalondo, N. (Writer/Director). (2007). Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes) [Motion picture]. Spain: Karbo Vantes Entertainment.
Metz, C. (1994). Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism. In B. Nichols (Ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol II: An Anthology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mulvey, L. (1986). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In P. Rosen (Ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. pp. 198-209. New York: Columbia University Press.
Taubin, A. (2008). Primer. In D. Sterrit & J. Anderson (Eds.), The B-list: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love, pp. 79-82. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Like many of us, James Wan and Leigh Whannell started off with no money. The two recent film-school graduates wrote their Saw (2004) script to take place mostly in one room. Inspired by the simplicity of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the pair set out not to write the torture-porn the Saw franchise is known for, but a mystery thriller, a one-room puzzle box. Interestingly, like concentric circles, the seven subsequent movies all revolve around the events that happen in that first room. They’re less a sequence and more ripples right from that first rock. And let’s not forget that the original Saw is still one of the most profitable horror movies of all time, bettered by the twig-thin budget of The Blair Witch Project and the house-bound Paranormal Activity (2007), two further studies in constraint.
