The following is a short story, written by me, previously unpublished.
One note of preface: haunted as I am by an online incident in which an acquaintance was lambasted for revealing plot details of the then-elusive and daunting Out 1 (1971), I feel obliged to mention that the following similarly describes critical scenes from the movie Sátántangó (1994).
On the morning of the long movie, Henry almost didn’t go. He lifted the blinds from the bedroom window and saw the grey sky, felt the cold through the pane of glass. He considered the task before him, which he had begun to dread like a long-delayed errand. It was a Saturday morning in February, the first of two scheduled screenings of the long movie to take place this weekend, with no plans for encores the following weekend. He could not wait and go to the Sunday show, because the forecast called for several inches of snow overnight, and he did not want to risk the possibility that the roads would be in too poor condition to make the drive. Plus, the anticipation of a difficult passage would not only contribute to his stress in the days and hours before the screening, but would hang over the viewing itself, in turn making him nervous and distracted and negating the entire point of the trip in the first place.
Still, as the date had approached, drained from the events of the previous few weeks, he had felt the usual malaise and resentfulness about making the drive into town, wondering if he would feel in the right frame of mind to take on the task that day. He had steeled his will to get up and make the preparations that morning no matter what. The nature of the screening compelled him to go; the archive would have shipped the movie, seven and a half hours long, at no inconsiderable expense and at risk to the film print itself. In a real sense the screening was an accident. To complement the initiative taken by the theater to program it, the archive had to have some lapse in judgment or discipline to allow the print out of their vault. It was a sort of cosmic weather event, like a meteor shower, one where he had a favorite seat waiting for him, provided he left early enough.
As anticipation took him over, Henry started about his preparations. He was thinking of the timetable he had not written down but that loomed clearly in his mind, the structure of schedule that patterned his work life and his recreation. It would take him at least forty minutes to drive to the city, find a parking spot and get to the theater thirty minutes early. That meant, now, that he had only thirty-five minutes to prepare and leave the house, which would be barely more than he needed. After checking these calculations, he showered, and in the bathroom decided against shaving the stubble on his face which might provide a little warmth if the theater proved chilly. He dressed in his sweater and his heaviest pair of jeans, slipping on his boots as he sat on the edge of his bed. When he got up and entered the living room, the thud of sole against carpet announced the seriousness of his intentions. He filled the cat’s bowls with food and water and set them in their appointed place. He got the sandwich things out of the fridge and put mustard, ham, cheese, and pickles together on four slices of bread. These he put in plastic wrap and into his lunch sack with an icepack, which would keep the sandwiches cold most of the day. The sack went into the backpack, which he slung over a coat onto his shoulders, and Henry went out the door.
The drive to the city consisted mostly of long stretches of highway. This was the dead of winter, the worst time of year, and Henry reminded himself he was lucky for this window of manageable weather, where the roads were clear and he had only the cold and the wind to contend with on his journey. As he approached the toll bridges, stuck in a creeping bottleneck, he turned on the radio and tuned it to various local stations, playing the news, classical and contemporary music. He remembered the drives when he had listened to baseball games; he liked hearing sports announced on the radio, the excitement of the commentators coming and going like the crest of a wave, the ambience of the crowd noise and the occasional crack of a bat, the secret logic of the statistics he didn’t entirely understand. He imagined himself as an athlete, maybe a paunchy one gone to seed, with years of figures and percentages to characterize his history ready at hand: number of films averaged per year, career naps taken during films, longest continuous time spent in a theater. That last number, yes sir, the announcer said, I think he might make a play for that record today.
After winding through the snarled highway traffic and then the confusing off-ramps in the heart of downtown, he found himself on the side streets of the city, burrowing through residential areas and past dive bars and playgrounds. His eyes lingered on the baseball stadium as he passed it, the vacant structure awaiting the resumption of its season. Finally, he found the parking deck he had used a few times before, four blocks from the theater. He pulled into a space on the first level and pocketed the ticket. Then he got out, pulled his coat tight around him as a gust of wind welcomed him to the city streets, and walked the distance to the theater, right on schedule.
