In my second failed novel, the daughter of the protagonist’s lover was an unruly teenager named Valentine. No writer has to read that sentence twice to twig why the novel was doomed (distracting tertiary characters; digressive capillary plot lines), but in my faint defense you ought to know she stole every scene she was in, no matter how many outlines I wrote about her mother.

I say second novel. The first novel finished in worse shape. Editors and writing teachers like to say that wretched first attempts are valuable experiences. The ideas in mine still seed my imagination. It’s more useful to me in its overwrought, irretrievable mess than it could ever have been as a published work.

The failure of the second, I did not take with this equanimity. It caused me a total meltdown.

Nobody had to tell me that novel was bad.

After working diligently around earning a living, “showing up” daily for several years, I had arrived at a dead end. I began to take the novel apart in the recommended fashion—removing everything that wasn’t central, getting a clean through-line, a tighter story. When I did this, the novel did not get better. It ceased to exist. Had I merely gone too far? Removed something essential? I couldn’t see what to do.

For a while I wrote short stories, got my foot in the door with a respected small prize, and published half a dozen works. I was miserable. The work did not get better. The stories were not improving.

The surest way to do well and interest readers, I was told, was to write diaristic stories of a struggle for identity, the journey of overcoming violence and poverty, all of which it was pointed out to me, I had in spades. One of my mentors said I should never write about anything else. A well-known British writer praised my “voice,” telling me I was fortunate since “voice is one of those things that can’t be taught.” A poet laureate strongly advised that I develop my work in the direction of spiritual autobiography.

All of this made me despondent.

I quit writing fiction. I tried a year of biography, then several years of poetry. Then Covid hit. I was busy keeping my family’s life on the rails. Amid living in an apartment with no pipes in it, I wrote a third, very bad novel.

At this, defeat finally got to me. I wanted very much to admit that I’m just not a writer. I had plenty of evidence. I said it out loud. I wrote notes to myself. But it simply didn’t feel true. I began again, this time electing to work with an editor earlier in the process.

Purveyors of hope and self-improvement often trot out a mangled appropriation of enlightenment. A dedicated student keeps the faith through myriad trials and abuse, believing that with enough patience their ego will dissolve. The Master treats the student with unrelenting contempt. One day they suddenly hit the student across the face with their sandal. The shock produces a flash of understanding.

Maybe focused practices all come down to the same thing. I wasn’t comfortable failing, but I had allowed myself to think of myself as fated to it. Sooner or later whatever was standing on my neck would reward me; all I had to do was work harder and with more heart. Right? Right? Oh yes, the creative writing coaches nodded. Plus, you know, “your writing is so beautiful.”

So although I tried to “face facts” and see myself differently, still I’ve never had a gut feeling that I should give up. The enlightenment story is just CYA, because my real reasons for sticking had nothing to do with worthiness, showing my mettle, or even a “life-long dream.” The truth is I can’t explain it. If I was going to get any sandal in the face it was as Keep It Simple as that. I keep writing because I want to.

The editor was harsh about the incipient fourth novel. It was clear to him I hadn’t learned a thing writing the first three. I endured a tongue-lashing in a writing group with him more humiliating than any in my life. And yet.

There was an actual flash of understanding.

Hours after the flogging, I was resolutely chewing over my work, patting myself down for the beginner’s mind thing. Re-reading my workshop submission for the seventy-fifth time, it hit me. Not like a blow to the head, but definitely like a light going on.

I realized I had no idea how to tell a story.

It was obvious. I literally felt so stupid. And I do not know why, but relieved. Probably because I took it to mean I was going to be allowed to stay in the room.

Yes, there were other problems, I had habits to address, and lapses of judgement, but I wasn’t bad at writing. However, I was totally incompetent at telling a story. To some degree I didn’t know what story I was trying to tell (though I’d often been encouraged that I could write my way to knowing-) but worse, even when I did know, I didn’t put it on the page.

Astonished, I rifled through my work—manila folders of drafts where words and sentences loitered without purpose in plain view. It dawned on me that if I had not discovered my delinquency, it would not have mattered how hard I worked or how much my heart was in it, not in a million years. Pages upon pages of writing and rewriting contained not a stick of structure. Intriguing dialogue, yes; indelible images, check. Storytelling, negativo.

It called to mind (forgive me) Steve Jobs’ admonition that design isn’t aesthetics, design is how it works. Structure isn’t a magic ingredient; it’s the thing that makes the story function. You can adjust, fix, change, re-structure structure if the structure doesn’t work. You cannot address or remedy something that isn’t there.

I began the fourth novel again.

Then again, then again. With each new round of work I had a better view of the train wreck of my lack of skill. I got it. I still wasn’t telling the story but now I knew what was wrong. I had a lot to learn. Weirdly, this seemed doable. Like something if you did it badly, you could actually get better at doing it.

The novel I’d been imagining was too big and sprawling for someone at my level of proficiency to cope with, let alone succeed in doing what I had the nerve to envision. I began to search with growing interest and curiosity within the reaches of the novel for a story inside its pulses that I could tell—one that would work. I began writing again, trying out scenes from the drafts as the spine of their own unfolding.

One morning in this process, Valentine went to the movies with her cousin. Suddenly I saw a novel that I could write.

The first of the films known as French New Wave arrived in New York in August of 1959. Twenty-seven year old Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge opened at the 55th Street Playhouse, a 300 seat repertory cinema that offered foreign films, and, later, Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. Further downtown, Chabrol’s Les Cousins opened in November of ‘59, following Truffaut’s The 400 Blows at The Beekman. At the New York Times, Vincent Canby hailed Truffaut’s film as a masterpiece, but Chabrol’s summer debut was relegated to Abe (aka “Doc”) Weiler for review.

“They offer no solutions in their somewhat diffuse drama. A clouded but often disturbing picture of French youth.” Weiler had little encouragement for the new wave of “angry young men” directors, preferring a noir “full of sound and fury, murder, sacred and profane love and a fair quota of intramural intrigue” like Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, “more flamboyant than probable, a tight and sophisticated script.” It’s difficult to imagine him finding anything diverting about Jean Seberg washing her feet in the sink.

Mr. Weiler, perhaps too pressed for time for an Alliance Française class, believed directeur de production in the film credits meant Jean Cotet, “whose name, like those of the other principals, is new to America moviegoers” was the film’s director. Regarding Un film produit écrit and réalisé par Claude Chabrol, he allowed the credit of “writer-producer.”

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The boys made the revolution on le sou de grand-mère

James Monaco says Chabrol often doesn’t get the credit he deserves. For example, David Thomson calls him “a fringe instigator of the original New Wave,” as though he were Pete Best. In fact, without Chabrol, the first surge of directors may not have gained their moment. “For the first few years of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol was its financial angel,” says Monaco. Mais bien sûr Monaco means Agnès Marie-Madeleine Goute was the financial angel. When Agnès Goute inherited money from her grandmother, Chabrol brought a “practical intelligence to the financing of the early New Wave films.” He created a film production company, AJYM, named for Agnès, and their sons Jean-Yves and Matthieu. Chabrol first produced Jacques Rivette’s Coup de berger, then his own Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins.

Bragging rights: Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer had made short films using 16mm. Rivette’s Coup was shot on 35mm making it the first professional film of the New Wave.

Cherchez la femme 👀

Bear in mind, Francois Truffaut’s first wife was Madeline Morganstern, daughter of producer Ignace Morgenstern, owner of distribution company Cocinor. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Cocinor was up against powerful, well-financed distributors Gaumont and Pathé. To compete, Morganstern virtually cornered the New Wave market he and Truffaut helped to create, distributing Truffaut’s Palm D’or winning The 400 Blows, Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, Godard’s Contempt, Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, and Vadim's And God Created Woman, among others.

Meanwhile back at The Gray Lady

Weiler was quite a character. He thought it was snooty when the New York Times gathered the arts writers as a culture desk under Joseph Herzberg. Weiler turned down his boss’s request for a meeting telling the senior editor, “Sorry, Joe, I’m busy painting a fresco.” Apparently he was offended by the idea movies were culture. It might mean he’d have to learn a little French.

The man bringing art films to New York, Irvin Shapiro (Weiler calls him “Irwin”) had gotten his start in the city working briefly in RKO theaters and the Little Carnegie, venues that often showed art house movies. Shapiro quickly grasped the opportunity for a distribution business and formed Films Around the World to cultivate the “new moviegoing public that just wants quality and not stars or producers’ labels.” The access and centralization Shapiro provided helped small theaters create an identity as specializing in repertory, foreign and art house rather than feature these films in a mix with current American cinema.

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Weiler covered Shapiro’s import of Le Beau Serge and its twin feature, The Cousins in his Times Local Screen column. “Mr. Shapiro is not convinced that, having been made by members of the “new wave,” (Chabrol’s The Cousins) is a fresh, qualitative work.” Much as he wanted the Times’s coverage of his films, Shapiro was duly wary of Weiler’s penchant for “close enough” detail, and sidestepped politely. “I don’t know how to define quality,” he said. Satisfied with his scoop, Weiler did Shapiro the favor of touting another of “Chabrol’s films”, Out of Breath.

Informers inform, burglars burgle, murderers murder, lovers love

Chabrol was credited as technical advisor on Breathless. In fact, he was attached to the film only to provide producer Georges de Beauregard with a provisional sense of financial security the film would actually get made and be credible.

