Rooms Extract 3: SETS AND SETTINGS I

BITING POINT

Mike Kelley talked about a common failure in visual literacy, the viewing of film as a kind of nature. Immersed in this held world doused with internal congruity, its image appears tenable and the mind forgoes the knowledge of its edges, that it has been fabricated.

What is the climax of a work’s coming together, the biting point that allows its appearing as nature. It is, I think, an individual measure, and its possibility grows (quite freely) in the human brain.

In set making, and reality making too, the face of its architecture, like the façade of culture (that invisible hand of thinking) produces effects unrelated to their core. That tree is not a tree (neither is that shelved glass).

Semblances easily demolished for the next big thing. Involving the frame reveals an image’s flatness, and allows a peak into blinkered lucidity.

Leaning back on old times, the strings of it all appear quite clearly: susceptibility is a dangerous enemy. I’m working to fix it in me.

SUNDAY SET

A friend with access invites me to a dormant film set, to explore in the realworld of fiction and coax it out of itself. A security firm lingers outside, but their jurisdiction does not go so far as in. Inside, ghosted by the myriad employments of its weekday populace, reeks of absent action. There are levels to this. The film’s detritus (both of form and content) become merged by inertia: a spilled bag of ball bearings on a fake wooden walkway (the wood staying real); new old-fashioned brooms in the apparent entrances to shops, opening only to cupboards storing film equipment; sculptures of chicken meat in windows, and before them, real vegetables in carts, fresh and edible (a sly squeeze of a pear leverages context to check for texture). So much is made for two dimensions. A lot of it a trick. A kitchen drawer, unless invited by the script, remains empty, unable to open. I move through these weights of reality. The act of walking through it, separating out experience: from first-hand wonder to second-hand searching for writable matter.

Tapping on walls, comparing my sight with the touch of the bricks, to find that some are hollow and light, some grating on an unbelieving hand.

Trees growing from the apparent inside of buildings, the set with its back to things like nature that cuts through its living space, through to what isn’t really there.

The exit is a door into a muddied landscape — trucks and such that tore up the surrounding grass. Mud and dust in all of it.

My notebook: To write against the set’s compulsions, against its narrative slant — agitation.

(A WENDY) BETWEEN TWO K’S

I had been asked to write through the character of Wendy Torrance as shaped by Stanley Kubrick (and played by Shelley Duvall) in The Shining.

I had done all the research (the fun of it!) reading Stephen Kings’ book in four days, and its sequel in the days that followed, transcribing the slippages in translation from book to film. Despite Kubrick’s whittled version of King’s fuller character, Duvall’s portrayal puts a lot of life back in Wendy. I took notes from the home screen concentrating on dialogue, then watched on the big screen concentrating on it all: music and props, background and fore; lighting; fake snow; scale model mazes; low angles on the Steadicam; knitted woollen jumpers; Southwester wall hangings; and amazingly, noticing each country’s prop translation for all work and no play.

Having fully prepared, I then forgot all about it, and it was only on seeing Wendy’s knife, the real deal, on exhibition in London that I remembered guiltily my forgotten Wendy.

The knife (its glint) held by the ghost of a ghost (of a ghost) between prop, actor and maker, a many-substituted (fictional) person adumbrated by this (probably blunt) blade, this cut out shadow of realness. Who held that knife? Duvall, King or Kubrick? Where did Wendy go?

Too excited to focus on one single thing, I construct a list of writing tasks:

1. Write about a character doing something A character is doing something. The action is described and complete within a short story or a sentence, but the rest of that character’s world has to hide behind that sentence, unwritten, yet affecting every letter in every word, every choice in every articulation of its being. For each word to have its own full and flexible logic. That is what you mean.

2. Write against the prop of her character Identify her limits and inhabit them. Learn all of her given lines by King and Kubrick, thought and voice. Read what she read. Love her son like she did. Learn these bounds and spread that shattered character somewhere further.

3. Consider: What would a prop museum be for Wendy?

A phone call between two disappointed mothers; a snowmobile without fuel; a small library of Shirley Jackson, Samuel Pepys and Algernon Blackwood; the inhabited reek of cigarettes; a tray of breakfast items, trembling; a mirror to hold up to her self-effacement in service of her son and husband; a knife shepherded from the kitchen.

4. Visit the Design Museum’s exhibition of Kubrick’s props Consider a props’ existence, out of time with its own real live. How mutated by a chain of encounters, these protagonists caught in the act of space are recasting life and all its fuss with believable complexity.

Consider their journey from one realm to another. Consider the narrative impact of a prop without its user. Place (don’t touch!) one prop beside the other, and in Kuleshov’s terms, consider if this new sequencing makes gains in meaning.

Experiment with juxtaposed props from the same film, then from a mix of films. Consider its meaning in the prop of the museum, then take it home and consider it on your shelf.

Kuleshov your point with Ben Lerner’s when he writes about the Institute for Totalled Art, that sometimes people just stop believing in things.

5. Act yourself into the film’s world Minimise interactions with other people to minimise resultant stress or anxiety, unshelf the memory of your friend reciting annoyance at a studio mate who asks daily: What are you doing today? to combat your own heard recitations.

Think of a shop windows, a terrarium, a vitrine: a constrained scene, static and impenetrable, viewed from the outside. Think of how writing is like acting too.

We are a character now. We understanding completely the vagueness of that. We’re thinking about the day before, our first therapy session, our last piece of meat. We’re learning to play with the tone of I, learning how to separate our me from it. We’re part of that inner circle, holding that knife, Duvall, King, Kubrick I.