She gave it to you.
SEVERIN
Well, of course she did. I was fourteen. Do you have any idea what a fourteen-year-old girl will do to be loved? I wasn’t any kind of innocent at fourteen—she didn’t corrupt me. If you could pour it down your throat or stick it up your nose, I had managed to get my hands on it and give it a go. Percy didn’t care. Experience, he said. Experience is the only reason and the only master. I asked Faustine one afternoon what Venus was like. She put a stick of baleen in my hand and said it’s like this, baby girl. I ate it and curled up into my tiger and went to Venus with my mother.
ERASMO
And what was it like?
SEVERIN
It was like being inside a star. Like a star turning on inside of you. And then Faustine sang and that was like a star, too. A blue one sizzling down the dark alongside the red star of me. I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I went to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered: I know it, baby. I see it, too. That’s my insides coming out. Sometimes I see it so clear I pull back my feet to keep my shoes clean. But that’s what it looks like when you’re doin’ okay up there. Maybe you’ll do okay someday and I’ll get to see your guts blown out. That’d be nice. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then she put her head in my lap and died. Miss Faustine had so much baleen in her stomach that it backed up her works and she was poisoned to death by her own fluids.
[SEVERIN and ERASMO are quiet for several seconds. The displays tick on, lights faithfully flickering like candles.]
Araceli Garrastazu came after that. The femme fatale, Mary Pellam’s opposite—the perfect witch-seductress for my father’s every overwrought phantasmagoria. I barely knew her. I was running with whatever wolves would have me by then. The colours of Tithonus beat grey Virago every time. I didn’t want to act, but I slept with producers anyway; Gloucester and I danced on the carousel boats every weekend with my father’s rivals and I took girls and boys to my cabin on endless ugly promises of introducing them to Percy: Yes, of course, darling, he’s just dying to find the next big thing and you’re so lovely. You’re devastatingly talented. You’re perfect. You’re perfect. Until that horror show with Thaddeus Irigaray. That turned off my faucet, I can tell you. And by then Araceli was off to reinvent herself on the radio. [SEVERIN strokes her throat with her hand, a throttling, effacing gesture.] We’re almost done, aren’t we? Lumen’s left. Lumen’s my mother now, lucky number seven. She’s the reason I’ve got a boatload of circus with me. I love her. I love Lumen Molnar for everything she is not. I love her because she is nothing like me. I love her because she has never been to Venus. I love her because she has only one face. I love her because she is at this moment having supper in the cantina with Maximo and Mariana and Augustine and Gloucester. Because she came with me. Come with me, and I’ll love you until Jupiter burns out and the callowhales speak.
[SEVERIN clutches ERASMO’S arm. Her nails dig in. But she speaks to the camera.]
Do you want to know the truth about my mother? She was wonderful. She was kind. She never left me. She tucked me in at night and woke me in the morning. She played with me every day and she never missed a recital or a bedtime story.
Her name was Clara.
She could hold just under 150 metres of film at a time.
Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!
Limelight, 20th February 1933
Editor’s Note: The Iron Hand of Edison
A simple rule, enforced simply:
Movies don’t talk.
But whose rule is this? What Moses came down from the mount with such a thing engraved upon his personal stone?
Surely, our current state could not have been the shining future meant by those early masters of light and sound. It is Edison’s rule, enforced not by the Burning Bush but by Lawyers Burning for Their Fees. The name of Edison has become synonymous with the dastardliest of business practices, the most crushing arrogance. It stains the whole family, from Thomas Alva, who collected patents like baseball cards, to Our Present Edison, who continues such draconian strategies that he has, single-handedly, retarded the progress of motion picture technology by fifty years.
Your humble host has taken out editorials of this sort before. My readers must forbear. Given the upcoming Worlds’ Fair in the glorious metropolis of Guan Yu, overlooking the glittering shores of Yellowknife Bay on our dear sister planet of Mars, the very first to be hosted offworld, what better time can there be for Mr Franklin R. Edison (Freddy to his friends) to release his patents’ vice grip on reel, recording, and exhibition equipment and allow talking pictures to run wild and free? That is, after all, the natural state of technology. And so it was, once upon a time. Before the right to speak, the privilege of the voice, became the property of one man, to give and take away as he pleases.
Places, Everyone!, 14th April, 1933
Editor’s Note
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. That’s how the song goes. It does not go, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Patent Office and the Word could only be afforded by God. In the early days, for a brief moment, the wealthiest of studios and directors—and of course, governments—could afford the exorbitant fees demanded by Edison and his descendants for the use and exhibition of films. For a dim, glimmering moment, the great epics of Worley and Dufresne crackled with orchestras and soliloquies. But it did not last.
One must praise the independents, who simply ignored Edison and continued to make beautiful silent movies, more advanced and complex and heartbreaking than any throwaway studio talkie stinking up the summertime. I remember it: how slowly, then less slowly, sound ebbed away. Sooner rather than later, for an actor to talk on-screen became the mark of the Sellout—someone with deep enough pockets to pay Edison’s blood price. No True Artist, no Work of Quality, no Real Film would be caught dead making that kind of obnoxious noise. And bit by bit, the Big Boys on the Moon copied the starving artists so that they could convince the public of their Authenticity, their Great Aesthetic Merit, so that they could butter their bread on both sides. We are the People’s Entertainment! Bang, Smash, Yell, Crescendo! No, wait! We are Radical, Envelope-Pushing Artists! Hush, Hush, Soft Now. Win awards, stuff cannons with cash, bask in acclaim—and, hell, it saves money not having to deal with the devil in a back room, dithering over the price of a microphone.
And thus we find ourselves in an upside-down land where the technology exists, works beautifully, has even advanced—for no Edison can keep his hands to himself for long—but no fashionable soul would be caught dead using it. Men stand astride our world and call out: STOP. The System Works. They ask that everything stay the same forever, for Sameness is Profitable. Our Man Freddy E still bleeds filmmakers for exhibition rights, and we may all look the other way while he rolls piggily in his piles of lucre. Time passes, and we become accustomed to the status quo. Theatre Speaks, Vaudeville Sings, Radio Yammers Away Nonstop, but the movie hall is quiet as a church. Time passes, and audiences drink in this Truth with their mother’s milk. I have seen with my own eyes the recoil of audiences when faced with some flickie that sliced up its producers’ hearts at Edison’s golden table for the right to let poor Hamlet ask his famous question instead of staring dumbly at a plaster skull and waiting for the title card to do his job for him. Today’s moviegoer will get up and leave, convinced he has been swindled, rather than listen to a human voice.
What could it cost Friend Freddy to, quite simply, let us speak?
And yet, and yet. There is beauty in silence. I do not believe a film like Saul Amsel’s Bring Me the Heart
of Titan would have been made in a world where every film chattered on to its contentment. What of The Moon of Arden? The Last Cannoneer? If I were to turn back the clock and pluck Fred Edison from his ill-gotten celluloid throne, I should lose these reels which wrapped my heart three times round. He has bound us to Prometheus’s rock—but have we not made friends with the eagle? Have we not learned to love life without our livers?
The Worlds’ Fair is a time of brotherhood and goodwill. It is an expression of Progress and Marvels of Modernity.