While Jean-Luc Godard was working as press attaché for 20th Century Fox in France, Fox was distributing de Beauregard. Godard, true to his pugnacious reputation, told him,"your film is shit." (Godard and Weiler had similarly subtle assays.) Rather than slapping him in the head, Beauregard cannily challenged Godard to do something himself. Beauregard gave him the script for a film he was then producing, Schoendoerffer’s Island Fisherman. (Schoendoerffer went on to write Pêcheur d’Islande with the seasoned André Tabet.)

Chabrol said, "Godard may not admit he worked- or pretended to- on that script for six weeks until he persuaded de Beauregard it would be better to make the Poiccard film." Thanks to Granny, the angry young men had their chance. Chabrol himself went on to make over fifty feature films. He made light of throwing his weight behind Godard at the critical moment. “We were convinced we were all geniuses.”

Who fired the gun?

Hitchcock trains your eye by constant camera movement. Isolation shots and camera angles tell you where to look, then amp up the skittish tension by withholding the thing you want to see. The quickening rhythm tangles up chase scenes of spy vs spy and lies where truth won’t do so deftly that when the camera pauses, you feel the urge to get hold of it and move it yourself.

Double crossing

There’s no subtlety: motives are brash, betrayals clearly marked. Suspense doesn’t come from surprise villains but from the ubiquitousness of corruption and misperceptions—bad people, bad places—while the protagonist has no choice but to plunge forward, improvising solutions moment to moment. Each escape only delays catastrophe meanwhile pulling Richard Hannay deeper into other people’s lives, where every innocent becomes trapped, like him, in the appearance of guilt.

Chase scenes

The ironic romance advances by the same screwball quicksand. Every attempt to escape binds the heroine Pamela more helplessly to a man she believes is a murderer. Eventually her only possible answers are pure Hitchcock: stark and comic. Be right and die, or be wrong and fall in love.

The Lux Index

• 86 minutes, B/W

• Low stress trench coat: Romantic adventure in detective clothing

• Good for a post work, takeout evening

• Toughest challenge: merely annoyance if you don’t enjoy mimicking the nasal British accents and period-arcane elocution

• Best scene: handcuffs. wet silk stockings, and sandwiches

• Second best scene: a surreal Scottish crofter with fabulous sideburns who seems almost to have been cross cut in from another film

See also

The Drift Map

Appetizers circle. “Lamb cigar?” The husband of the rising star soprano indulges. He’s an interesting person, you know, he’s married to her, not her career. My eyes send a gentle pulse toward the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head wine captain. In the beat of an hors d’oeuvre, a tray of champagne surfaces from the raconteurs and perfume of the crowded room. The opera husband notices laughter, clocks who it is, who they are looking at. I hand him a glass as I take mine from the tray. “You were saying?”

Conversation, calculation, vaudeville, and violence. This is why I enjoyed watching The Phoenician Scheme. The elusive subject and the consequential verbs finally pull the pin on that repeated offer to “Help yourself a hand grenade.” Proper form is the mother of screwball.

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First, the flowchart shoeboxes of the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme, then perfectly roasted pigeons served on the terrace. Poisoned wine and the lie detector float on the crisp white linen, but under the table, attractions and cross purposes are laid out in bamboo.

Escape velocity

There are stories that draw the audience by means of complication, i.e. the well known reversals that turn up suspense and confound expectations. Complicated things operate by rules, and when the rules are broken? Voila, we have a change of fortune. However, and much to my delight, The Phoenician Scheme is not that kind of story.

Rather, we have complexity, interactions that result in emergent, unpredictable behaviors. In The Phoenician Scheme, the situation of these interactions is known as The Gap.

The Gap, at speed, is chaos.

Though their mechanisms are disparate, I might say speed was the reason The Phoenician Scheme kept reminding me of George Cukor’s The Women. “Watercress. I’d just as soon eat my way across a front lawn.” Help yourself, indeed.

The two movies gain their momentum into plot by the stage business of gossip and contracts. They make ideal cocktail party companions, riffing off each other in complimentary registers. But it’s the accumulating patter, it’s the report and ricochet that keep me rapt, and signaling for another champagne.

Overlapping lines

Why did they talk so fast in those 30s films? After all, in spite of a propensity for Benzedrine inhalers, people a hundred years ago didn’t talk faster than we do.

When movies learned to talk, they didn’t know how to convey plot through dialogue. So they invented, and they accelerated. Anita Loos rewrote The Women to get past the Hays Code, then kept rewriting it live in real time from a chair on the set, tossing ad-libs to the actors while the camera rolled.

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Abstemious people set their course through a cocktail parties by marking a set of rules. There’s a price to pay if you break them, and a margin of safety to be gained by caution. But some people know rules are codes not barriers. Rules are the instructions for activating the incalculable possibilities that saturate human chemistry. Taking chances with the proper form is the difference between being decor and being essential to the effervescent life of the party.

That’s the big similarity between The Phoenician Scheme and The Women: they take risks, they are formally rebellious. The Women breaks screwball comedy’s fundamental rule, to wit, the “battle of the sexes” because men never appear on screen. It’s not commentary, it’s a setup. Their absence makes men more present than participation could. AWOL, you can smell the aftershave. Men drove every second of plot, every gesture, every glance between the women. That screwball speed was both guilty-as-charged confession and nothing-to-see-here solution, moving too fast for censors or conventions to catch. The complications multiplied at breakneck speed.

Cinema frottage

Where The Women erased men to reveal them, Anderson touches a hundred serious issues— corruption, assassination, spiritual bankruptcy— then refuses to slow down to respect their weight. The Phoenician Scheme breaks genre rules by elevating complexity rather than adhering to the teased reveal. We’re always satisfied being one half step ahead of the smart guy in any movie, but Anderson withheld that reassurance. In The Phoenician Scheme I can’t begin follow the plot, and darn it that felt relatable. The surprise made me giddy. The 1939 audience laughed knowingly at what couldn’t be said. We laugh at what can’t be processed.

An argument could be made for art that invites us to slow down, art that doesn’t capitulate to chaos. It would point to Anderson’s speed as aesthetic cowardice, not honesty. But aside from hermetic withdrawal or fashions of sentiment, do we have a choice between fast and slow? I wonder whether arguing for slowness isn’t itself a kind of outsider art now—beautiful, privileged, irrelevant.

The world is rocket shot underfoot, our ears pop as we swipe the pages of its screen: mass shootings, A.I. career displacement, tariff charts, ground water contamination, and each new altitude reached before we’ve caught breath from the last. (The news itself is a form of mountain sickness.)

At the fundraiser, we’re summoned to dinner. The small groups disassemble, grateful for the (at last!) social structure of arranged seating. The houseman materializes at right hand of our hostess, his head inclined to her ear. A bloom of irritation withdraws itself quickly from her features. I know the look: someone she’s been delaying for, previously assured to be on their way is, after all, not late, but not coming at all. Is it a producer? An artist? (Or it is a love interest?)

WALL·E seals the heavy metal door just as the sandstorm breaks. Outside, the wind scours the earth with grit and noise. Inside, the light softens. He settles in front of the small glowing screen and presses play. A song begins. For a few minutes, the world narrows to movement, gesture, and the promise of hands reaching for one another.

Before this solace, we witness the labor that makes WALL·E’s treasured reprieve possible, the millennium of heaped trash, the long burnt orange days resolving to oil green shadows: sunset as expiration date. The haze drifting through the frame recalls the smoke that filled New York last year, when distant wildfires turned daylight into eerie Martian skies.

Longevity is inseparable from isolation

Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class. A construction worker, a maintenance robot, alone for hundreds of years, cheerfully and sturdily keeping faith with a humanity that long ago set him his industrial purpose. I thought of WALL·E again while writing Throwing Voices. Pixar’s assemblage/hero scavenges replacement eyes, second-hand treads, viable upgrades of his worn parts. WALL·E is a koan and a coda, as much a long-tail patch as Del Toro’s Creature.

Inside his garage, WALL·E unpacks what he has gathered: the useful, the unusual, the things that delight him—spare parts, a spork, a lighter. He places a find (another rubber duck!) in its bin, with the collector’s satisfaction of making a quality addition to the set. Still, there is longing. He bangs the dirt from his lunchbox and looks up at the stars. Despite the gulf of time between them, he wants what so many before him have wanted: a companion. Someone like him.

Sanctuary fantasies

Shelter has its own grammar. The sounds that lull us to sleep aren’t usually of weather in the open. Often, they are rain striking a roof, snow brushing a tent, the reassurance that something stands between us and what rages outside. Filmmakers have always understood this. Again and again, cinema returns to rooms that offer pause—places where characters hide long enough to gather themselves, to think, to survive.

That instinct is what led me from WALL·E to Scorsese’s Hugo. Hugo lives inside a machine, slipping through the vast gears of the Gare Montparnasse. His small body moves against enormous mechanisms, dwarfed by scale in the same way WALL·E is dwarfed by towers of waste. Refuge arrives at last, when Hugo pulls the workshop lever to a locked position, sealing himself into a sanctuary of notebooks and tools. That heavy metal door between himself and all circumstances daunting and precarious made me feel the bond between WALL·E and Hugo.

It may not seem like much to anybody else, but to Hugo, his notebooks and gears are no less sweet than WALL·E’s sprockets and tins. WALL·E rewinds a videocassette, a relic of a vanished home-life ritual. Hugo oils the joints of an automaton built in the early days of cinema. Careful hands ease something from stiffness. An image appears. In each case, motion carries time forward, allowing the past to speak again—not as history, but as presence.

