Marie Buck and Matthew Walker
from Spoilers
Bewitched reruns play on Nick at Nite, circa mid-90s, and my mom likes to point out the discrepancy between the two actors who, at different points in time, played Samantha’s husband Darrin: Darrin played by Dick York in the early seasons of the show—the actor she preferred—and then Darrin played by Dick Sargent after.
Wikipedia tells me why the change occurred: Dick York had a debilitating back injury that eventually took him out of the show, after several seasons of various accommodations: the crew built a slanted wall for York to lean into between scenes; the writers built in episodes where there was a reason for York to be mostly on the couch or in the bed, lying instead of standing the whole time.
Apparently York got the back injury while filming a movie with Gary Cooper and lifting a “teeter totter mechanism” that suddenly bore more weight than expected, ripping his muscles.
York managed the injury for a few years; he got addicted to painkillers; he got off of painkillers. Later he died of unrelated causes.
You tell me that you had a crush on Elizabeth Montgomery as a child.
I recall being fascinated with Barbara Eden’s stomach in I Dream of Jeannie, a show that copied the basic premise of Bewitched.
Before we meet the first time, in the park, you warn me that you can’t currently sit down—can only lay or stand, due to a back injury.
Now I touch your back; I touch you. But your skin is screen-like, a fleshy projection of the pain, which comes from the nerves and moves to the psyche.
*
I want to cram it all in, every movie on my list of films, every movie deferred in my earlier pre-pandemic life.
In In the Mood for Love, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen live in the same apartment building and become close when they realize their spouses are having an affair with each other. The platonic relationship evolves into a creative partnership and then into a love that’s never consummated.
At the film’s end, following an old tradition, Chow travels to Cambodia to visit Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure, where he whispers his sorrows into the hollow of a ruined temple wall, sealing his untellable secrets in the hole with a clump of mud.
An intangible empty space where you confess your sorrow and the point is to bury it outside of your body.
The ungraspable projector lights flood the surface of my living room wall.
I rent Béla Tarr’s 7+ hour Sátántangó, and the movie takes me from Friday night through Sunday afternoon to complete. Later I won’t be able to remember what I do between viewing sessions; I’ll remember only the feeling of burrowing into the movie’s landscape—a bleak Hungarian village whose inhabitants live in squalor following the failure of their collective farm. The movie is composed almost entirely of very long shots, many of them static, and some that move at such a glacial pace that they transubstantiate from excruciating to sublime.
Outside the bar, a distraught young girl, overcome by existential crisis and desperate for help, stands in the rain, looking through the window to watch the adults of her town descend into madness.
I rent the film from Lincoln Center and have to stream it on a buggy vimeo app. For a while, the app manages to keep my place in the movie, and I can take breaks and then start back in where I left off. But on my last day of viewing, about six hours into the film, I bring up vimeo to watch the final stretch and the app instead starts the movie back at the beginning. The site is such that there is no way for me to manually move the playback head back to the six-hour mark. My only option to return to the spot where I left off is to hit a button that advances the movie in ten-second intervals.
I mash it over and over again, I guess 2,160 times to be exact, determined to complete the film.
*
The two source texts for Bewitched are earlier movies: I Married a Witch in 1942 and Bell, Book, and Candle in 1958, both pleasurable romantic comedies with pretty much the same plotline. Charming witch uses magic to get the guy.
We learn that it’s fine to put your all into loving and being loved, to pull out all the stops and hypnotize your neighbor into a whirlwind romance. And isn’t love always magic to begin with? It’s a nice metaphor.
I Married a Witch is not nearly as good as Bell, Book, and Candle.
Though I do appreciate that there are actual Puritans in the film.
On vacation in the New England woods, we watch The VVitch, and I love especially the early scene where the teenaged daughter plays peek-a-boo with her baby brother and, instead of the teenaged daughter’s face disappearing from the baby’s perception because of the object permanence problem, the baby disappears in real life when the teenaged daughter has her own face covered.
According to the premise of peek-a-boo, the baby should incorrectly think his older sister is gone because she is covering her face with her hands, but actually it’s the sister who is incorrect in thinking her baby brother will still be there when she uncovers her eyes.
It’s a crystallization of the supernatural more generally: you imagine something is in your head—in this case, built into early life is a sort of creepy lag in understanding how existence works—and actually that gap turns out not to be in the brain, but in the world itself: peek-a-boo is correct to suggest that something can be there and then suddenly not be there. Things don’t have integrity. Our skin crawls to think of it, to think of a person vanishing, because we know it feels like a metaphor for death.
