24 Hour Psycho
A good chunk of the narrative is given over to the protagonist’s obsession with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho being slowed down to last twenty-four hours from beginning to end. It is a new way of looking of the movie, but also a new way experiencing reality:
“He was in place, as always, his place, in body contact with the north wall. People in uneasy passage, in and out. They would stay longer, he thought, if there were chairs or benches here. But any kind of seating arrangement would sabotage the concept. The bare setting, and the darkness, and the chill air, and the guard motionless at the door. The guard purified the occasion, made it finer and rarer. But what was he guarding? The silence maybe. Or the screen itself. They might climb the screen and claw it, tourists from the movie malls.”
Rendition
Everything that the narrative proceeds to cover begins with the word “rendition.” Or, to be more precise, a lengthy explication of the variants of definition and connotation of the word “rendition” as written by the story’s protagonist:
“What lay between these sentences was a study of the word rendition, with references to Middle English, Old French, Vulgar Latin and other sources and origins. Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering — a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. From this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition— a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated.”
The Jerry Lewis Telethon Movie
Torture is at the center of the novel and more than one person’s idea of torture would be watching a film made of the Jerry Lewis Telethon by one of the characters in the film. He is a particularly inventive—or creative or even possibly slightly mentally disturbed artist—whose cinematic visions quickly fly off the radar of anything remotely resembling the mainstream:
“I edited out all the guest appearances, the lounge acts, movie stars, dancers, disabled children, the studio audience, the band. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting the nation's love and wonder at four in the morning, in closeup, a crew-cut sweating man in semidelirium, a disease artist, begging us to send money to cure his afflicted children.”
The Avant-Garde Filmmaker
What kind of imagery would be suitable as an efficient portrait of the type of mind the conceives making a film such as the Jerry Lewis telethon pastiche described above. This is avant-garde cinema that goes beyond the avant-garde. Gus Van Sant did a shot-by-shot remake of Psycho and was called nearly every bad name in the book. What would be left to call a filmmaker consumed by the idea of what can be gleaned from the original by slowing it down to last an entire day? This is the type of imagery best left to significant others:
“My wife said to me once, `Film, film, film. If you were any more intense, you'd be a black hole. A singularity, she said. `No light escapes.’"