‘Tis the season

To love these films is really to love the idea of moviegoing itself: the darkened room, the light held in place long enough to mean something, the permission to rest momentarily while the world continues outside. WALL·E and Hugo both leave their fortresses, seeking connection. They step back into danger because meaning requires exposure. But the memory of shelter travels with them. It’s a fitting fable for the dead of winter, for these long solstice nights.

I find myself drawn, especially now, to that permission. No milk or sugar with that pause, thank you. But yes, for a moment, an inner sanctum. Less octane, more recharge. Winter invites a slower rhythm, a deliberate narrowing of focus. The solstice brings with it the pleasure of crossing a threshold and closing the door of the year.

In the season of renewal, like WALL·E, I give myself over to beams of light in the dark.

Cinema has always offered that kind of refuge: a temporary room built of light and shadow, where responsibility can be set down without being abandoned. The night will still be long tomorrow.

The Recap

This first series of columns has found me musing over a favorite question from different angles: how do films show the private labor of becoming someone? I think of this as intimate industry—the sort of striving in which whether your goal is learning to surf or starting your own business, the project to attain it is inside you. Subjecting and correcting ourselves, restraining, calibrating. It’s core social-being activity, basic maintenance we all engage in, some more consciously than others, some more relentlessly. Either way, getting what you want in the world is happening under your skin, and it surfaces for air in everything we do. How do directors make their stories talk about this in movies?

I’ve watched someone’s presence appear almost by accident in Her and The Sixth Sense, noticed how sleight of hand does its hiding in plain view, and been astonished ADR can re-characterize a performance so thoroughly it changes the relationship at the center of the film. I’ve followed life-defining absences through Blade Runner 2049 and Past Lives, and the urges of agency and self-preservation in Clouds of Sils Maria and Lady Bird. Each film has a different take on what resolves to the fundamental address of self.

After writing my way through making something of yourself in The Hobbit and Pumping Iron, I’m still thinking about bodies and performance. Having exhausted the legend of a ring and a stack of plate weight, in the films I’m considering today I’m drawn to the theater of ventriloquism.

Being someone is staged, or borrowed, or … thrown

Woody Allen puts history on his lap and makes it speak as though it’s his creature. He uses Leonard Zelig to embody the force of assimilation. Zelig is a satire of conformity: if your personality is as socially manufactured as the latest popular idea you’re a zombie. Like Victor Frankenstein, Woody Allen rummages emotional dross and chaff, pieces of ceremony piled in archives, garages, and camera junk shops, looking for human remains that might sustain a vital charge with which to animate Zelig.

Meanwhile in Frankenstein, Del Toro’s Creature refuses that part entirely. He won’t speak on command, won’t absorb Victor’s voice, won’t perform the obedient mimicry expected of him. His first act of selfhood is a refusal: he insists on the right to speak in the timbre of his own becoming.

Both films are concerned with assemblage—of bodies, of identities, of meanings stitched from other people’s tongues. But only one of their protagonists tries to reclaim a voice that belongs to him alone.

Allen treats identity almost as if it were part of Gordon Willis’s lighting scheme: precision-adjustable, period-calibrated, grain-matched until it becomes indistinguishable from whatever surrounds it. “The Chameleon Man” blends because blending spares him the unbearable void of otherwise being nothing at all.

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Among psychologists Zelig speaks like a psychologist; among baseball players, a ballplayer; at political rallies, a partisan. I laughed even as I felt the quick jab of self-recognition. (How often we learn to modulate ourselves for harmony, or safety, or approval!)

And it is funny, until it isn’t. A tranquil Zelig finds anonymity amid the Brownshirts. He bobs up surrounded by them, radiating a naive and discomforting congeniality. He doesn’t know what he wants, and therefore he’s easily convinced to want anything that someone makes seductive. Maybe it’s good for the economy, but it can be dangerous in a crowd. A man without a voice belongs to convenience, a man available to any voice.

That danger is what Allen had in mind when he pointed out the ordinary urge to be liked can nastily decompose into a conformist mentality, even into fascism. The celebrity Zelig is charming only while the stakes are low. Once the world darkens, his mimicry lends him complacently to terrorist accommodation.

A puppet is a ventriloquist’s dream and history’s nightmare.

This is the hinge on which Zelig turns: a man assembled from borrowed voices, and a film assembled from borrowed images, each making the other possible.

The Assemblage of Zelig

If Zelig’s personality is stitched together from whatever surrounds him, the film’s images are, too. Watching Zelig now, it’s easy to forget how little of its seamlessness came pre-packaged. The illusion required the kind of manual labor usually reserved for restoring a damaged artifact—hours spent hunting through newsreels, home movies, and forgotten negatives for material with the right kind of grain, the right degree of decay, even the right amount of vacuum.

Susan E. Morse, the editor, remembered a shot of Rudolph Valentino she loved but couldn’t use because he wasn’t “surrounded by enough empty space.” Zelig needed room for his apparatus. In a literal sense, the construction of his identity depended on the physical margins left in someone else’s photograph. Identity might be flexible in performance, but film stock was stubborn; to blend in, you had to speak its dialect.

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Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, found his technical solution partly in the past. He tracked down a set of 1930s newsreel lenses—optically imperfect, uneven, but honest—and had them remounted for the Panaflex. Their flaws became part of the film’s vocabulary: a slight distortion here, a softness at the edges there, each an artifact that allowed new footage to converse naturally with the archival material it was meant to imitate.

The most fascinating thing to me was the way the work literally moved backward from history. Willis and the research team spent weeks studying the original footage. The script lived as a draft that bent to each discovery. Film historian Julian Fox noted, when research turned up something too good to pass by, Allen added the material to the screenplay and rewrote other scenes to make the fit. The assembly grew bit by bit, shot by shot, each new element requiring a rebalancing of what was already there. It reminded me of Robert Towne’s epic struggle with his screenplay for Chinatown.

“If you took something out, it didn’t work, and if you added something, it didn’t work,” Willis said. The structure depended on perfect tension: remove or introduce a single sliver, and the illusion collapsed.

Assemblage, in Zelig, is a disappearing act.

The Assemblage of Frankenstein

If Zelig is assembled to disappear, Frankenstein is assembled so that he can never blend in. Del Toro’s Creature announces every stitch. The body is not a seamless illusion but an exposed construction—a record of choices, mistakes, and revisions made as visible as seams of mark up. Where Zelig blends by adopting the texture of other people’s affects, the Creature stands apart, built from meat and sinew no one meant to remember.

The screenplay makes this plain. Victor picks through the dead with a craftsman’s fussiness: “Look only in the middle of the pile,” he instructs. The corpses on top have been scavenged by carrion birds; the ones on the bottom are too rotted to use. He needs remains with “the right degree of decay,” a grotesque calibration of viability. Scale matters. Limbs matter. He scribbles, sketches, revises; he sutures, saws, and splices. If Zelig relies on the patient coaxing of film grain, the Creature is born from a workshop of bone dust and stitched fascia. Assemblage is no longer invisible finesse—it’s butchering.

And yet Del Toro approaches these permanent scars of violence with a strange tenderness. “He became my patron saint,” he said of Mary Shelley’s Creature. “I saw myself as the Creature—out of place, frail, alien to my reality.” The identification is not romantic; it’s practical—and material. To give the Creature dignity, Del Toro grounds the fantasy in matter. Thirteen head and neck pieces. Twenty-nine full-body prosthetics. Ten hours of application each day. To make a being assembled from cast-off parts, the production had to assemble a body with equal devotion.

That devotion extended to the world around him. Del Toro insisted on building the ship—the entire ship—in which the story’s frame narrative unfolds. No miniatures, no digital facsimiles. The wooden hull was mounted on two gimbals, one for the Creature’s push and one for his retreat. Costumes were loomed from scratch, the fibers chosen to echo circulatory systems, insect wings, minerals. Every surface in the film is fabricated, and every fabrication acknowledges the hand that made it.

Assemblage, in Frankenstein, is a confession.

Under the skin

If assemblage explains how these figures are made, voice explains what becomes of them. Zelig discovers that mimicry is a kind of anesthesia: the closer he matches the people around him, the less he has to feel the absence inside. The Creature has the opposite instinct. His first act of selfhood is refusal. He will not be spoken through. He will not echo Victor’s intentions back to him. He steps out of the frame his maker designed and demands a voice capable of meaning.

It is the sharpest contrast between the films. Zelig moves toward conformity; the Creature moves away from it. One tries to vanish into the safety of the crowd; the other risks everything to be singular. The moral stakes sharpen: to surrender one’s voice is a kind of self-erasure; to claim it is a form of life.

And here Zelig offers an unintended parable. One of the film’s “experts” is the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, then a respected authority. In retrospect his presence is unsettling. Bettelheim’s public identity—his Viennese pedigree, credentials, even aspects of his reputation—was later revealed to be partly fabricated, assembled from borrowed parts of a life that was not his. Reports from former students describe a temper meant to dominate a room. The irony is almost too neat: in a film about a man who becomes whatever others wish to see, one of the commentators turns out to have been his own kind of chameleon.

