Issue 22

Jonathan Jones

Visiting Hours

I’m waiting where the holes in the ruins and the pavements overflow. These songs just seem to slow things down. A letter like a straight look through the mirror you give me to follow. In this way for me the past has no way of holding your hand, like pretending I can’t remember who it was called me now, a year ago some New Year’s Eve party in London, and I knew you were there. Pretty weak coming out of the anesthesia, it took a while to sink in. Seems like I’m always running into the same old faces. You used to tell me not to worry, what I couldn’t remember didn’t count. You’re nodding at me now, but that could mean anything. Just a language I have to learn over, watching the numbers change in series. Like smiles at a private party, there’s no way of knowing. All that’s left of your face strung together, half-hearted, well-meaning. All smiles.

A CRITIC

The first time Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak in Vertigo, he isn’t looking at her directly, but rather sidelong in profile. It’s a tightly choreographed scene without dialogue, where Stewart and Novak are shown in close-up through a suggestive 180-degree movement. As Novak turns back to her right, Stewart turns away to his left to watch her leave. While the camera remains stationary, in two separate close-ups Hitchcock uses the actors themselves to give the impression of a gradual half revolution to rotate the audience’s perspective. This movement is later extended at the climax of the lovers’ reunion, only this time with the background itself rotating a full 360 degrees around Stewart and Novak, as her hotel room fades to the scene of the old mission where Stewart believes he saw her die. Both scenes combine to suggest an underlying mood of fatalism where memory is out of joint, not quite able to recognize what it reveals and hides in the moment that brings a non-existent woman back to life.

Hitchcock is keenly aware of the way memory offers its own kind of circumnavigation. Yet the way he explores this in Vertigo is not merely a question of astute cinematography. What the audience sees in Stewart’s first encounter with Novak remains a self-conscious and highly choreographed series of silent gestures. However, the subtlety of the trick lies not in the virtuosity of the sequence, but in engaging the audience’s own awareness that identity does not necessarily have grounding in authentic experience. It is rather the idea that identity is based on possession, which makes this movement of memory so acute and telling. Here memory takes two forms, one the figurative conceit of Novak’s own character Madeleine being possessed by a ghost, and second the darker implication Hitchcock makes, that desire itself is inevitably bound by a claim to ownership.

SWIPE LEFT

Too many cars in Rome, ask anyone. It was a bump, just enough to let you know, no one was watching. I had a mouth full of Hawaiian pizza, although Italians will tell you there is no such thing as Hawaiian pizza, the same way other people might deny the Bermuda triangle. I plugged in my earphones, and was scanning through my iPod when the car reversed into me late and slow with a thud and a faint “Mi spiace.” I must have been thinking again, how typical.

“The car didn’t hit me very hard.”

A pair of delicate round-framed spectacles gave the illusion of boyhood, but nothing behind. No eyes for smiling. My elbow buzzed warm and sticky.

“You felt that too?” I asked him.

“Kind of. What’s that you’re listening to?”

I told him and he smiled. “It was Star Trek: The Next Generation sent me here.”

“Come again?”

“Y’know like on YouTube, you get it all the time, people leaving their comments on songs, like it was this film brought me here, it was that long-running series. Everything’s a soundtrack nowadays, didn’t you know?”

I told him I couldn’t say. There was nothing so unusual in the conversation except for the technology he could have no memory of.

“Want a fag?” he said, offering me one of his Camel Lights. Part of me wanted to say I stopped smoking years ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurt his feelings.

“So how you getting back home now?”

“Take the next bus I suppose.”

“Anything else I can help you with?”

“Yeah,” he said, and I could tell he was already thinking of the humiliation. “How come they don’t sell Hawaiian pizza over here?”

I laughed, but he didn’t like that.

“They say it has no right to exist,” I said. “Poor pizza.”

He nodded and rubbed his neck sorely.

“What was the name of that song again?” he asked.

I told him there were no songs I knew of on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

THE TIME BEING

Going home, no expectations. I could already picture the half-closed shops and the feverish condensation on pub windows. Streets saturated in the empty sound of other people’s footsteps. On the flight back I slept, and dreamt nothing. I took a taxi from the airport, and had it drop me on the edge of town. The smell of the cold English night was recent with freezing rain, and in the distance I could see what appeared at first like misty phosphorescence. I walked towards it. It was an ice rink. I stopped for a moment to watch the silver blades circle and intersect across the winter glare, and a chill of horror sliced through me from groin to chest.

You were still dressed for 1991. It was a party I vaguely remembered. Your David Bowie t-shirt that belonged to another era, back when we thought style and truth in songwriting were largely interchangeable. It was completely convincing, the fact you looked so lifelike. Besides, I suspect no one buys the Marley’s ghost act anymore with all that melodramatic clanging of chains or wailing about man’s inhumanity to man. Real phantoms are no more unsettling than the simple fact of our own skeleton. You were simply there to tell me what I already knew.

“I told them you’d go with it,” your voice exhaled, twenty years younger. “They were worried you might overreact, start smashing up the place.”

I saw right away where you were coming from. It’s true I had quite a temper back then.

“I still say it’s impossible to settle an argument between gods when it comes to men and women.”

You nodded enthusiastically.

“I think you told me that once. How the ancient prophet Tiresias was asked to settle the issue between Jupiter and Juno as to who took more pleasure from the act of love?”

Your hands stayed in your pockets. Pale blue jeans hung loose off your hips. A black line of underwear you might have drawn on your skin with a pencil.

