I Am The B-Roll
The last days and nights of Marlon Brando; nobody believes 'Rebecca'; believing 'American History X'
He is alone in the screening room, in the basement under the stairs. Nicholas is up in the kitchen, but Garby is nowhere. Garby is not in the house.
“Where is Garby?” he yelled, upstairs, before he came down. “He took the car,” said Nicholas, upstairs, before he went down.
Now he has gone down. Deep. Down in the dark under the stairs. First, he’d checked from a front window. Indeed, Garby’s silver machine had vanished from the drive. Johnny had wanted that car. But Garby wouldn’t give the car to Johnny. Peter was still sleeping, or he was out with his old friends again. There had been no one to talk to, really. It made no difference.
There is the dream. A silver dream on a wall. Lost souls dream. Lost voices fill a room. Lost dreamers, dreaming of Manderley.
Daphne du Maurier never knew this particular vision. It was never on her page—her pages. For her, the dream had started a decade before this coil, this unspooled celluloid, could wrap around it. Squeezing it. The film was a boa constrictor. It was a constricting python of dreams.
Once, it had been her vision. Still, what a horrible mangling of the murder. How foolishly the cuckolding wife falls backwards into the tackle. The splitting of her head. Unconscionable. The dream cannot convince anyone of this truth. It can’t, because it is a hollow dream and it is unconvincing. No audience can see this dream and think it’s true. Not the accidental fall. Not the splitting open. Not the pulley block. Not the pile of rope.
Maybe these things do happen, but they should never happen on a screen. Never in the silver. Never in the flickering beam. Never in a dream. The stuff of concrete daylight, not the shivering silver dram, the measure—and more than the measure due—poured from some innocent projector. The film projector does not know what it does.
He thinks about the picture they showed him last week. Black boot on the foot of a black kid. The big actor, not the black kid, is on that upward rise. He is undoubtedly on that skyward trajectory. A boot to the back of the black head. The black mouth biting the curb. Anyone could believe that. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark. Anyone could believe it because everyone saw it on the news.
Down here, though, things had to be different. It took a special kind of trick to be believed.
Sitting in front of it, unbelieving, he lifts the orb of his glass, which balances atop its stem, which emerges from a base that looks like the silicon cups they connect to his chest. To his breasts. He thought he stopped drinking wine. But this is a Bordeaux. Who is he to say what goes to waste and what does not?
Besides, the tannins draw the old-age out of his mouth. The tannins make him dry and flammable again. He is ready to be infused. Freshened. Stood up. He is not this moist thing in this moistening dark. If there was one wish left to him: to be no longer damp, and out of the dark. Forever never comes. The minerality rushes in. He swallows the Bordeaux. All gone.
On the wall, Mrs. de Winter is perfectly dumb. She is dumb as paint. Up there, the man, Maxim, is deeply retarded, too. Which is to say, he is dumb in his head but not in his heart. Finally, it takes the friend—the chaste, asinine, and faithful Frank—to clarify, to tell the story of reality so that it can be believed. To say it in the right way. To tell the truer truth. Which is the true reality of death on the boat. It takes Frank’s words to tell it. More words than her dumb husband ever says. Will ever say. Donning his cap. Sheathed in his tight little tuxedo for the ball. Impervious. Poofter. Half-man. Uber-man. Mensch.
The ghost of Laurence Olivier chases some lustful cousin who climbs through windows. The phantom lingers, hating the cousin who claims and claws at his new soft wives. Poor, sweet, faithful Frank, floating in the wings, the only man who will ever tell Mrs. de Winter the truth. Or something like the truth. The truer truth. She’ll take whatever she can get.
She sits in a room of her own, in which a projection also flickers. In the image of her projection, she honeymoons. She kisses Maxim. She is alone in her own room, at the end of her own scene, her cheeks en-strobed.
I always felt like I was behind the scenes of the scenes.
I am the B-roll.