It throws Zelig’s predicament into sharper relief. Mimicry can be baby talk, it can be comedic, it can even be an awkward dance lesson toward community where you can relax and actually be yourself. Or it can shade into power, and from there, the shadow of “belonging” becomes the means by which a person disappears into the unclean line, the knacker’s yard of acquiescence. The Creature refuses that fate—refuses the ventriloquist’s hand, refuses the voice thrown into him. His voice emerges haltingly, painfully, but it is his. Del Toro sees this as a kind of grace. “He became my patron saint,” he said, not because the Creature is noble, but because he survives the violence of being made and still speaks.

Between the two films, the question becomes unavoidable:

Who gets to author the voice inside a body?

And what is the cost of letting someone else decide?

The work finds its voice

Somewhere in this question, the labor quiets. Walter Murch once said that cutting a feature means having an opinion about two to four thousand separate shots, each a decision that narrows or expands the film’s possibilities. But the choices themselves are not enough. At some point the structure begins to cohere on its own terms, and the editor’s will gives way to something quieter.

Murch turns to biology for an explanation: DNA, raw information stored in fragments, waiting for the right sequence to activate it. A film grows not because the maker insists, but because its internal order begins to assert itself. “When I can no longer ‘see myself ‘in the material,” the renowned editor has said, then he knows his work is done. “The film finds its own voice.”

It’s a line that gathers everything in this diptych. Zelig surrenders his voice so completely that others dominate and speak for him; the Creature claims his voice through the very scars of his making. One vanishes into borrowed grain; the other emerges from stitched flesh. And somewhere between the two is the fact that creation—whether of a character, a body, a performance, or a self—will bear in its current a temperament of its own.

As a writer, I can feel it in a draft, too, that moment of grace when the whole thing I’ve assembled begins to speak for itself.

After I finished writing last week’s column, I found myself still thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger. In order to create a “compelling routine,” he gave real attention to the spaces between poses, the part lesser performers don’t see as a wealth of potential. Schwarzenegger studied every detail.

“To hypnotize and carry away an audience, you need the poses to flow. What do you do between one pose and the next? How do the hands move? How does the face look?”

He encountered a sublime, personal choreography. In his memoir, he wrote that he discovered he could, “ride the melody like a wave--quiet moments for a concentrated, beautiful three-quarter back pose, flowing into a side chest pose as the music rose and then wham! a stunning muscular pose at the crescendo.”

Serpentine

It was the way he fully inhabited his craft that brought me back to Andy Serkis. In my research I kept returning to a behind-the-scenes photograph: his face covered in a field of tiny motion-capture markers, already half-transmuted into Gollum.

Originally, Wētā had mapped the sensors onto a pre-designed Gollum model — essentially an animated wireframe wearing borrowed expressions downloaded from Serkis. But then they had a small epiphany: what if the character’s face matched the actor’s?

Once they redrew the facial structure to echo Serkis’s own musculature, something unlocked. Serkis wasn’t merely guiding Gollum; he was inside him. With a few analog pencil strokes the animators brought the living face across the digital divide.

That small invention, a performer enlarging the form from within, reminded me of another figure who endowed inanimate material with life: Loïe Fuller.

Silk screen

In 1892 Fuller transformed a vaudeville genre called skirt dancing, a hybrid of ballet and dance-hall clogging. The Times described it as half “the Court” and half “the gutter”. (Skirt dancing also gave rise to the French cancan: an art of movement built from fabric, legs, and velocity!)

Fuller reimagined the vaudeville entirely. She engineered extension poles into her costume and patented them as “a mechanism for the production of stage effects.” With these hidden wings she lifted and swirled billowing volumes of silk into spirals of color and light. A New York review extolled the performance as “unique, ethereal, delicious.” As she moved further from burlesque toward something visionary, she slipped out of the dance hall’s orbit altogether. Audiences came to see her not as an novelty act, but as a legitimate artist.

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To the Symbolist artists watching her in Paris, she seemed to dissolve solid form into continuous metamorphosis. They saw her spirals of silk as currents of light and dream, and critically embraced a performance of transformation they recognized as creativity itself.

Loïe Fuller made performance look like art; Jean Renoir made art look like performance. Renoir felt something similar in his bones. In French Cancan, he filmed entirely on sets to highlight the world as performance. Director Peter Bogdanovich once said it “walks an extraordinary line between artificiality and reality.” Fuller expanded the possibilities of fabric and light; Renoir expanded the possibilities of cinematic artifice.

Standing in a theater watching Jurassic Park Peter Jackson saw digital creatures step across a threshold. He understood that animation was no longer a trick layered on top of a performance, but a space where performance itself could live. In that moment, he expanded the expressive room of visual effects the same way Fuller expanded the stage and Renoir expanded the set: sensing that the form had more life in it than anyone realized, they gave it room to grow.

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And the impulse recurs

Echoing Loïe Fuller, Frank Zane once told the Times that bodybuilding was “the creation of living sculpture…a performing art,” and said he wished posing routines had lighting and music integrated like theater. Schwarzenegger, of course, felt the same instinct: the routine was not a sequence of poses but a continuous, expressive form.

Audiences have often responded to this kind of expansion. When the Whitney organized Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art, they expected a hundred people to attend. Thousands arrived instead — booing the art experts, cheering the bodybuilders rotating on a platform beneath the museum lights. Andy Warhol was there. Candice Bergen was there. Everyone understood, viscerally, what the panel was trying to aestheticize. The form had already outgrown their frame.

Jackson also had his own version of this expansion. When he saw the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, he felt immediately that the medium had shifted. The tools could now carry the weight and coherence of real performance. And once he sensed that, he didn’t treat digital effects as decoration; he embedded them as the nervous system of how the story could move. Which is why Serkis’s audition landed the way it did. Jackson had already recognized that the space for acting had widened.

Jackson tells the story: when Serkis arrived to audition, he “jumped on the furniture… leapt on the chairs… went on the floor,” mimicking his cat coughing up a hairball, sending papers flying. He didn’t just offer a voice; he offered a performance so vivid it forced the technology to evolve around him.

Like the tail of a kite

That’s the thread dancing through all of this — Fuller, Serkis, Schwarzenegger, Renoir. They didn’t abandon the constraints of their forms; they transformed the constraints into stage directions. They expanded the life of the form from the inside until something new appeared.

The way I think of it, form is shifting before we are. Form is vital not static. Artists like Fuller or Serkis or Renoir or Jackson aren’t pushing anything so much as listening, answering something moving inside themselves in response to the medium. Forms are more flexible than we are: we get attached to our ideas. We think we’re geniuses but we’re nostalgic, like Bilbo standing in his living room.

In our fairy tales, in our centuries-old myths of self creation, the protagonist senses the new world, is off and running, finding form in motion, leaning into the change. Loïe Fuller’s influence went places even she couldn’t have predicted — into painters, poets, filmmakers, anyone drawn to the expressive possibilities of metamorphosis.

Maybe that’s why artists are essential: they spark in the friendly gloom of the familiar something dangerously new and alive.

After forty minutes of history and horsing around—moral shaming, bad manners, and worse sentiment—The Hobbit finally lifts itself from the riptide of its inherited obligations to Tolkien’s book. Then, like The Birth of Venus, it pauses in the light of a new idea of man.

The Still Moment

The moment arrives when Bilbo stands in his now-empty house. The chaotic dwarves have departed; his back is to the camera; he looks through the enfilade of circular doorways leading from room to room toward the daylight at the far end of the hall. The cozy gloom gives way to the dawn-singing world. He checks each corner in stealthy sequence, reassured to find every trace of the outrageous party gone. He comes to rest at last in his privacy and his familiar ways.

Right up to this moment, Bilbo has been increasingly relieved to find himself alone, safe and sound, on the cusp of resuming tea and a pipe. Expecting satisfaction, he is unprepared for a sharp recognition: though tranquility has returned, something far more disruptive has happened to him. He has been inspired. Now he wants something he doesn’t understand. In this moment, he is for the last time motionless, gazing at the home he loves. Then, as everything he has known changes, he gives himself over to wild, uncharted territory.

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Peter Jackson will soon fill the screen with goblins, wolves, dragons, forests, and noise—so much noise. Yet this quiet moment never fades for me: an interior stillness of soul pressed between a home invasion and the empire of CGI. The true beginning of the journey lies here, where everything vital is already underway inside Bilbo.

His suspenders, once trailing, are now drawn tight, the X bracing his back like an arrow behind his heart. What has changed inside him is not what he prefers but what he is at this moment becoming. The transformation pushes him through the O of each doorway, passing him along through his own smoke rings. By the time we see him dashing across the lawns and laundry of his neighbors, the signed contract flying like a standard, he has gained a humanist clarity—a sense that life’s meaning is not inherited but chosen.

I have several times felt unwell at such an obvious crossroad, dizzied under the pressure of choosing. Who doesn’t know that feeling of no longer being able to delay accepting an offer or turning it away—a job, a commitment, the end of a particular dream? There is a terrible realization that you could simply go on behaving as though you’ll always have options, but that this too is a choice, a kind of failure you can hide from everyone but yourself. And it looks just like the closed loops of Bilbo’s Hobbit home. No wonder he ran.

This act of choosing to do is the pulse of George Butler’s Pumping Iron, the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sixth Mr. Olympia title in 1975. When I look at the halfling Bilbo and the bodybuilder Arnold, I don’t see opposites or cousins. I see the same person: me. And you, do you see yourself, too?