“I remember you saying Tiresias, having known pleasure as both, chose the latter.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

A latch-like laugh beneath your breath.

“That’s sweet, but you know I’ve heard you say that kind of thing before.”

“So finish your story.”

“Your story, nothing to do with me. Still I can see you’re tired, so I’ll oblige. The story goes that Juno struck Tiresias blind for having contradicted her own opinion, while Jupiter gives him the gift of prophecy in recompense for his lost sight.”

“Trade-off. Preempt present vision in exchange for future memory.”

“So what are you doing with yourself nowadays?”

FINALE

Sitting in some bar with a drink I had no recollection of ordering, how I came to be there is anyone’s guess. My links were severed, generally with a phone call or a letter, sometimes, very rarely face-to-face. There was me and Sarah and George the day we left Sixth Form, some place they’d just opened in town. I was looking at Sarah.

“That top really suits you,” I said. “Peach is definitely your color.”

She smiled as she swept back her barley-bright hair off her forehead. There were little brown honey-beads of perspiration on her forearm. She didn’t say a word.

“Tell me this, you ever wonder what a hundred years must feel like?” George stared absently at the flame of his Zippo lighter. “You know, I mean like a hundred years when they go to warp speed in Star Trek on the Enterprise.”

“George,” I said, “a hundred years in Star Trek’s not the same as a hundred years for us at all.”

“So what you saying, people can’t get old travelling at the speed of light?”

“Just forget it,” I said, mildly irritated at the thought he was drunker and more lucid than me.

“I’m just saying I think a hundred years probably goes a lot quicker than you think.” George stuck doggedly to his point. “I just want to know how it feels if I ever have to, you know, look back on all this and think when I’m a hundred, good times or what have you. I mean it was some good times we had at Sixth Form, right?”

I didn’t answer him. Sarah laughed at my face, but I didn’t say a word.

“Come on Tom, don’t you want to know what times are a changing?”

“Okay, sure,” I said. “One day we’ll end up in some other dumb century, talking about here and now and Star Trek: The Next Generation like it was all some big conspiracy.”

“So predictable, Tom,” she said. “So defeatist.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” I said.

“No I don’t,” she snapped angrily. “I don’t know what you mean at all.”

For a couple of minutes we sat and said nothing. I hated the fact that I was sober.

“Right,” said a voice. “Need a piss.”

She shifted her right leg to let me get up, and the curve of her blue jeans brushed against the back of my hand. Both her and George had been accepted at Cambridge and were deferring university for a year. I was already heading to some other place.

“… was how it finished.” George was nodding at her when I got back. There was a light like a dull silver polish gleaming the deep varnished brown of the empty tables around us. I finished my cigarette and wondered if that really was six minutes lost off my life. It might have felt longer.

“So do either of you feel like moving on?” George asked cheerfully.

“Why don’t we just stay here for a while,” said Sarah. “I don’t know about you two, but I’d really just like to stay here for the time being.”

“Sounds good to me.” I nodded. George shrugged.

“Okay, well, I’ll get the beers in then.”

Three moments passed. The Gordian knot remained untied. A drunk in the corner was singing to a song on the jukebox. It was Phil Collins’ “Against all Odds,” but he couldn’t remember the words.

“I like it here,” said Sarah. “It feels like one of those places we could always come back to over the years.”

If I could only remember the words, I thought, but the drunk in the corner had got there before me.

“Here we go,” said George, returning with the drinks and three bourbon chasers.

“That was quick,” I said, taking my beer and downing the shot in one.

“Hey, you know you’re actually supposed to finish your beer first.” George’s laugh was uncertain of itself, like a foot caught in a grating, maybe not so funny at all. Her eyes were staring way past me, the way other people stare at photographs from thirty years before. Only we had no way of knowing what thirty years felt like, much less a hundred.

“Beer’s flat,” I said. “I’ll get us another.”

“So what shall we drink to, wealth, health or happiness?” George’s voice seemed to fall back, struck like a clown’s stumble.

“…sha emee playsh,” the drunk in the corner howled quietly.

“A hundred years,” even then I could tell her voice was speaking to George, not to me.

By the time I got back they were ready to move on.

“Don’t worry Tom.” She smiled. Her smile was very patient, very present. “They’ll be other toasts by the time you get to wherever you’re going.”

HOME

Many say it’s Hitchcock’s masterpiece, but I don’t know about that. I had a couple of friends in college who watched it with me many years ago, and I’m thinking how my own memory plays tricks nowadays when it comes to the camera angles and the woman who doesn’t actually exist, because who actually goes back to look for neither the living nor the dead except poor Jimmy Stewart. So much comes down to the things you don’t see at the time, but then what else do you have to work with. Years come and go, come back again benign like lumps of laughter in the back of the throat. I was at some conference the other day, and one of the speakers claimed realism came down to the fact you can never tell what the other person is thinking. I like that without having to like that. When you watch a film, it becomes all the more impenetrable. But if all reality comes down to is a mask itself, then a real critic is still out there somewhere, waiting in the premature androgyny of dawn like a simple warning sign. The ghost works either way, cold then warm in the mouth, to stimulate the blood or breathing.

A REVIEW

But for now Paul talks about his friend John going over the same stories about Hamburg, the Mania, and his new songs, which have never been quite as good. You bought me his biography one Christmas, not quite the story of a life. Now his memory is part interview, part autograph. McCartney knows his name must surely live forever. But then what is that without the vinyl needle spinning like a memory thread? What good are old friends, without his old friend John to talk to?