The theater had been a grand movie palace at one point, and now was a sort of amateur museum to that idea, kept up by loving patrons of the arts but no longer a seat of majestic power. The marquee had been restored decades before and would be due for more work soon, if it ever came. The title of the long movie beckoned to him, black, slightly crooked lettering from the sign that probably should have been lit against the cloudy skies. He hustled forward past the ophthalmologist, the pizzeria and the coffee shop and found to his disappointment that there was already a line. A short one, but a line nonetheless, which he had to join at the back.
Standing behind a group of three men who were chatting and laughing in low voices, Henry pulled off his cap and gloves and fidgeted with his hands in his coat pockets. He fingered the card in his wallet, as if having it ready now would make the transaction go faster. He was now at the point in the moviegoing routine where small interactions took on ritual significance; he wanted for the staff to recognize him and think of him as a regular, although he would never want more attention than a glimmer of recognition in a cashier’s eyes. When he reached the head of the line, however, the worker did not remember him, or was enough of a pro to make that flicker of memory indistinguishable from the cool practice of the job. The card and ticket changed hands, he moved on.
He walked around to the snack counter, thinking of the sandwiches in his bag and of the financials of the theater business, figuring that he owed the theater at least the face value of a popcorn and a black coffee, an underrated flavor combination. In part because of his history in service jobs and also what he thought of as a hereditary male interest in the economics of small businesses, he could not keep himself from estimating how much the theater was taking in on a given screening. It was possible that the terms the film print was being rented to them were favorable, but given the high cost of shipping the several film cans and the limited number of seven-to-eight hour screenings they were able to program, he reasoned the movie palace would be lucky to break even on the weekend. It was with this sense of sober magnanimity that he paid for the coffee and popcorn in cash and left his change on the counter.
Henry walked up to the auditorium doors with twenty-six minutes to go before the show, having budgeted to arrive thirty minutes early. Any earlier than that, he thought, was excessive. There existed a type of person who arrived an hour or more early for such screenings and he was not that type. They risked not being able to get into the theater for too long a period, having to stand outside either becoming cold and soaked by the elements, constructing some makeshift shelter like a tent or at the very least standing underneath a golf umbrella. Either way called far too much attention to oneself, while later than thirty minutes was running a risk that he would not get his choice of seat. So many people started to arrive after that window, with a crush around the twenty minute mark. He felt certain that thirty minutes was reasonable for this event, which was rare enough to attract a crowd, but sufficiently daunting that a sold out show was unlikely.
Entering the aisle, Henry’s eyes went at once to his desired seat. Exactly eight rows back from the front, on the right side, the aisle seat, where he might be able to lean his knee out to get comfortable. He walked with purpose at first, then more slowly, then with a sinking feeling as he saw that the dim shape was a man in, not the row ahead, but exactly in his desired seat. How could this have happened? He had no one to blame but himself. Middle-aged and elderly filmgoers were like local wildlife. He was really on their turf, and it was no use trying to wheedle one out of their chosen spot. So set were they in their routines that it might be best to steer clear, perhaps choose a seat even further away, to avoid having to push past them at intermissions or the sound of some eccentric habit, like frequent consulting with program notes or a bag of candies being unwrapped, as he had witnessed before.
He realized that he was standing in the middle of the aisle and looked around, letting an older woman push past him with an apologetic nod. He squinted at the screen from his position, about twenty rows back. It was closer to the rear than he liked to sit, but this row might do fine. He had the full screen in view and it was not so far back that he would regret the distance and feel as though he was watching on a large TV. He sat in the aisle seat, experimenting with his usual posture, tilted slightly toward the center of the screen, one folded leg bent out into the aisle. Yes, he would adjust to this. He tucked his bag underneath the seat and settled in to watch the auditorium fill.