The Body As Landscape

Pumping Iron is like an inside-out landscape, a palindrome of the vast New Zealand expanses the dwarves must cross fighting tooth and nail to arrive at the actual battleground. The weightlifter’s bodies hold those miles. They contain days and months of “shocking” muscles with stripping workouts, five-hour sessions six days a week, split workouts twice a day, bulking and cutting cycles, and years of limitation, nausea, and discipline. Jackson frames his small-statured musclemen against mountains and miles, emphasizing scene by scene just how daunting is the physical course of time in their quest. Butler, by contrast, films enormous men confined to benches, stages, and the occasional hotel room, the constraints of an odyssey within.

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“Arnold is the center of Pumping Iron in every way,” says photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was at the Mr. Universe contest in South Africa for Rolling Stone. “I am reluctant to have form impose the meaning on a picture. But in Arnold’s case, form is also content. His career was built on willpower.”

Willpower is exactly the substance and sustenance of Bilbo’s voyage. His peaceful nature is disturbed in a way that can’t be repaired by tidying up; the shapeshifting is out of his reach, internal, with a life of its own. He sees even his familiar hall and its pink side chair with a clarity that reveals him as someone he doesn’t yet know.

When Bilbo gives up his own preoccupations to go off on an adventure, he in essence gives up his life. He can never truly go home again, even if he lives to return to his shire. Bilbo seems at every moment drawn deeper into the recognition that one cannot simply step outside to “get another point of view.” The very act of getting it is not only informing but re-forming.

Arnold, by contrast, can choose his formation more directly. He has an exacting alchemy of how to shape his body, down to sharpening a particular line of pumped muscle. “My goal is to even out everything, that everything is perfect,” he says. “If I want to increase one muscle a half inch, the rest of the body has to increase. Everything fits together now. All I have to do now is get my posing routine down more perfect.”

To that end, we find him in Joanne Woodward’s Manhattan studio with New York City Ballet instructor Marianne Claire. “You want a pass-through position that will keep showing your body,” she tells him. “What you have to realize is that people are watching you all the time,” Claire says—not just when he hits the pose. “Start with a focus up. The eye-line goes up.” Arnold lifts his gaze. Recognition washes across his face as he feels how a simple adjustment enlarges the whole self.

The Light That Finds Us

I can’t easily take in at one glance the long tail of change and becoming that forms me. My effort is full of heart, though it has rarely matched the single-mindedness of Pumping Iron or the courage of The Hobbit. Watching Arnold expand his sense of himself reminds me how opaque to us our transformations are, something we sense more astutely than we see.

I still feel the times I made bad choices. I still have to cope with the painful effects they had. I prefer to think my wiser decisions mattered more, but I find myself wondering.

Bilbo is remade in his renaissance. He breaks free of the church of the right opinion that cossets his times. He embraces the freedom of agency, the tenet that an individual can make a contribution, even change history. The protagonists of Pumping Iron and The Hobbit embody the essence of human possibility.

It may be I’m not ambitious enough— yet. Like Bilbo and Arnold, I’m still becoming who I am, and each experience shapes the light even as it shapes the life it illuminates.

Is talking on the phone such a natural habit that it’s easy to fake it without feedback? When a character is on the phone in a movie, I wonder if they have someone reading lines off-camera. Do they just talk to the replica smartphone in their hand and imagine someone on the other end? Probably actors have their own preference, and the pacing can be adjusted to suit the cut in the editing room.

That detail made me want to know how Her was shot. Did Joaquin Phoenix sit alone on the set talking and “making the film” so they could put the voice of the OS into it later? Or did someone read Samantha’s lines so he could respond to another actor, feel the push and pull of dialogue?

Making Her Twice

It turned out Spike Jonze worked both ways as he made Her. First, Samantha Morton performed the role from a sound booth while the cast shot their scenes. To increase the authenticity of Phoenix’s response to a character whose only presence is a voice in an earbud, Morton was never in view on set. She and Phoenix never saw each other or acted face-to-face.

But when Jonze began editing, he was unsatisfied. The way things felt in what he’d gotten wasn’t what he’d hoped for. After talking with Morton, they agreed she’d step away from the role. Jonze then hired Scarlett Johansson to voice Samantha. She was shooting Captain America at the time— busy with other projects, as Samantha herself is with other Operating Systems.

ADR and Afterthoughts

The second time Her was “made,” instead of Phoenix acting with someone off set in a sound booth, it was Johansson who took her cues from Phoenix’s recorded performance. The team worked in an ADR studio—Automatic Dialog Replacement—a process usually reserved for fixing technical glitches or line changes. (Think of any moment when a character speaks off-camera; odds are it’s ADR.) I liked finding out that when the technology was introduced in 1969 it was called Electronic Post-Sync. Wouldn’t ADR be perfect for those times a great comeback line hits you hours after a conversation? I’m going to shorthand those I-know-what-I-should-have-said moments as “post-sync” from now on.

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What fascinated me most was how the process reshaped everything else. Johansson didn’t re voice Morton’s performance, she originated her own, interpreting Samantha her way. Jonze rewrote scenes to fit her rhythms, and Phoenix returned to recalibrate his own. Inspired by their work, Jonze wrote additional scenes for them. The writing fix quickly outstripped “new pages” and took on a collaborative vitality of its own.

That constant revision reminded me of another kind of post-sync: the writer’s version, where resynchronizing happens inside the script every time a character shifts their weight.

Ironing Out Every New Wrinkle

Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye recounts how Robert Towne, writing Chinatown, faced a similar recursion. “I wrote at least twenty different step outlines,” Towne said. “Long, long step outlines.” Each new idea rewired the whole narrative. Every change meant disassembling and rebuilding the screenplay from scratch. As Wasson observed, Towne’s previous plot “couldn’t always be redacted without difficulty; if abandoned ideas once had narrative value, excising them would capsize all that followed.”

After Johansson’s performance was cut in, Jonze had a two-and-a-half-hour version of Her. Overwhelmed, he handed it to Steven Soderbergh, who returned it twenty-four hours later as a ninety-minute edit. Jonze ultimately made his own 126-minute final cut, but seeing Soderbergh’s streamlined version helped him rediscover what had been lost in the sprawl.

From Film to Digital Memory

If digital flexibility created headaches for Jonze, film’s material excess nearly drowned his former father-in-law. Francis Ford Coppola shot over 230 hours of film for Apocalypse Now, and Walter Murch spent two years editing it, “the longest post-production of any picture I’ve worked on,” Murch said. Adjusted for today’s dollars, Coppola’s film cost about $150 million; Jonze’s, around $32 million.

In 2013, the year Her was released, digital video officially surpassed film as the industry norm. Directors like Jonze, with his background creating music videos, found that digital workflows didn’t just make production cheaper; they altered how fiction could evolve. The medium’s elasticity invited experimentation: try something, see what happens, rewrite, reshoot.

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Echoes and Exes

It might sound like that flexibility got Jonze into trouble, but it also enabled the emotional precision that defines the movie. And there’s an ironic echo in the way Jonze and his former wife Sofia Coppola each filmed their divorce. I wasn’t tempted to draw a direct line between the two films, but I kept thinking about the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation. Coppola makes a suave joke out of the Japanese karaoke bar, sending up the music-video aesthetic of Charlotte’s husband John. Karaoke is content in Coppola’s hands. In Her, Jonze turns karaoke into a production technique— swapping one voice for another, just as Charlotte swaps John for Bob. The sly pleasure of Scarlett Johansson playing both Charlotte and Samantha feels like a private wink: the humor of a more urbane director, a contemporary Howard Hawks.

Sometimes a film about a voice in your ear turns out to be a lesson in how artists continue talking to each other—across edits, across years, across the static of their own pasts.

Openings

A shadowy hallway reveals a figure in the thin light of a half-open door. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley’s rumpled caution answers a knock with a question: “Were you followed?” In Cabaret, the painted face of the emcee spirals toward us from contorting reflections until his leering grin becomes the expression of the whole room. Both moments do what the best films do from their first frame: they awaken attention.

The image isn’t telling us what to think; it’s making us feel that something is already alive before we arrive.

The Intelligence of Presence

My favorite films begin this way—by giving presence room to unfold. What we see is only part of what’s happening; the rest is sensation, inference, atmosphere. In Her and The Sixth Sense, two directors solve the same problem from opposite sides: how to make something feel vividly there when it can’t be directly shown. Their success depends on the same human capacity—the way we meet stories halfway, supplying belief, emotion, and continuity.

Spike Jonze’s Her opens on an extreme close-up of Joaquin Phoenix. The shot is so tight even his chin and forehead are cropped away. His skin tone, pale and desaturated, floats in a blur of creams and reds that lend him the color his own face has lost. For the next two hours, this man, Theodore, will talk almost exclusively to the air around him. His isolation is as compressed as the framing; his world, drained of warmth, glows with the fatigue of memory. The expired-film palette suggests not emptiness but aging exposure to a world saturated by longing.

M. Night Shyamalan chooses a dusty filament light bulb for the opening shot of The Sixth Sense. It’s the only source of illumination for a woman descending creaking stairs to a cellar. The light’s heat is deceptive: it belongs to a world haunted not by absence but by the persistence of dread. Like Theodore, Cole—the boy who will soon utter those famous words, “I see dead people”—speaks into the air, searching for response from those only he can see.

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Stories bring out our most enjoyable sense-making skills. Human beings are innately pattern seeking, puzzle solving creatures. I like a broken little trail of facts. I get a buzz from a bit of misdirection and from that small thrill when something—what is it?—feels slightly out of kilter. No art form exploits this human gift more precisely than cinema, which chooses not only what we see but how we interpret it.

