Radiance

Daddy is telling the story!

PERCIVAL

[laughing] Well, Daddy made the movie, but Daddy is not telling the story. Look at the characters and how they speak to each other. Look at how the film begins, how the very first scenes shape everything else. Now, who is telling the story?

[There is a long silence.]

SEVERIN

The camera is telling the story. It’s watching everything, and you can’t lie to it, or it will know.

PERCIVAL

My girl is so clever! No, the camera witnesses the story and records it, but it is outside the story. Like a very tiny god with one big, dark eye. Baby girl, look at the lovers, and the villain, and the doting father, and the soldiers, and the ghosts. Which one of them is the authority? Who controls how the story is told? And who is the audience, for whom all these wonderful things are meant?

[Another long silence follows. There is a rustling, as of a little girl twisting her lace skirts while she tries to work out an answer.]

SEVERIN

They are all telling the story to me.

Preproduction Meeting,

The Deep Blue Devil [working title]

(Tranquillity Studios, 1959, dir. Percival Unck)

Audio recorded for reference by Vincenza Mako, screenwriter

PERCIVAL UNCK: If you want to know about the beginnings of things, you have to talk to the dead.

I know how that sounds. The dead should do endings. Surely that’s their squat. In the space after the story, they’re kings and queens, ruling with bony hands, pulling epilogues, last acts, climaxes, pulling finality from declining action like spinsters at black wheels.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been aces at endings. At the Fin I’m like a ball player, balanced hips over knees, brandishing my bat, pointing to the outfield, pointing like I’ve been doing from the first word spoken, the first frame shot, at the revelation I intended to hit all along. Lean into the last scene; you can hear the whiff and the crack of my swing. If anything, I’ve always been too eager to get to the ending. I’ll throw the haunted, wild-eyed gamine from her tower too soon, slaughter a soliloquizing retinue complete with bicyclists and bears five minutes in. Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed. The right ending can’t resist a spread like that. She sidles up like she’s lived there all along, sleepy-eyed, hair a fright, asking the antihero for coffee and be quick about it, wouldn’t you? There’s a love.

But I’m rubbish at beginnings. Listen to that mess. My metaphors all rumpled about my ankles. So I talk to the dead. They’re the only ones who can see the whole story. All they’ve got is story. Look, say the ghosts, she was doomed all along because of how it began. You watched her to death. She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you. No one could have gotten out of this thing alive. Not with Acts I-V stacked against them like that. If Hamlet couldn’t swing it, what hope did she ever have?

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. But the deadest of the dead—the ancient, toga-tugging, sheep-fucking, olive-gobbling, laurel-spangled dead—they rattled on about nothing else. Gardens and clay and the Sky slinging back a nebula or two for courage then slicking back his hair to make nice with the Earth. They had it right. It’s downright dishonest to begin with anything but the Creation of the Known Universe, and a tale that ends before the destruction of all and sundry is a damnable lie. By fire? Well, that’s too obvious. And floods always look amateurish. Maybe it just winks out. Cut. Print.

Point is, the Greeks had their heads on straight: If you’re going to bother beginning at all, you have to throw up a believable theory of origin or it’s got no anchor. No root. Why four seasons? Why seasons at all? Why just the one moon? Why green trees and red roses and not the other way round? Why death and time and is there such a thing as fate, and what, percentage-wise, is the efficacy of human sacrifice? You have to answer those questions before anyone comes on stage, you know. In even the littlest story about a…let’s say a housewife in an aqua-blue print dress and matching apron making a roast, only she’s planning to kill herself later, obviously, or maybe her husband—otherwise why should we care one soggy whit about the vagaries of beef at temperature? At any rate, someone’s got to die. That’s why she’s wearing aqua. Blue invariably means death. Even in poor lost Millicent’s kitchen—yes, Vince, her name is clearly Millicent, do try to keep up! Before she even pricks the meat to slide the garlic in, it’s all been arranged for her. Does death do its thing, in this universe? Yes. Time, in Millicent World? Progressing one second per second, twenty-four and seven and three hundred-odd. Seasons: four. The moon: intact, in orbit, in phase. Green elm, red peony. Seventeen per cent sacrificial success rate under ideal conditions, results not peer reviewed. And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody. Given all these parameters, husband Humphrey should be dead by dessert. See? It’s only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than—well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.

It’s all down to girls, one way or another.

[indistinct]

All right, all right, I’m boring you. I’m babbling. I haven’t made up my mind about this one yet. I don’t even know how to go about making up my mind. I would rather not have death. I would rather that. Time is terribly tawdry, as well. And let’s see what we can do about that percentage.

Let us begin properly. This is what I’m thinking: She came from nowhere. She came from the sea. She came from the dark. The Earth fucked the Sky and made a hundred children—or maybe just nine. Mercury, Venus, Mars, the whole ragtag family. And the nine had their own kids: Phobos, Triton, Io, Charon, all the brats. Maybe we can do this like we used to do, way back when. You know I can never quit Vaudeville. Toga up the main cast as the planets and the moons: rings around Saturn’s head; Venus dripping wet; Mars in a cowboy getup; Neptune, I don’t know, up on strings like the levitators, maybe? Stupid on af-yun, all heroin eyes and running makeup. Stand them in tableaux against a spangly cloth backdrop. Then they can start killing each other. It’ll be Shakespearian. Barking big knives. Buckets of blood. Blood and callowmilk.

So the little bastards stab the Sky to death and throw the spangles into the sea, and they turn into the title, and that’s where she comes from. Out of the words and the water. She can rise up on a clamshell naked and covered with blood and milk. That’s what birth looks like, after all. Naked, with a myrtle branch in one hand and a camera in the other.

I have no ideas for casting. Someone new. I don’t want anyone whose face has been someone else. I’ll have to call Richard. He’ll find somebody fresh off the rocket who looks like her. He always knows what I want. So, whoever she is, she’ll look through the camera in her hand at the camera in my hand. The waves hit her and wash her clean. Mostly clean. Leave a mark on her face. Like a wound. Presto: Birth of Venus.

[indistinct]

Yes. Severin’s birth, too. No difference.

But that’s the last time we use her name, Vince. What’s our rule? You can’t name the subject. You can’t say the word death in a m