More or less it did. The auditorium contained, he knew, around 800 seats, and he estimated that at least a quarter of them were full, putting the attendance around 200 before the show started. He was a little disappointed; although he had never seen the place full, he thought more would come for this kind of occasion. Perhaps in years past, as the construction of this palatial auditorium implied, he would have had to fight for elbow and leg room. Here, no one seemed in danger of squeezing in next to him, so as showtime crept nearer he slung his bag into the seat at his right.
As a stooped man with a curtain of silver hair climbed onto the stage and, clutching notes in a soiled sheaf, began introducing the movie along with the house rules — please no phones, two intermissions of ten minutes each — Henry shifted in his seat and looked around at the audience. He saw young couples and older couples, a few groups of three or four people, in young and middle age, but mostly he saw solitary-looking men, many of them approaching old age. Most of them wore heavy coats, some had thick glasses, few of them had a full head of hair. He imagined a number of them were locally known poets or bloggers with an intense forensic knowledge of the city’s cultural life. He wondered how often they were at this theater, if they knew each other, corresponded.
The introductory remarks wrapped up. With a flutter of excitement Henry turned back to the screen, thrilling to the almost imperceptible dimming of the house lights as it began. As the room faded to a comfortable darkness, the screen took on a pale luminescence, a threatening, ghastly white in the shadows, like a glacier emerging from the ocean. The projector sped to life somewhere in the rear and the glow became a whispering black. As he contemplated the silent opening credits, he thought of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They could have been the same credits, forbidding white letters in an inscrutable language, containing their own wry jokes on the sorts of people who saw long foreign movies. He took a sip of his coffee and held it in both hands, drawing the warmth from it.
The opening shot faded in. It was also in black and white, a wide shot of a muddy field of cows. Some old, decayed buildings and fencing behind them. A discordant rumbling came from behind the screen, a sound of reverberating bells. The camera tracked slowly along with the wandering animals. He remembered hearing about this shot years before, that the film began with nothing but cows for several minutes, he wasn’t sure how many, maybe ten. That was where the legend of this film had been created in his mind, as a teenager reading about it on forums. Just cows, he’d thought, that sounded really intense. Watching it now, he found the experience intriguing, unsure whether the cows were meant to be aware of the ominous soundtrack. It seemed as though they were experiencing the portent along with him. After a period between five and ten minutes, the cows wandered offscreen altogether and the shot faded away. That wasn’t bad, he thought to himself, with some confident amusement. I was enjoying that shot. I could have stood to watch cows for several more minutes than that.
The narration murmured to life and he began to settle into the experience. This really wasn’t so unusual a film. The takes were long, which he had expected, but the camera was not entirely static. It moved and carried him along with purpose. He didn’t feel punished, made to sit and watch squalid images in discomfort. There was a stark beauty to its play of light and shadow. When the stringy-haired woman turned toward the camera for the first time, he was shocked to find that the actress was beautiful, which was silly, because actresses tended to be. A narrative began to take shape, a love triangle, a dispute over money, a possible con job. The characters heard a knock at the door and then news of old neighbors thought to be dead returning to town. Excitement leapt within him as he grasped the contours of a mystery, his brain scattering across the possibilities of narrative here. This would be an enjoyable afternoon in the hands of a great storyteller, like a day spent in front of a fire with a thick novel. He stretched his shoulders and slid down a little in his seat.
The characters who had dominated the first passage of the film disappeared and the narration introduced new ones. There was a long shot of them walking through a windswept town. Their faces were obscured. Henry glanced up at the architecture of the theater. He noticed the scrollwork around the screen faintly visible through the dim glow emanating from the images. Looking left and right he saw alcoves almost like perches for statues of saints in a church. He reasoned that at one point they had probably contained speakers for the sound system. He glanced back at the screen. The wind still howled and the men walked on.