Editing as Empathy

Cinema doesn’t trick us so much as invite us to collaborate. Its power lies not in deception but in recognition—in how we participate in creating what feels real. A face held in close-up can belong to grief or to triumph, depending on what follows it: a burning house or an awards dinner. The expression hasn’t changed, only the context we supply.

Editing becomes a call to empathy, a choreography between what’s shown and what we perceive.

The finest films depend on this intelligence—the instinct we all share for completing the image, for sensing presence where the screen gives us only fragments.

The difficulty in Her wasn’t recording a disembodied voice; it was filming a presence that couldn’t be seen. Editor Eric Zumbrunnen understood the paradox: “With a film about two people in conversation, you do kind of want to see the other person. And the fact that you couldn’t do that—well, it wasn’t easy. You could go to the shot of the device. But we were very careful about how often we did that.”

His work wasn’t about disguising Samantha’s non-existence but about building her presence in the space between frames. Her voice has to inhabit the air around Theodore, to charge the room with companionship without reducing her to a blinking dot. Zumbrunnen called this “the challenge of making you really feel this relationship.”

He cut sparingly to the device, not to conceal absence but to protect the illusion of aliveness—to let the viewer’s own belief complete the scene. “There are times we specifically cut to the device,” he said, “but that’s to show the gulf between them.” Each cut is an act of empathy: how long he holds on Theodore, how much silence he leaves, determines whether Samantha feels near or far. It’s editing as emotional architecture, a way of letting presence radiate beyond the visible.

Both films face the same puzzle from opposite directions: how do you show a connection that can’t be seen? Jonze and Zumbrunnen find it in the intervals between cuts, where breath and voice build a sense of companionship. Shyamalan finds it in the stillness of a frame, where bodies share a room but not perception. Each trusts the audience’s reflex for empathy—that quick, unconscious completion of what’s only half visible. Presence, in both cases, is a shared construction, an act of seeing that belongs as much to us as to the film.

Alignment

The deep pleasure of rewatching The Sixth Sense comes from noticing how Shyamalan builds presence not through revelation, but through alignment. In one early scene, Cole’s mother, Lynn, sits waiting in an armchair; across from her, Malcolm sits in another. The composition suggests a shared waiting—a conference between two adults anxious for a child. When Cole enters, he looks toward Malcolm, yet Lynn never acknowledges the doctor. The framing quietly holds both sightlines, as if each could see the other.

Shyamalan’s intelligence lies in the steadiness of that shot. He doesn’t point out what’s missing; he lets our ordinary sense-making fill the room with presumed connection. Malcolm’s slight tilt of the head, Lynn’s responsive posture—these gestures complete a conversation that never occurs. On rewatch, we recognize that what we took for shared presence was only parallel awareness, each person vivid but unseen by the other. The film’s tension isn’t the absence of life but the persistence of it—how feeling continues even when recognition fails. That’s the secret engine of Shyamalan’s craft: he films belief itself, the human instinct to feel together, even when the world’s angles no longer meet.

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Belief

You know, the more I think about it, the difference in their approaches to the challenge may come down to what each believes about cinema itself. Jonze, who came up through music videos, treats film as something assembled out of lived fragments — a medium discovered in the edit rather than dictated on the page. He shoots as if the real movie will emerge later, in the rhythm between shots, with his collaborators gathered around a screen. Shyamalan’s belief runs the other way. He writes every frame before he shoots it, trusts story structure the way a playwright trusts language. He rarely shoots coverage; he wants precision, not options. His actors supply warmth and intuition, but the shape is architectural. Jonze looks for presence in discovery. Shyamalan gives it life by design.

Aliveness

My favorite films bring me back to life from the dullness of coping—they sharpen my attention to the world instead of letting it blur. Everything seems more articulate after a good story: the light on a face, the hum of a street, the pulse of color in an ordinary room. The best storytelling isn’t cleverness or plot reversal but an act of understanding—of seeing and being seen.

A well-made film reminds me that I’m always in conversation with the visible world, that presence is never exhausted by a single look.

There is always more aliveness waiting to be noticed.

In Synecdoche, New York, Caden Cotard is directing a regional theater production of Death of a Salesman. On the day of its opening, when Caden wants to use the toilet in his home, the plumber is working on fixtures in the bathroom. The plumber nods at the toilet and says, “Go ahead, I’ve seen boy parts,” but Caden is too self-conscious. He goes downstairs to his wife Adele’s studio, in the cellar of their house. Caden moves in close and blocks her light with his head as Adele is working, asking “Can I take a piss in your sink?”

The Basement Take

Zipping himself up, he lumbers past his four-year-old daughter, Olive, painting at her own table behind Adele. Throwing another glance at her work Caden says, “It’s gorgeous, Ad.”

Adele asks him how his rehearsal went.

“Awful. We have five hundred and sixty lighting cues. I don’t know why I made it so complicated.”

“It’s what you do,” she answers.

The ninety-second scene is like the micro-portraits Adele paints, a miniature character study of Caden. In the hands of screenwriter/ director Charlie Kaufman, it’s a set piece as compact as the cramped space of the basement itself. We don’t quite regret Caden’s disappointment that Adele will miss his opening tonight, though we share in the unreconciled tensions. We peer through the dingy gloom as Caden creaks away up the basement stairs.

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Caden loses us when he leans in to look at the work Adele is painting, and we are drawn in magnetically to a momentary view of her canvas. It’s no larger than a matchbook. Several bright lamps are turned toward it, set at angles that eliminate shadows. Adele wears steampunk-looking jeweler’s-loupe eyeglasses. Her apron is flecked with paint—evidence of time, of commitment. Her slender brushes bear only a few hairs of fine bristle, allowing her to touch in minute detail.

Adele focuses intently but with palpable familiarity in the deep space of the world she creates. She makes deft strokes adding color and shape as though she is tuned to reach and move between dimensions of existence as well as those of scale, into another place altogether. When Caden compliments her glibly then abruptly and predictably returns to the subject of his play, we feel ourselves unwilling to go with him, wanting instead to watch Adele work. Even the camera doesn’t go along with Caden, but stays with us and Adele, wishing him out of the way.

We were Beavis and Butthead go to the Art World. -Walter Robinson, Gallery Beat co-founder.

In the world according Guest of Cindy Sherman, videographer Paul Hasegawa-Overacker’s instrument was autobiography, not a paintbrush. Though he’d moved to New York to be a sculptor, H-O was soon using his woodworking tools to earn a living as a carpenter. In the early 1990s he and two painter friends working at Art in America created Gallery Beat, a scrappy public-access show bringing the New York art world to late-night community television.

Like thousands of other New York public-access programs it was democratic, lo-fi counter-media—part document, part performance, mostly personality.

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described the gallery parties, “Paul, with his camera on his shoulder, was quite a regular fixture. He had a distinct style—sort of, you know, right in your face.”

Then he met Cindy Sherman

In 1995 Cindy Sherman was a rising star in the pantheon of significant artists Paul H-O had been filming from the fringe. True to form, the first thing he did was put himself in the picture, a precursor to today’s me-and-a-celebrity selfies.

“This is Cindy Sherman,” H-O says, narrating her head shot.

Then he slants the camera at himself, stepping in close to her. “This is Paul H-O,” he continues, in self-congratulation, putting himself center screen, framing Sherman off to his left, “I just wanna, you know--” he says, then with instant ennui, he looks away, dismisses the moment. “My hair is dirty,” he says.

“I need chapstick,” Sherman replies, entirely up on his game.

Several years pass before they meet again.

They are now both divorced, and Paul has been taken to court by his landlord. By this point in his directorial turn, his health isn’t great and he’s “running out of steam,” he tells a friend. Fortunately, Cindy Sherman helps him out by allowing him to make a program about her work process.

Between various interviews they begin to date.

H-O moves in with her; Sherman pays his “tens of thousands of dollars” of debt, nurses him back to health, even gives him a video studio. His new work crashes in oblivion.

Once he becomes Cindy Sherman’s boyfriend, he no longer needs the video camera to put himself in the picture.

He’s no longer the insouciant king’s fool, tolerated—sometimes affectionately—by smart people in an in-crowd only too aware they’re taking themselves a bit seriously. An ironic, perhaps inevitable reversal occurs.

Now that he has access, he is more of an art-world outsider, not less. Because he’s with Cindy Sherman he can be places he hardly knew existed—not as part of the scene but as a “plus one” in it. Hands in his pockets, he stands much closer and much farther away at the same time.

An instrument is not a sleight of hand, it’s a discipline

Both Adele and Paul work through instruments meant to reach beyond limitation. The jeweler’s loupe, the handheld video camera—each promises proximity, a finer focus, the power to choose and frame the subject, to edit what the audience perceives.

Adele’s lenses multiply intimacy, drawing the gaze inward like an object of meditation. A world at the scale of life, rendered at a size we fall into. It opens out again into a world whose boundaries are as indistinct as the receding space where the viewers in their jeweler’s loupes forget themselves to be.

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Paul’s video camera, by contrast, collapses intimacy to superficiality. It turns desire to belong into a kind of surveillance. When he lives through the viewfinder, he’s part of the scene he composes; when he lives with Cindy Sherman, he’s excluded from it. Adele’s work keeps expanding outward, while Paul’s world-making contracts to needling.

