American Tracking Shot
A lesson in continuity and rupture leads from a country road to the big city.
I begin with the moment I first learned how power can change hands — when the script of threat shifted because I found myself with the power to redirect it.
My vocation shook me out of my childhood when I was twelve years old. I was riding a bike on a rural lane when a car forced me off the road. A man pointed a gun out the window of the car, clicked off the safety, and asked me my name. And then time did what it’s said to do: it stood absolutely still. I couldn't tell you exactly what I was thinking of when I responded to the question, but I can attest with some certainty that it wasn't persuasion or rhetoric. It also wasn't compliance.
Thus, my education began with a lesson in continuity and rupture. I discovered the way a scene can be redirected by altering its beats, not in a lecture in narrative theory, but in the dangerous midst of it. As is so often the case growing up, I did not find myself with good options there.
This is an indelible sequence: the hand with the gun, extending through the window, out of the enclosed space of the front seat. Something without words, something living in that motion had the power to make me part of what was inside the car, separating me from the world outside.
Though I was standing in the sunshine, surrounded by humming insects, ripening fields, and wildflowers, the rusty ten-speed rattled in my hands as though it were struggling to hold me against the will of the darkness inside the Chevy.
That rural America lane was my first script. Today I find myself involved with another story: the fractured America of the 1970s. I'm working on a novel set among bomb-building radicals and a divided New York family. The history of ends that claim to justify any means is shocking, demanding, complex. I'm called into its midst to invent a way of seeing — to craft a structure that opens the story in all its ambiguity and contradiction rather than closing it with easy judgment.
It is in becoming story that violence, the tragic, the near-tragic, outstrip their numbing and annihilating force. That day as a child when storytelling caught me up, I learned something about meaninglessness and how to fight against it. I learned that in the grammar of fiction, even time itself can be transformed, can become fungible.
Movies teach me, too. Time on the screen arrives in miniature storytelling arcs, compressed lessons at the speed of images. I pause the stream of light, rewind ten seconds or a minute, watch again. The set-ups and confrontations I study are not simply analytical; they bleed into the act of making. To watch is already to write.
The films I return to in The Pounce are the ones that make me ask, How is that done? I want to know how the hectic pacing made me laugh watching The Phoenician Scheme even though its speed was panned by critics. How does Capote’s opening dissolve into dread in the view of a field of grain? Why does the ache of The Graduate echo in Michael Clayton? I follow these frames back to their edits, not as a reviewer or film buff, but as a storyteller, exploring her craft.
For Proust, the forward direction of time was compressed into the taste of a madeleine; for me, it was distilled in the taste of metal: the car, the gun, the bullet in the chamber, the vacuum between a child and a stranger.
In reality, time elapses in a long take you can't cut away from; you have to live it. That day I answered the question, What is your name? by asking a question of my own: Why do you want to know that? In that instant, though I wouldn’t yet have recognized it, I wasn’t just answering — I was rewriting, claiming the power of the teller.
I remember hearing myself speak. I remember, too, a surge of nascent disdain for the cowardice of attacking the defenseless mingled strangely with curiosity about what had brought him to this pass. What good would my name do him, I wondered, if he was only going to kill me? Maybe vocation stirred me to ask if he truly wanted to do that, bestowing on me an instinct, a little nerve, a first glimpse of insight.
Dialogue in beats of time, briefly disruptive. How often in life those seconds count. Enchantment, luck, and grace pulled me back from the grasp of the shadow. With my question, I became the teller of the story, redirecting the script off its track as surely as the driver of the car had forced me off the road.
That pause was enough for another vehicle to enter the scene. Unable to pass the first car, it became a jump cut that altered the ending. The Chevy vanished, spinning out in grit and exhaust. The second car idled in the sunlight, waiting with me in the world, while the perception that had first stirred that day waited within me. I didn’t know it then, but that afternoon was my beginning — an introduction to the life ahead.
Every column in The Pounce extends looking at film as a craft of turning, timing, and transformation. My essays will follow that current, tracing how films fracture and gather, how meaning lives in what they withhold as much as in what they show.