At the first intermission Henry leapt out of his seat, which he regretted immediately, as if his quick reaction meant that he hadn’t been fully engaging with the film. He was one of the first in line for the restroom and relieved himself quickly, only bumping shoulders with a few other men as they hustled in and out of the cramped facilities. He checked his pocket for his ticket — out of the paranoid instinct that he might not be allowed back in without it, although he was sure the staff at the theater would recognize him or would understand — and for his cigarettes. Exiting into the cold exterior air he stopped just short of walking out from under the marquee and lit up, pocketing his little plastic lighter and taking a greedy drag. The cigarette was an impossibly indulgent comfort on a windy day, but he held it like a little dagger, his lone weapon against the elements. He looked about and saw a few other moviegoers, mostly solitary men or couples, but also one middle-aged woman in a knit cap with a large bag, smoking underneath the marquee.
Henry observed again the group of three men that looked to be about his age, whom he had stood behind in the ticket line earlier, all varying sizes of the same bearded man in glasses and coats. They had arrived together, but were not speaking to each other now. He understood this, it would not make sense to discuss the film as they were watching it, almost like jurors forbidden to discuss the trial before deliberations. It would be an incomplete picture. At the same time he felt a stab of inexplicable and shameful loathing for the three men. He knew it was jealousy, that he understood the act of going to the long movie alone to be a perverted activity, and if these men were similar perverts they enjoyed a camaraderie of perversion that was closed off to him. He resented his own longing for company, for not being fulfilled by the movie alone. He finished his cigarette and went back to his seat.
As the show resumed, Henry reflected on the experience so far. He did not feel his patience being tested as he had expected it might. He liked the way that long, steady takes following behind the characters walking down muddy roads would end by rising into the air on a crane. It felt like the movie had put him on its back and was carrying him toward a destination. He thought of his first experiences with longer films, the experimental sort where shots of faces, buildings, or domestic routines were elongated and filled out the runtime. In all those cases he had begun expecting some reckoning with his own capacity for boredom, that the films would not only be enriching artistic encounters but healthy acts of self-discipline requiring him to step outside a world that catered to and conditioned short attention spans. Perhaps the other movies were prelude to this one, training runs for the marathon, the long movie that made best use of all the tools of narrative and image at its disposal.
This section of the film was more difficult. There was a young girl involved now. He felt his chest tighten. He wondered if some danger would befall her. The tone of the movie was such that nothing would surprise him, but still, he hadn’t been led to believe that the film featured anything extreme — and, were it to turn in that direction, he would be too trapped by his investment of time and attention to allow himself to look away. So he kept his eyes on the screen as a scene unfolded involving the girl and her pet, a shabby barn cat, as it appeared to suffer intense pain. He would have to look up later how they accomplished the scene. Surely if a cat had actually been tortured during the film he would have heard that beforehand. That would be the first thing that came up when he typed the movie’s title into a search engine. He let his eyes unfocus and kept them on a point a little to the left of the main action. He grimaced and twisted his back into the seat.
The girl was suffering. She felt guilt over what she had done to the animal. An unexpected pang of feeling rose within him, something the movie had not inspired thus far, with its atmosphere of chilly absurdity. The young actress’s face was to the camera as she trudged through the countryside in search of help. He had an instinctive reaction to her tired appearance, this errand of shame and penance. He cleared his throat, putting a hand to his mouth to stifle the sound. Within another few shots, which could have lasted one or ten minutes each, the girl had perished in a bed of leaves alongside her stiff and emaciated pet. This was the crux of the movie, he realized as the next chapter unfolded, and all the characters converged to mourn the child. This tragedy had brought them together and would drive them outwards from the village. Now the pangs of sympathy that had ripped through him mixed with the thrill of the narrative gathering itself up into a legible shape. The pattern emerged before him, the movie transformed. Then the screen darkened out again.