Adele’s scale grants her freedom because she accepts the limits of perception; she builds within them. Paul’s scale devours him because he confuses access with authorship, longing with doing. Both are artists of replication, but only one has learned that their path isn’t through an enchanted door—it’s through a discipline.

Near the end of Guest of Cindy Sherman, Paul H-O is driving through Los Angeles, having handed his video camera to Sherman in the passenger seat. For the first time, she films the flowing road, the breezy passing palms, the sunlight rippling through glass.

“It’s fun to look through, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s like you walked into this little replication of life.”

It’s an uncanny moment of vision, like the green flash at sunset when light fractures and night arrives.

I write a lot of scenes of people getting from place to place, or people getting ready for a thing, or coming down from a thing, just because we all know the big events but what are all the little things that lead you to the big event? —Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig’s words stayed with me this week. The in-betweens, those moments of transition and drift, became a lens as I read everything that followed.

The interviews I read for this week’s column were a trove of context on how actors and directors collaborate. But the details also gave me a view of something less discussed: how directors use setting itself as a collaborator in the emergence of their work.

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The edit

In Lady Bird, the in-betweens play out across iconic Sacramento locations. In Clouds of Sils Maria, they unfold along disorienting mountain paths.

If you’re not familiar with Gerwig, you might assume Lady Bird is set in California because of the distance a kid will go to escape their parents. But Sacramento is Gerwig’s hometown. She chose it, she says, because she loves it, and because she could “film it lovingly,” something she felt hadn’t been done before.

Assayas first encountered the Engadin valley through an early twentieth-century documentary by Arnold Fanck, whose footage of the region’s shifting clouds inspired both the film’s title and its meditations on time.

“The documentary footage in those movies is just amazing. I had no idea they were famous clouds. I recognized the places where he had been shooting a century before. It just gave me a sense of embodying the passing of time.”

He includes a clip from Fanck in Clouds, just as he includes a clip from Rendez-vous —the film he co-wrote with André Téchiné that made Binoche a star. I loved this doubling: Assayas shows his work in the same way he has his actors show the work of making their characters.

Time is on Gerwig’s mind too. She says she’s “a big believer in the more specific you make something, the more universal it is.” Her familiarity with Sacramento let her take a coming-of-age story to a very specific place and give it a universal landscape. People who watch Lady Bird feel “their particular geography of their childhood and how they relate to that as an adult.”

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Why are we here? Why this setting?

For both director/ screenwriters, setting becomes a temporal instrument: Gerwig’s hometown replays the memory of growing up, while Assayas’s mountains collapse a century of cinema into the present tense.

For Assayas, the landscape matters precisely for its distinctiveness, not its common denominator. “I have the actress, she’s rehearsing a play with her assistant. She doesn’t have to be in a flat in Paris. They are lost in the middle of a landscape. Why not this landscape?”

Still, I found myself most drawn to a slightly more complicated reading of setting—not as the establishing shot of a story, but as a living relationship among plot, character, and theme. Setting does more than locate a story; it shapes the conditions of discovery. It is, as Gerwig says, “all these little corridors that seem like there might be something promising.” Olivier Assayas put it another way: a director must stay “surprised by where the film is heading... aware not of what you want the story to be but what the story itself wants to be.”

The in-betweens? That’s where you discover not the story you brought to the project, but the one that’s been inventing itself all along.

I’ve been thinking about how people fight in movies. Not with fists, but with words. How they sustain combat across an entire film without the audience getting bored. It’s harder than it sounds.

“Nobody would ever say, ‘Just take these swords and see what happens, just duel a little and see where the spirit takes you.’ That’s insane.”

Greta Gerwig said this in an interview about intimacy coordinators, but she might as well have been describing every choice she made directing Lady Bird.

The Trip

The film opens mid-fight. Mother and daughter, Christine and Marion, have just traveled through “21 hours and 5 minutes” of taped Steinbeck, both wiping tears from their eyes. The audiobook wasn’t a bond; it was a buffer, the last civil thing between them and what’s coming. Christine turns on the radio. Marion snaps it off. These seemingly innocent actions are fighting words.

Now they’re arguing—about what? Everything and nothing. Who invented whom? Can Christine make up someone named Lady Bird and be that person, or can Marion make up someone who wants the colleges Marion has chosen and make Christine be that person? When Marion threatens to prevail, Christine opens the passenger door and exits the moving car.

One hundred fifty seconds. Before the opening credits. That’s action-film pacing.

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The Sword

I’ve watched that scene a dozen times trying to understand why it works when so many on-screen arguments feel false. The answer lies in what happened before cameras rolled. Gerwig shot all the Ronan–Metcalf scenes together, creating a separate shoot within the shoot—emotional continuity the actors could weaponize. Metcalf, a founding member of Steppenwolf Theatre, prepared “table work” for each fight, what Ronan later extolled as “the structure of the argument, the trigger points for both characters, what new information the audience would learn.” Theater discipline in service of film chaos.

And the chemistry was earned. Ronan describes her real-life mother as her “soulmate.” Journalist Sloane Crosley notes they “finish each other’s sentences and make each other howl with laughter.” That intimacy, filtered through Metcalf’s technique, becomes choreography. They speak over, through, and past one another with the timing of people who actually love each other. This is what Gerwig meant about swords—you need to know exactly where the blade is going or someone gets hurt.

Gerwig compresses everything: budget cars. Overfilled rooms. Convenience-store aisles. She traps the fight so it has nowhere to go but deeper.

The Wilderness

Now consider Olivier Assayas, who does the opposite in nearly everything.

Clouds of Sils Maria also begins in transit with Maria Enders and her assistant Valentine on a train. But where Gerwig compresses, Assayas scatters. The train moves; the women move inside the train. Valentine heading back from the cafe car juggles phones, calls, water bottles, searching for signal. Maria paces the corridors, negotiating her divorce while drafting a tribute. Motion inside motion inside motion. I can feel the challenge to balance just describing it.

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They arrive in the Alps, and the mountains offer what looks like relief: space, air, beauty. But Assayas knows something about space—too much becomes its own kind of trap. In Sils Maria, sky and mountains maintain a bracing isolation without boundary. Even the windows and doors—the rooms themselves—are thrown open to an uneasy indoor–outdoor living. Night brings no reprieve. There’s no shelter from the currents between them—innuendo, aggression, failed communication, Maria’s mounting crisis.

This spatial philosophy extends to how Assayas directs. “The more space you give actors, the more control you give them,” he says. “I don’t want to hear the lines from my screenplay. I want the actors to appropriate it and make it their own.”

If Gerwig’s sword metaphor insists on precision, here is its opposite: surrender. “They can reinvent the film, and I can be the first spectator of it.”

In the film, Maria prepares to play the older role in the same play that launched her career twenty years earlier. She runs lines with Valentine reading the part of the younger actress, all the while also discussing the difficulty for Maria of accepting that reversal, of accepting that she’s older. Their rehearsals blur constantly. Are they acting or living? Discussing the play or themselves?

Like the unbounded landscape, the two bleed together until you can’t tell which is which. The actors play with the intentionality of this, at times subverting the other’s reading, increasing the richness of the psychological layering.

Kristen Stewart recalls that Assayas first approached her about playing Jo-Ann, the younger star who takes on Helena’s former career-making role in the play at the center of the film. She campaigned instead for Valentine. “There was something between these two women that I wanted to get to the bottom of… this weird duality that can occur between two women, this competitive nature and yet this innate love and care. That kind of all came to me at the end, whereas initially I just thought it was interesting to watch two women work.”

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Having secured the role, Stewart refused to rehearse with Juliette Binoche. “Rehearsals can strip something of why I’m curious about the role—everything, my first instincts—not that I think they’re so fantastic, they’re just the only ones I trust. If you give me any time to think about it, I feel we’ve missed something. So I never wanted to run lines with her, I was like, get away, no, get away.”

The urgency in that last phrase says everything: Stewart wanted the live-wire of uncertainty. She preserved it by withholding preparation, keeping the possibility of surprise alive between them—an interior form of exposure that mirrors the film’s landscape.

Binoche answered in kind. She brought her real-life assistant to the project and ran lines with her. An actress playing an actress with an assistant rehearsing with her own assistant—meta multiplying meta. The tension between Assayas and Binoche —she’d told him their previous collaboration felt “too secure” and dared him to make something more vulnerable—infused the work itself. He obliged, writing Clouds around Binoche’s 1985 breakthrough Rendez-vous, which he had co-written. Binoche later deflected: “I never saw my life in the film... that’s really Olivier’s imagination.” The actress, it seems, found the vulnerability she was after.

The Fight

Where Gerwig’s script and directing method invited choreography, Assayas’s method was to capture the actors creating the characters while the characters themselves were working out the very same questions for the play. He built long tracking shots that gave actors time to surprise him, then filmed counter-shots later to layer emotional registers. Wilderness became staging: conflict with no retreat, no witnesses, no de-escalation. The untamed landscape mirrored the untamed exchanges between the women.

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Two dialogue-driven films, then—two pairs of women fighting in nearly every exchange. They fight about everything but rarely about the same thing at the same time. What they fight about borders on tedious; how they fight becomes the story. Each depends on actors trained for unrelenting rivalry.

Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? if you removed years of Taylor and Burton’s off-screen conflict. Gerwig and Assayas both wrote their films to pose the same question: How would you do it? How would you sustain this?

What actors do to embody characters under stress varies from precision timing to solving puzzles in real time while the camera rolls. You could call them opposites, but they meet in the same clearing. Both require risk. Both create conditions where authenticity can surface. The method differs; the necessity doesn’t.