In peek-a-boo, someone goes missing and the reality of that is located only in the baby’s psyche; in the world, someone goes missing and it’s evidence of the supernatural; in the world, no one can really go missing like that, but at the same time, it’s fundamental: we’re all going to go missing like that, the part that is the psyche drops out and the flesh part stops being animated.
Jeannie bobs her head and we hear a springy, boingy sound as the world around her changes.
*
If I were to tell you about Kaili Blues,
I would describe for you a clock drawn onto the surface of a raw wall,
inscribed with crayon blue and cadmium red,
the red clock hands pointed precisely at 12:15.
A second pair of clock hands superimposed in black
indicating, with less certainty, something close to 10:08.
I would whisper in your ear on the train.
I would flag the scene where
a man sits in a white undershirt, leaning against the back
of a tan plaid sofa, eyes closed, sweat shining on his forehead,
a green three-bladed fan spinning slowly to a stop as
the disembodied voice of the director reads his own verse in voiceover:
Without music, the ears go deaf, without rules, candles go out.
I would repeat this line to you as you lay there drifting to sleep.
The camera cuts—
a still shot, multi-layered, greenery in the foreground,
houses, tall buildings, a city occupying a sliver of the middle ground,
mountains rising ever so slightly higher,
held down by a broad expanse of sky,
great gray clouds slowly moving across,
a bright white patch of light showing at the center.
I would rehearse my verbal account of it and wake you up each morning into a new scene.
*
We go out to the beach and stay there until late, boardwalk and the beach at night and the novelty of a crowd at Coney Island and then sitting by the water again. You say, as we walk out onto the sand, isn’t life so good sometimes?
Which makes me think of the Hiroshima Mon Amour line, “It’s so nice sometimes to be with someone!”
And it’s true, I want the butter that the devil advertises at the end of The VVitch:
Wouldst thou like the taste of butter?
A pretty dress?
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
*
And in Cruising, Al Pacino’s character tells his girlfriend that working undercover on a case where he’s trying to lure a murderer who is targeting gay men in the leather scene is “changing” him, though he doesn’t say how.
A big chunk of the movie is the camera panning over sexy, leather-clad bodies dancing in clubs, the gaze of the camera—presumably Pacino’s gaze as well—riding the line between lingering on muscley dancing bodies out of suspicion and lingering on the muscley dancing bodies out of desire.
By the end of the film, Pacino seems to have caught from the killer a desire to kill—but this seems, blatantly, like a cover: the thing he was going to catch was certainly going to be an attraction to other men. The movie floats a sort of punishment but the punishment seems fake.
It says death, but it definitely wants us to think desire.
*
And in The VVitch, the brother gets lost in the woods, is lured into sex with a witch, then comes home possessed, vomits up an apple with a bite taken out of it, and dies.
In real life, I ask the cat over and over if he’d like to live deliciously, my little joke directed at him but really for you to overhear, and then give him salmon, butter, bacon, all originally prepared for you or me but then redirected to him.
When he begs for human food I think “life is short.”
We curl into each other as we lounge in front of a tree in the park at night. A group of rowdy crust punks yells and sets off firecrackers in the distance.
Later a tick crawls up your pant leg as we swing in a hammock, in a setting that is fun, where I feel safe and happy.
It’s hard not to read misfortune as punishment.
Or to read pleasure as too good to be true, something you’ll have to pay a price for.
In the weeks before you first tell me you love me, we keep saying to each other, awkwardly, “I’m so grateful for you” and similar phrases, feeling it out.
I feel lucky.
The butter shimmers in front of our eyes, the glint on the surface of a lake—
the hammock a pat of butter to be immersed in
so that the shimmery world around us globs on the lips,
little flecks of fat, our heads as tiny apples within the fat, the
butter melting, the world
vanishing like a baby snatched
away by a witch
only to return again as the next wave hitting the shore.
*
Marie Buck is the author of Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020), Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books, 2017), and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015). They are the managing and web literary editor at Social Text and live in Brooklyn.
Matthew Walker is the executive director of Primary Information, a nonprofit publisher of artists' books, and one half of Ex-Official, an imprint and production house for electronic music occupying a liminal space between hard boundaries.