Fancy Goes to the Movies

Every day she retires. “Each day is a day worth living,” said she and she expires. Every day she keeps her keep—her heart—on her sieve like a Johnny Apple Seed sowing in small parts of American fabric. She keeps this her daily bread and gives us her self. It’s the dough that she’s earned and she’s earned it—she’s earning and kneaded into two pound cakes. Every day she retires and kneads and she quells it. She punches it down just to let it rise again—only to start over, only to punch it down once more. Time and time again she does this like a stop clock. Yet, all the while, she makes a life worth living by that good ol’ American past time: the cinema.

After a day of long hard work, Fancy likes to kicks off her shoes. This is what she likes to do. Every day she kicks off her shoes and retires with trajectory. Every day she retires and transforms and is transformative. This is the way she does it. She does it when she dons and is leaden with a shawl made woolen. She makes it a night on the town. Wraps shawl about shoulders—ties shoes. She makes it a night on the town and heads to the theater.

All of her troubles melt away when the lights dim low and the curtains draw. Only among the stars and silver can she rise above her toil and trod; only before pictures can she rise above the existence of hum drum, above the ethical workings of a plan-old-gal living—a heroine who, no matter how plain she may be, wants just a little slice of adventure, just a crust of experience.

“Only a small piece,” Fancy says, “thank you very much.” A nip, a bite, a scratch. Never too hungry and never too full, never more than she needs: only enough to turn her bread into moving image, only enough to turn water into wine.

Just a spoon full of sugar, just a scrap. Fancy wants a bit of transcendence. She never asks for much, she’s not one who takes handouts, but she very much likes to go to the movies. Each day and ever day she goes to there in a dream. Each day she goes and each day it’s raining and pouring and of course the old man is snoring as it is often so in the industrial city of riveted seams. Many men in the city are filing out from warehouses and into the streets. They are all so strange, simple and true. I say these characters look like the Dickens’ in this city so full with the expired and the retired and the machines made like monsters--the sky gray and raining.

This is most certainly not novel—this is not the Dickens’ but only just like it. This is to put it bluntly one of many a fancy fangled dreams as Fancy seems to be dreaming of pictures. Imagine, we move deep into her subconscious, past grey matter, past material, past her electrical circuit trees—past it all we move into what counts, into what makes really Fancy tick. One, two, and three makes an apocalypse out of Fancy. We move further into her, deeper inside her we look and resurrect her dream.

What Fancy wants more than anything else are pictures. PICTURES! She is a simple child of God and we are very careful to note the character of her nature. We are very careful to demarcate the motivation. To calculate her most worrisome preoccupations. She is very young and she is very tall—that was the observation. Now note the implication and write it—transcribe it for future review. Most importantly, what can it say? What can the deduction say to the nature of you?

“Who ARE you?” Was it the caterpillar or the cheshire cat who said it so plainly and to a point always with the emphasis falling on you? Why must he rain and patter above us with a mouth like a moon? Why must he gaze with ferocity, why must his implications always fall on the ground like a shoe? Paddle pat, simply insinuations made by some cat—an insinuated you. The only problem is I don’t like who you are insinuating. The argument is, as “the story” goes, that this is merely some dream of Fancy. And just who might said Fancy be precisely? What is the nature of her being? Oh, she is whoever I or you or we wants her to be. In and other “words,” sometimes she wants to go there and it’s raining there. Sometimes it is and other “times” it is not.

It’s always that, it’s the dream sometimes. Fancy’s always getting out of the car except this time there’s an awning above the box office and music from a french film falls from the sky. This time awning’s steel or aluminum but red this red one makes that awning-in-the-rain-sound that hail-on-a-tin-roof sound this red one this red awning sound.

Red. That’s got to “mean” something. Red always means the worst of things. It’s probably just her repressed sexuality making a cameo half way through the dream; these gals have got a real streak of girl-on-girl action burning behind their brides—I mean eyes. And upon the movement of breezes pouring from flower laden meadows, and upon the delicate lifting of her woolen shawl and hood, our dear heroine, repressed, sweet pied and bright eyed, faces a stark reality: she realizes she’s really not warring any paints. She has failed her first university exam and, to make matters worse, she accidently invited her ex boyfriend who didn’t show. That bastard. Stood her up again. In the dream.

She forgets the boyfriend, now only being interested in the things that show. It’s late at night inside the box office. A delicate youth stands under a single fluorescent light. His features are all aglow and al contoured and it’s all a bit like a Rockwell painting and all the while the single fluorescent light is making a hiss all about itself—buzzing, flickering, turning on and off the beauty of the delicate youth’s face. It’s got that fluorescent-light-in-a-quickie-mart-sound, just like the sound you hear in the movies when you know something really sleazy is about to happen like a murder, a robbery or a ghost.

But this isn’t a movie, it’s a dream about a movie although sometimes Fancy’s dreams are like movies. In them she is so completely pixilated and divine and digital. She is ex machina always in the dream. She can do just about anything. She is a just like a doctor.