At each film’s moment of greatest tension, the women seem to flee—Christine leaps from the moving car, Valentine disappears into mist. But these aren’t surrenders; they’re innovations, the electrifying escapes of underestimated heroines under pressure, women who can and do rewrite the rules.

What interests me most is how both films trust conflict itself as worthy of this much craft, this much care. The fights become the substance of the films, not decoration around some other narrative. Just two women, arguing about everything and nothing, with all the technique cinema can muster brought to bear on making us believe it—making us unable to look away.

I suppose I keep returning to these films because they suggest something I want to believe: that two people fighting well is its own kind of intimacy. Not the fighting—God knows we all fight badly enough in real life—but the craft of it. The attention required. Maybe that’s what Gerwig and Assayas understood: you can’t make a fight matter without first understanding it’s a challenge of authenticity. When Christine jumps from that car, when Valentine vanishes into the clouds, they’re still saying, maybe I’m not making myself clear. Can you hear this?

Or maybe I just like watching brilliant craft. With films like these I don’t have to decide.

While writing History of a Memory, new ideas kept crowding the page. Words have their cousins, replica/ replicant, which call up their own echoes: reply/ replay. I kept circling how projection works in film and in life: how we project ourselves onto others, how we present ourselves outward, how memory itself spools like a private cinema, unpredictable as a kaleidoscope and not always a welcome intrusion.

The edit

One idea I couldn’t fit kept returning. In Blade Runner 2049, questions of artifice aren’t only part of K’s work environment. The issue of what it is to be real follows him home to dilemmas of desire and connection. K’s holograph girlfriend Joi devises a way to cross into his physical world. She overlays herself on the doxie Mariette, syncing her gestures to Mariette’s body so she can touch him. The attempt is tender, but always a little off, two presences flickering in and out of alignment.

In Past Lives, when Nora calls Hae Sung on Skype, the familiar tune plays. Including that iconic set of beeps and tones is a canny choice Celine Song makes, summoning instant nostalgia and yearning. (Online, people have commented the Skype tones make them suddenly homesick; for me they still carry the tiny twinge something special is about to happen.) Then Hae Sung’s face appears, jittering in the small laptop window.

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Technology is a specious present

As I watched this scene, I thought of Joi and Mariette. The sync imperfect, frames of the video drop out in space, and the image stutter itself is like memory. I imagined that Nora at her desk in New York was seeing not only Hae Sung in Seoul but also Na Young at twelve, both layered into the same fragile frame.

I replayed the scene more than once, trying to understand how it works, why it stuck with me. Perhaps because it rhymes with lived experience, a la William James: feeling the present and its vanishing at one time in the faint shimmer of what cannot be held still.

A Keepsake for the Journey

In Celine Song’s Past Lives, a mother sets up a playdate for her daughter, Nora, because the family is about to emigrate. The mother is a children’s book illustrator who wants Nora to have “good memories” of her best friend. The phrase — so modest, so practical — sounds like a mother making sure there’s a snack packed for the journey. Yet she’s trying to slip a keepsake into her child’s story, something that will outlast the leaving.

Crossing genres, in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, the same gesture turns up again, though in a stranger key. Ana, a memory designer for replicants, tells K: “I can’t help your future, but I can give you good memories to think back on and smile.” Two women in different centuries, one with watercolor pencils and one with code, trying to gift someone resilience. You might call it survival, but it’s really something quieter: the ability to keep your bearings.

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Twelve Seconds of Now

William James, with his pocket watch and hashish experiments, would have understood. He argued that the present isn’t a knife-edge, a millisecond already dissolving into the past. He called it the specious present: a stretch of time, maybe twelve seconds long, where past and future braid together into now. A saddle-back, he said, wide enough for us to notice change. It feels to me the present never holds still; it slips its own leash. What we call “now” is already half memory; it’s imperfect, but that’s what makes it feel real.

That is the saddle where Ana and Nora’s mother both go to work. They don’t just make art; they plant experiences in the seam where present and past are stitched together. A child’s outing. A replicant’s daydream. Both a little unreal, and both potentially decisive.

When the Horse Catches in the Code

K is the proof. He lives by code — literally. His baseline tests are meant to catch any flicker of deviation. Then one memory catches him instead: a small wooden horse, hidden from a gang of boys. The toy horse lodges in his baseline, snagging code that was meant to be seamless. Replicants are given memories so they will seem more human to humans, not so they will change themselves. But this memory changes K, and it’s testament that a flaw can open into possibility.

“Someone lived this,” Ana tells him. “This happened.”

For K, who has accepted false memories as the only ones he will ever have, this is seismic. The memory feels real, and it is real. Suddenly he can trust his own feelings, an intelligent advantage he was never meant to have. From there rebellion feels almost inevitable. He demands meaning, and in the very demand becomes someone he chooses to be. Our AI-baited culture likes to ask if this makes him human. Perhaps the sharper question is whether it makes him a child.

Children are replicas of a kind. They inherit not just DNA but traditions, reputations, illnesses, challenges. Some inherit property; some fight not to become it. Families ask them to carry burdens, preserve a way of life, finish ambitions left incomplete. None of this is their choosing. Like K, they carry memories arranged for them in advance. No wonder his struggle looks so familiar.

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The Bed as Replica

Song makes this visible in her own way. Nora and Arthur, her husband, are posed in bed like Lennon and Ono in that famous Leibovitz photograph. The tableau is perfect, almost too perfect. Like Lennon, Arthur clings naked; but Nora is distracted, and talks about fast food. She replies in English to Arthur’s words in Korean, dropping the connection he offers in the language he learned for her. The replica carries echoes of estrangement. Even intimacy, Song suggests, is a borrowed pose.

And then — the shimmer of Skype. In 2006 it was miraculous to beam a face across oceans, though the pixels were clumsy and the signal faltered. Years after leaving Korea, Nora finds Hae Sung again, not in person but through that laptop connection, bounced through space, faltering even as it carries. When his face flickers onto her screen, he seems to bring her younger self with him. In him she sees the “good memories” her mother planted, glitching and alive in the pixelated haze. James’s saddle is no metaphor here but an interface: the present arriving already nostalgic.

Do We Emerge, or Begin Again?

In James’s saddle of now, Nora is as close to Hae Sung as K is to that wooden horse. And yet, as real as the horse is, as real as the memory feels, neither belongs to him.

Ana says we misunderstand memory: we think it’s about detail, but we remember with feelings — and what’s most human about feelings is their imperfection. They are unreliable narrators at best. Looking at Hae Sung, Nora says,

“That little girl did exist. She’s not here in front of you, but it doesn’t mean she’s not real.”

What she’s telling him is: that’s not me. It seems to me the recognition startles her as much as it does him. The little girl belongs to neither of them.

It is always a shock to realize we are not who we remember ourselves to have been. We bend, we change, but rarely into the shapes we once thought were ours. And yet we remain recognizably ourselves. This is the paradox both Nora and K discover. Identity is continuous even when its contents shift. Do both, in that letting go, emerge more themselves — or simply enter another story?

Memories, however unreliable, are powerful agents. What matters is not their precision but their authenticity. They startle us to life again and again, even as we are still working out who we are.

The wind shifted.

The car slid up beside me without ceremony.
No revving. No theatrics.
I didn’t think much of it.

I was a kid, riding my scuffed ten-speed,
rehearsing in my head the clever things I’d say someday
when my life finally became interesting.

Then the car pulled up beside me,
as if responding to my cue.

Just a machine pacing a girl on a ten-speed
that had no business outrunning anything.

I thought he was going to drive over me.
I barely made it off the road
without ditching the bike under his wheels

The window rolled down.
The man leaned back into the shadows.

Ain’t you ashamed? Trying to steal a
I made out he must be not quite sure
young, hoping I couldn’t see it.

Then he lifted the gun
and pointed it out the window at me.

My heart really did skip a beat as the fear hit —
the kind that arrives so cleanly
you feel the world tighten around its outline.

Everything unnecessary vanished.

“Tell me your name.”

Ah.
So the gun was going to do everything.

This guy —
this guy was a mess,
and things could only get worse from here.
So much would have to happen
for him to get what he wanted,
and this gun —
he clicked the safety off,
what a chump —
was going to figure it all out for him.

A man who hadn’t done the assignment
and now he wanted to copy my notes.
My name?

And I —
twelve, sunburned,
annoyed to be interrupted mid-daydream —
realized I could simply…
not oblige him.

Do not roll your eyes, I thought.

So I tilted my head,
the way actresses do
when they’re about to deliver
the line the audience came for.

“Why do you want to know?”

The question did not fit his script.
He leaned forward then
and looked genuinely perplexed —
a villain thrown off
by a heroine who refused the stage directions.

I looked evenly at the gun,
then at him.

The whole thing just seemed… inefficient.

I could see — instantly —
he didn’t know why he’d asked.

And now, instead of getting me into the car,
he was scrambling
to come up with an answer.

Behind him, another car swung onto the road.
Wrong timing for him.
Perfect for me.

He cursed,
pulled the gun back in and dropped it —
actually dropped it —
hit the gas,
and vanished.

Dust rising around me.
Silence returning.

Not bad, I thought.
Not bad at all.

I dragged the handlebars,
pulling my front wheel back onto the road,
a little surprised
to find myself smiling.

It seemed my life
had gotten interesting after all.