Sinister: The Machine in the Ghost

[P F]

Winds batter the country: gold leaves fly across the
green grass and stone pavements. Amid classical
columns I meet my editor. I never did write a column.
In a quiet auditorium we wait for our man to arrive
and share his fantastical world. He stands at the
front of the stage, seeming to tower over us: starts
the experiment, the performance, disavows being a film
critic. In his accent Joan Didion meets Peter Osgood.
Words fly, a whisper to a dream. How his reviews
closed down magazines he wrote for; how he likes
writing about films he hasn’t seen; how Pauline Kael
could write the review during the film.
– Remarkable capacity – and she was a remarkable
woman... a bit of a witch, but a remarkable woman.
What film does in our heads.

- Now, I’m going to stop being that figure, lecturing
at the front of the stage.
He sits down in a director’s chair.
– I’m tired... didn’t realize how tired I was...
Gosh, I think: this is ‘fiction’.
- But sometimes when you’re tired, unexpected memories
can come through... I remember my mother, talking to
me about going to the cinema when I was a teenager...
she didn’t mind this passion I had.... parents want
that kind of engine to come and propel kids out of the
teenage years...
She said: - Maybe you want to be an actor?
– But I said, no, I don’t think so: I think what I’d
really like to be is a character.

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is out of print. William
Holden walks a New Orleans street, seeking a light.
Presences.
- Bill, meet Phil. Phil, this is Bill Holden.

- See, you get film this afternoon, too!
Fernando Rey walks from one screen, one country, to
another. On the subway he steps in and out of a train,
jams and opens doors.
At a party 20 years ago he’d told barrel-chested
Mitchum he knew him. Did he?
Beatty had dithered over banning that book:
- Wow, that book...
- Yes.
- Wow: that book.
- I know.
- Wow - that book!

Nicole Kidman walks on. Nicky D, you should have been
here. We should be so lucky. I reckon our man wrote
her script on the back of an airline napkin.

Now, he says, I’m going to stop being that figure in
the chair, and come back to the front of the stage. My
editor pops the question. The instant reply is
– You’re my kind of guy.
Time freezes a second, or warms up.

My editor and I drink overpriced, over-strong beer at
a table near the new dictionaries. We meet his editor.
Wow, I think: his editor. She asks my editor about his
fiction plans. They sound impressive. Our man asks my
editor about his name. Discoloured bleeps start to
emerge in the background: to smudge my already fragile
consciousness of what’s happening. I ask our man about
songwriters: like, why Berlin and Porter aren’t in the
book.
- That’s a very good criticism, he says; and:
- I would like to write lyrics for songs.
I won’t tell you what else he said.



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