As the Moon Climbs

She wondered if her mother had named her in a burst of prescience, or if her name had led her to this. Dolores. Pains. She felt them more keenly than other people did, so they paid her to do the feeling for them.

She put on a black dress, pulled a black shawl over her bony shoulders. A black veil obscured her face, but she often tore it during the ceremony. She bought veils wholesale from a man who made them with cheap cloth, like paper. In her youth, she would have ravaged her dress as well, even scratched her face and arms in despair, but she had to be more restrained now. Her skin was as thin as her veils, and equally hard to mend.

This was the funeral of Mr. Lee, who had owned the laundry around the corner. She had known him, but that made no difference. Every life was precious to her, every death a disaster. Already she felt the tears coming. She slipped on her walking shoes and hobbled down to the street, a wail building inside her like a wave, ready to wash over the mourners and leave them clean.

“If I did Titanic today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t be a 750-foot-long set. There would be small set pieces integrated into a large CGI set. I wouldn’t have to wait seven days to get the perfect sunset for the kiss scene. We’d shoot it in front of a green screen, and we’d choose our sunset.” –James Cameron

“Reading those comments by James Cameron just makes me feel sad for movie making today.” –afscot

Why is my buddy sad? Because he thinks it’s weird to fabricate something that exists in the real world for the sake of convenience. Film makers are relying more and more on technology to substitute for the real when the real isn’t readily available or would be more expensive to procure or create. Forget shooting on location in some remote jungle for weeks when you can set up a green screen and do the same work in a few days. Don’t worry about building some elaborate contraption to make your actor appear to be missing limbs, or setting an actual stunt person on fire, or blowing up the Statue of Liberty in miniature; computers can handle everything. Depressing, isn’t it?

Not really. Movies are fictional, after all, and they always have been. Anyone yearning for some mythical good old days seems to have forgotten that once upon a time, movies were filmed on sound stages with staged lighting and painted backgrounds that were swapped out as soon as the director said, “That’s a wrap!” It wasn’t until the 1960′s that one could say most films were shot on location, and that didn’t mean they were bereft of the various trappings of the studio stuff. Even Italian neorealism and cinéma vérité required specialized technology and careful setup, not to mention the eventual manipulation of the raw footage through editing. No movie can truly said to be “real,” only a more or less realistic representation of reality as we know it. Why, then, cannot “as we know it” become “as we wish it to be”?

Still, is there something to be said for shooting “practical” instead of digital? Naturally; until recently, and arguably still today, technology had not sufficiently advanced to be able to trick the audiences’ brains into accepting the animated as something that actually exists. However, movies like Avatar push the boundaries of the impossible back to make room for a few more possibilities. Does it matter whether the enormous eyes and blue fur of a character are digital or pasted on and sewn together? Does it matter whether the spaceship flying through an alien jungle is a miniature or a computer model? Both are equally unreal, and yet can be equally satisfying.

In time–perhaps now!–it may very well be easier and more cost effective to simply fabricate a sunset than to have a film crew standing by every day for a week to capture an hour or so of footage in the hopes that it yields the perfect shot. If anything, the film makers of the distant past would probably find it sad that anyone would wait on that sort of thing when they could just have an artist paint a backdrop and be done with it.

The curator and her assistant stared at the painting, which was the size of a small bus. Finally, Hugh spoke.

“God, it’s ugly.”

“That’s modern art for you,” Amy said.

“How much is it worth?”

“Millions.”

“And he’s just giving it to the museum?”

Amy shrugged. “I’m sure there’s a tax write-off in it for him. Shh, he’s coming back.”

They smiled radiantly at their benefactor as he approached. Marcus Harvey could have passed for Santa’s evil twin, with wispy white hair and cheeks that were likely rosy from alcoholism rather than merriment. He fixed his beady eyes on them and sniffed.

“Well, what do you think of it?” he said gruffly.

“Magnificent,” Amy said.

“Sensational,” Hugh agreed.

“Such a bold panoply of colors.”

“And the brush strokes… divine!”

“I’ve never seen such a vivid representation of existential ennui.”

Harvey nodded. “Glad to hear it.”

“Your generosity is unparalleled,” Amy gushed.

Harvey stared at it, shaking his head sadly. “Had to get rid of it. Wife said it was too ugly to bear.”

It is not easy to write about
granola bars and ripe bananas,
the ineffable angst of losing
an expensive cell phone, addiction
to organic lip gloss and hand cream.
There is little gravitas in sushi
despite an allergy to avocado,
and cats simply expect to be fed.

Even so there is time for thought
while driving on highways perpetually
being constructed and reconstructed,
as lane closures coax people closer together,
an ibis delicately picks its way between
giant piles of dirt, an excavator
rumbles as it passes, dig, dig, dig
and see what is unearthed.

“Dave,” Sheena had said, “I can’t stay married to a child for the rest of my life. If you want to act fucking simple, do it by yourself.” And then she had left him.

He missed her, but he had Rhonda now. She appreciated him. Understood him.

“Bug, ten o’clock!” Rhonda shouted. Dave leveled his shotgun at the huge, spindly-legged creature and squeezed the trigger, grinning at the explosion of carapace chunks and fluids. The action was repeated as more of the monsters surrounded them, until there was only a soggy pile of leftovers.

“Gross,” Rhonda said, wiping goo off her shirt. “Any chance of a shower?”

“Nah,” Dave replied. “No running water anymore.” He grinned. “Nothing sexier than a sweet little lady covered in bug juice.”

Rhonda punched him in the arm. “Come on, lover boy. One more day of hard driving and we’ll be at Edwards. Maybe the Air Force still has showers.”

They finished siphoning gas into the Prius and drove off: a simple man, a simple woman, and a car full of weapons and ammunition and hope.