The lights came up to their dim intermission level. Henry thought to stay in his seat, then jumped up and stepped out into the aisle so that an old woman could push past him to the exit. He sat down again and retrieved the sandwiches from his bag. He ate with deliberation. The mustard had soaked into the bread. He wondered if the tang and spice of the mustard was a flavor known to the characters in the movie, who seemed to subsist on liquor and potatoes. Time, geography and politics separated him from their experience. He finished the meal and tucked his bag back under the seat, stood again and stretched. He reached down and touched his ankles — he could almost make it to his toes, but not quite. He realized a woman in the center section was looking at him, and he left the auditorium.
He had to waste a few minutes in line for the restroom, trying to push his annoyance at the outdated facilities out of his head. He looked around and fixed his eye on a peeling scrap of wallpaper at the corner where the hall turned back toward the lobby. He cast his eye up at the obsolete light fixtures, noticing some particulate gathered in the frosted glass, dust or the remains of bugs zapped in electric flash. As the line men shuffled forward he fixed his eye on the soiled edge of a shirt collar poking out from the tweed coat before him. They went on, slotted into narrow stalls, got relief, exited.
Pausing in the lobby to stretch his legs, Henry observed the seconds passing. The disturbance he had felt earlier at being pried out of the rhythm of the movie had diminished, his own thoughts were a murmur underneath the dominant soundtrack of space, air and short movements within the lobby. Overhead the high domed ceiling cast the sounds of mumbled popcorn, coffee and soda orders into little thunderclaps. The paper cups and bags hitting the counter had declarative force. Looking to his left, out the glass doors of the lobby he saw the three men smoking again. He had lost the time to join them, would have to suck down the cigarette in hurried gulps of nicotine. He went to the counter and ordered another coffee instead. Then Henry went back to his seat and in another moment everyone had surrounded him again and the lights were lowered.
As the plot revealed itself to him he found it humorous, in theory. He thought of the cliche of the shaggy dog story which repeats similar episodes in agonizing iterations before a punchline that reveals the meaninglessness of the whole thing. This long movie was kind of like that, but because of its deliberate qualities there might not be a punchline moment. It would instead become funny almost in retrospect, only when the whole shape of the thing was visible. As well he briefly worried that his attention would wander and he would miss the climax of the joke. He felt sorry for the characters, who must have believed that the trials they were suffering were stations of a journey imbued with deep meaning, only to find a cheap trick at the end, if they ever realized it.
One of the final scenes involved the characters reviewing their next steps with each other. Henry grasped its significance, that they were going off to oblivion, and he felt suddenly that this would be the last time many of them were on screen. He still craned his neck up and looked about at the dim glow of the screen cast around on the scrollwork of the proscenium. He looked at the old men in the crowd, wondering how this denouement was unfolding for them. Guilt twinged at him; he had never found himself slipping into total submission to the film. He had imagined an ideal state of viewing where his awareness of time went away completely and the seven-to-eight hours passed like steam rising. He wondered instead if this feeling of awareness and peace with the passage of so many minutes was the thing to be desired instead; if ideas like a projectionist stepping into a movie screen or a matinee idol stepping out were imperfect metaphors; if the aim was not to come out of oneself but to draw further in, to be more receptive, more patient, open.
The long movie wound to its final chapter — it had to be the end, he thought, not with irritation but with assurance borne out of familiarity with the movie’s rhythms — and he found that there was indeed a punchline, a solution to the mystery of the strange sound heard by the cows. He furrowed his brow as the doctor discovered the madman raving and striking at the pendulum in the forgotten bell tower. Someone’s idea of comedy, an absurd solution at the core of an elaborate setup designed to obscure it until the last moment. He articulated a stoned thought: that the movie contained a metaphor for comedy and tragedy bound together in one like a self-consuming snake. In the final shot the doctor boarded up the windows of his house and the final voiceover whispered through the crystalline dark. The credits rolled. The sounds of rustled clothing and deep exhales, scattered applause, murmured reactions and quiet laughter rippled all around him. He waited for the credits to end, feeling rested in every inch of his body. The lights came up, and with the receding tide of the crowd he left the theater.
