The Animators(22)

I clear my throat, trying for a sort of professional “erm,” and pluck at the waistband of my pantsuit. “We do it all as a team,” I manage. “From the first storyboards to editing.”

“I’m interested in hearing about what your storyboards look like. You’re clearly art school grads, but with a taste for candy, it would seem—obvious cartoon fans, with that sense of fun and danger coming through in your work. I see Ren and Stimpy there. I see nineties-era Klasky Csupo there. I see Ralph Bakshi there. Can you fill us in on how this aesthetic influences the way you storyboard?”

She looks at me. My throat freezes right back up. Shit. Shit shit. I was prepared for this—the academic questions, the tech stuff. And now I can’t talk. Glynnis, Mel, the sound tech, they’re all watching me freak out.

And so she looks to Mel.

Mel kicks back, crosses her legs, adjusts her tie, and says, “Well, we wanted to do something more honest than those retrospective memoirs that make everything so saccharine, you know? And Sharon and I both watched ungodly amounts of television as kids. Just brain-slaying, vision-doubling hours of TV. Cartoons included. Drawing in that style was just the ghost that emerged when we started to dig. It didn’t feel like a conscious decision. I mean, childhood is pretty much ground zero for stories, right?”

“Yours in particular was very storied,” Glynnis says. “Can you tell us about the main players in Nashville Combat?”

“Uh, it was me, my mom, and a whole string of Mom’s boyfriends. It’s basically my upbringing until her arrest when I was thirteen.”

“Can you tell us why she was arrested?”

Mel rolls her eyes upward as she ticks off the list. “Bunch of stuff. Possession, intent to sell, intent to prostitute. That’s right. Only in Florida can you charge a woman with the intention to whore herself out.”

I press my lips together. It’s a slip, not a big one, but a slip just the same. This is where it all starts to come apart. I can feel it.

But Glynnis chuckles. “This is a very place-oriented film. Some have gone as far as to categorize it as regionalist. Would you agree with that assessment?”

Mel shrugs. “Nah. I mean, it is where it is because that’s the memory. I don’t think we really set out to tell about the place.”

“But you’ve clearly chosen to make it a focus,” Glynnis says. “We’re hearing the term ‘white trash noir’ thrown around here. We’re hearing a lot about ‘redneck pathos.’ How would you respond to the way in which this movie is being sold?”

Huh. Is it just my imagination, or was that a tone of displeasure in her voice? And what the hell does she mean, being sold.

I cough. She turns to me. “We won’t deny the setting,” I say, my voice shaking. “It makes sense. Mainstream America has a big fear of the rural. If this story isn’t rural, then it definitely takes place at the margins of the suburban. The line separating what’s developed and what’s still wild—that’s more interesting to us than the regional aspect, I think.”

I lean back and take a deep breath without looking at Mel. That actually felt okay. Thoughtful, precise. Not totally vapid.

Glynnis leans in, gazing at me. “You’re a bit of an enigma, aren’t you,” she says.

I laugh, startled. So does she, a stilted-reaction sound. “No, really,” she says. A smile creases her mouth, but her eyes remain still. “One wonders, upon watching, if Nashville Combat is the product of shared trauma, in a sense. Did you find some of your own experiences surfacing in the film as well? What kind of stake did you have in the making of something that was so personal for your partner?”

The rest of the room falls away. This was definitely not in the questions the producers sent. And her tone—it bears the unmistakable note of a throw-down. I thought she liked what we were doing. I was almost right. She likes what Mel is doing. She is challenging me to tell her what it is, exactly—if anything—that I do. I am being asked to explain myself. Glynnis is staring at me.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. There’s a horrible cottony stillness for a good three seconds before I feel Mel stir at my side, just now waking up to the room. She jumps in: “Are you kidding? Kisses is the boss, man.”

Glynnis goes back to her with a lopsided grin. It’s genuine—not what she gives Fenton, or me, but something secret and hidden. They’re the only two people in the room again.

I have ten pages of notes sitting on my desk back at the studio, the weeks of worry and preparation I’ve put into this interview. My freshman year at Ballister, I listened to Glynnis’s podcast (and she was one of the first to post podcasts, at the very tip of the aughts) on the mammoth Dell I’d just bought for college. Listening to Glynnis always gave me the sense of driving around the periphery of a large city at night, lights made brighter by the darkness surrounding—exotic signage, alien parkways. I ran over the dummy questions, I practiced my best, thoughtful erm, my radio laugh. Thinking, Glynnis will love me, will love us. Never imagining I’d need to practice a defense against an ambush, against What was your stake in this?

I expect Mel to say something more here, something more directly in my defense. But she doesn’t.

“Fair enough,” Glynnis says. “But the question of setting”—she wags her finger back and forth between us; I’ve suddenly reappeared—“relates tangentially to a very old argument as to the nature of animation, which still has trouble defining itself as a mature genre. When subject matter veers toward the complicated or dark, as I would say it does in your film, it seems many will pull back out of a belief that the cartoon rules of content have been violated. Which brings us to a difficult point in the story of this movie: the death of Kelly Kay Vaught, the archetype for Nashville Combat’s Mom.”