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Authors: Kage Baker
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begin, I’d like to serve refreshments.” He went to the corner table and took down two big bowls of popcorn and handed them out. “Eat hearty. There will be brief intermissions when I change reels, because, no, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a holo! Tonight’s entertainment comes to you in the authentic and time-honored medium of reel cinema.” He gestured dramatically to the corner, where he’d opened out the primitive-looking projector and connected it with alligator clamps to a solar battery unit. “So without further ado, distinguished audience . . .”
Einar blew out the lamps one after another, killed the music, and stepped over Oscar to reach the projector. A click and a buzz, a white light on the screen briefly occluded by his head and shoulders as he groped his way back to his seat; then the flickering images held our attention, and the only sound was the faint whirring of the projector and the crunching of popcorn.
It was a great film. Horrible unrelenting tragedy, but you couldn’t be depressed watching it, because you were constantly exhilarated at what a work of bloody genius it was. Have you ever seen it, señors? From the opening scenes in the mining town, where you meet this appalling, tender-hearted ogre who protects little birds but is willing to kill his fellow men with a backhand blow, to his astonishing transformation into a
dentist
, for Christ’s sake, to the banal and doomed love story with the girl who won the lottery—their degeneration, she into a grasping harpy, he into a bestial drunk—and the murder, the chase across the desert, the final scenes where the poor monster finds himself handcuffed to a dead man on the floor of Death Valley, the last frames where he watches the expiring flutters of the damn canary he’s brought along with him, cage and all, on his flight from justice—I tell you, it beats Hamlet for craziness and black humor in tragedy. Not a ray of hope in a frame of it.
So why did we sit there enthralled for nine hours, never saying a word? The last frames unrolled, the progressively longer shots of the wretched mortal’s end winked out, and the screen went white. It was 0500 hours. There was silence but for Juan Bautista’s stifled sob.
“That poor canary,” he gasped.
Imarte began to applaud, and we all joined in, even Juan Bautista. And I think our applause counted for something. We’re immortals, after all. We’ve watched history itself unspool before our eyes. It takes a lot to impress us. So even though the real Erich von Stroheim had yet to be born on the night we watched
Greed
, I hope his shade heard our ovation for his butchered masterpiece. I hope he was appeased, somewhere, somehow.
I WAS SO IMPRESSED with the film, I accessed the text of
McTeague
and read it through in the following days, as the inn drowsed between stagecoach visits.
On a good day we got two passing through, pausing long enough to let off or pick up mail or passengers. If one of the horses was in need of attention, Porfirio got out his farrier’s tools while the passengers wandered up and down our little canyon or availed themselves of our remarkably clean and tidy outhouse. Imarte would hurry to entertain them; if it was a group of mixed couples, she’d leave off the feather boa and play gracious hostess rather than daughter of joy. She’d do whatever it took to get them talking to her about themselves. There were in-depth interviews with an Italian opera singer headed for San Francisco, a Scot in a genuine kilt (sporran and all), two Basque wool magnates who might have been identical twins though they weren’t, and a Mormon patriarch from San Bernardino, who proposed marriage to Imarte on half an hour’s acquaintance. She was genuinely regretful at having to turn him down. (“What an incredible opportunity to study a fascinating mutation of American folk morality!”) I mostly slunk away into the oaks when passengers were around. Mortals got on my nerves, these
Einar blew out the lamps one after another, killed the music, and stepped over Oscar to reach the projector. A click and a buzz, a white light on the screen briefly occluded by his head and shoulders as he groped his way back to his seat; then the flickering images held our attention, and the only sound was the faint whirring of the projector and the crunching of popcorn.
It was a great film. Horrible unrelenting tragedy, but you couldn’t be depressed watching it, because you were constantly exhilarated at what a work of bloody genius it was. Have you ever seen it, señors? From the opening scenes in the mining town, where you meet this appalling, tender-hearted ogre who protects little birds but is willing to kill his fellow men with a backhand blow, to his astonishing transformation into a
dentist
, for Christ’s sake, to the banal and doomed love story with the girl who won the lottery—their degeneration, she into a grasping harpy, he into a bestial drunk—and the murder, the chase across the desert, the final scenes where the poor monster finds himself handcuffed to a dead man on the floor of Death Valley, the last frames where he watches the expiring flutters of the damn canary he’s brought along with him, cage and all, on his flight from justice—I tell you, it beats Hamlet for craziness and black humor in tragedy. Not a ray of hope in a frame of it.
So why did we sit there enthralled for nine hours, never saying a word? The last frames unrolled, the progressively longer shots of the wretched mortal’s end winked out, and the screen went white. It was 0500 hours. There was silence but for Juan Bautista’s stifled sob.
“That poor canary,” he gasped.
Imarte began to applaud, and we all joined in, even Juan Bautista. And I think our applause counted for something. We’re immortals, after all. We’ve watched history itself unspool before our eyes. It takes a lot to impress us. So even though the real Erich von Stroheim had yet to be born on the night we watched
Greed
, I hope his shade heard our ovation for his butchered masterpiece. I hope he was appeased, somewhere, somehow.
I WAS SO IMPRESSED with the film, I accessed the text of
McTeague
and read it through in the following days, as the inn drowsed between stagecoach visits.
On a good day we got two passing through, pausing long enough to let off or pick up mail or passengers. If one of the horses was in need of attention, Porfirio got out his farrier’s tools while the passengers wandered up and down our little canyon or availed themselves of our remarkably clean and tidy outhouse. Imarte would hurry to entertain them; if it was a group of mixed couples, she’d leave off the feather boa and play gracious hostess rather than daughter of joy. She’d do whatever it took to get them talking to her about themselves. There were in-depth interviews with an Italian opera singer headed for San Francisco, a Scot in a genuine kilt (sporran and all), two Basque wool magnates who might have been identical twins though they weren’t, and a Mormon patriarch from San Bernardino, who proposed marriage to Imarte on half an hour’s acquaintance. She was genuinely regretful at having to turn him down. (“What an incredible opportunity to study a fascinating mutation of American folk morality!”) I mostly slunk away into the oaks when passengers were around. Mortals got on my nerves, these
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