In the dream it’s late at night. The movie Fancy’s about to see—it isn’t porn. A movie late at night doesn’t always mean porn although sometime it does. This particular movie is a bit like porn: there’s curiosity involved. She’s compelled to pay, something draws her to move forward and seat herself, all for the sake of watching something she’s not supposed to see.

It’s not that she’s not supposed to see it, it’s that she can’t see it completely. Physics won’t let her and she doesn’t have a real experience to qualify. What’s worse, others won’t loan her their experiences or let her live inside of them. She’s forced into this plastic and polyester, she can’t help but substitute the living world with the movement of light and shadow; she can’t help but substitute intimacy for the image.

She can’t help but substitute it for the imagined experience. Some won’t give it up. The experience. They won’t give it to her and money can’t buy the real thing. All too often the best of life has to offer requires a compliant third party. All the same, others have died with it and without having shared it and she wants to hear the telling of it with kinetics and their names in lights. She wants to see it to scale as if it were happening in real time, as if it were something real to herself, for nothing can possibly be real to oneself without one having seen it and felt it firsthand.

Always in the dream Fancy has a body. There is a definite sense of body inside her. In vertebra exist small pin pricks. They feel just like the carving of an apple. What are they exactly? They are her sense of wanting. It’s the it that she wants and she wants it. It’s a desire to open up the historic film as if they were a woman, to part the slender legs of time and peer inside a period piece. She wants to play doctor. To doctor up time. If only she could render it and stitch it and suture it up whole. So badly she wants to tear it apart just to put it back together again. She calls it push pull. She loves damaged goods and she is the doctor.

The youth hands her a ticket. It would be a cliché to say such adolescences looks like a pock marked moon. There’s only room for only one moon in this story as this face makes more of a ruin. This is his landscape usurped by an army of Rome, his five o’clock foreshadow foretelling the ruins about to unfold on film.

O our oracle, our sweet youth under light. Conflict is inevitable. So is resolution. That makes an arc out of it although I heard this film was supposed to be independent.

Fancy finds the inside of the theater strange. The man taking her ticket is old. He is unable to retire with grace and economy and his hands shake from all our ages.

He takes the ticket into his hands, it is the embodiment of her presence, a historic event made material, evidence of her purchase and of the scenes about to unfold.

Slowly he wraps his fingers around the ticket. His wrists tighten, ligaments pull their spindle threads and his old hands separate. The ticket’s gives way at the center, unwinding, perforated and gear edged just like the turning of the century; just like the opening of a zipper and modernity, for a nation can never be truly civilized without first having learned to zip up its pants.

Say, why aren’t there any other people inside this theater? When was the last time someone came through this concession stand, the popcorn hasn’t been touched in at least half a year. This might be an all-elusive, undiscovered hideaway. It is all so lost and virginal, the soda machine might as well be El Dorado and Fancy Cortez with the sugar so youthful—young as bubble gum and glycerin.

Fancy steps up to the concessions as one approaching a bar at a saloon. She thinks about saying something like “howdy” but thinks better of it. She orders herself up a tall popcorn and grape soda. The popcorn tastes a bit like styrofoam, but that’s part of the appeal. Everyone likes to taste a little bit of antiquity from time to time. It’s like eating the coliseum.

.

Fancy enters the theater, moves center—seats self. Then it’s soda left and popcorn right. The curtain. draw and house lights dim like dusk well dwelled. Now tungsten threads cool and tungsten threads quiver. Like fine oil this light scatters and litters. From the house embers quiet and shiver. This is the last light—a dusk before the showing, a kindling before matinee.

Everything out and everything dimed. Everything like a fire that dies. Last spark. Out from the dark the scene emerges from a point source—a dot.

Eyes of Fancy widen, scopes unfold. Story steps out from binding—story unravels its scrolls. Out from the dark the scene begins to materialize, begins to take a form. The point opens like a mouth. Then wide, then wide, then wider.


FADE IN:

This epic begins with a pan: a slender conifer covered in snow. The shape is almost familiar. The shape is a female form.

Then angle widens.

Enter mountain town, enter barracks.

EXT. FORT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON - DAY

INT. SOLDIER’S QUARTERS - DAY

A SOLDIER sits on his cot. He is lacing up his shoes. First he works the left foot. Then he work the right foot: in and out all the way up to his shins. Then tying comes in: twice the rabbit runs around the tree, then down the rabbit goes into his rabbit hole. Thus the tie is made and made completely.

He ends the ritual of his shoes by stuffing the ends of his pants into his boots.
They are parachute paints, but way before MC Hammer.

He stands. From his cot he picks up the letter he’s been writing all afternoon.

THE LETTER

Dear Dorothy, I hope the photos weren’t too edited because I have the picture. I’m proud to say I’ve seen the worst in Italy.

BACK TO SCENE

He signs the letter and turns to face a mirror hanging above the cot.

His features make an outline, one can almost see his face.

.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

One can almost see his face.

(a beat)

He is my grandfather.

He looks down. He hopes the photos weren’t too edited.
He has the picture.

THE LETTER

He crosses out his original signature. Pauses. Signs the letter once more.
He scrawls in black ink a large elegant L . The signature appears slowly.

SOLDIER(V.O.)

Love

(a beat)

Bob.

FADE OUT.