On the way out, in the muted streetlights of the dusk Henry almost walked into the three smoking men. They noticed how close he had come to them and all three looked him in the eye at the same time. This so destabilized him that Henry reacted reflexively to shorten the silence and blurted, “Bum smoke?”
The second one, who was of medium height, squinted, said, “What?” Then nodded and laughed. “Yeah, bum smoke.” He handed over a cigarette and helped to light it. Then the four of them were standing together.
“Well,” Henry said, “how about that?”
All three of the men were smiling at him with eyes not all the way open. The short one said, “Pretty good,” in a hushed voice, and grinned wider. The other two nodded. “It’s the greatest,” said the tall one.
“I’d never seen it before. Had you?”
The tall one nodded, the others shook their heads. “I had a DVD a long time ago. You take what you can get.”
The second one shrugged. “I figured I’d hold out for this as long’s I could. Turned out it was just long enough.”
The short one had an even dopier grin now. “I just heard about it yesterday.”
The three of them laughed, and Henry joined in with them. He took another puff on the cigarette, so as not to appear ungrateful.
“Thought there might be a bigger crowd.”
The second one’s eyes widened, and he nodded. “It’s been a while since it was even that full.”
“Really?”
“There’s the classic Hollywood festival every fall. That usually does okay. Last year was pretty scary. A lot of regulars dropped out.”
The tall one drew a finger across his throat.
Henry took their meaning. “It’s cool everyone stayed for the whole thing.”
The second one looked pained and the tall one burst out laughing. “He’s thinking of the guy behind us —“
“Oh Jesus. He had an entire bag, he was sucking on, of lozenges —“
They dissolved into giggles. Henry took a long drag.
“Well. Pretty good cow movie.”
They grinned. “Great cow movie,” said the short one, and one by one they put out their cigarettes.
Henry said goodbye to them and did not look back as they walked in separate directions. He returned to the parking deck and found his car as he had left it, no boot on the tire, his windows unmolested. He got inside and let it warm up as he sat there breathing, watching the windshield fog up and then clear with assistance from the wipers. He turned onto the street and began his voyage out of the city. The sun had already set behind the clouds and he turned his lights on as he drove into the darkening grey.
As he drove he felt the effects of the long movie on his perception of time, sensed it expanding around him like a bracelet of rubber drawn tight and then relaxed. He did not turn on the radio, but left the window open a crack, letting the cold air whip through at his ear, the tastes and scents of the coming February night bringing him back to his particular spot of earth. In the rearview mirror as the night fell he could still see the few vehicles stretching back behind him on the road, shrinking dots in an ellipsis trailing off.
At home Henry took off his coat and let himself warm up in an armchair. Time wobbled around him again as he sat. He blinked and a minute passed without awareness. The cat found his way to his shoulder, sniffing the coffee, popcorn and mustard on him. They exchanged their old familiar greetings, a scratch behind the ears, and the animal went with unbothered habit to his perch on the window. Following the cat with his eyes, Henry saw that snow had started to fall. It was too early to go to bed. He reheated food and thought of what he would do tomorrow, the conversations he had put off today, the to-do list he would tick through, the structure that would again confine his time in ordered and inelastic sections.
After eating he went to the window and gave his pet a scratch. The snow had accumulated a latticed layer on the ground outside. Moved by sublimated fondness for the season he put on his coat, picked up his cigarettes and stepped outside, careful to nudge the cat with his boot back inside the door. As he watched the balletic static of precipitation he remembered the sounds of rain and muddy footsteps on the film’s soundtrack. Alone on his porch with his cigarette he leaned against the door and, casting himself back into the movie, where in his memory the space between his body and the screen had collapsed, drew the day around him like the luminescent fabric of a dream.