The Animators(96)

Extended story: A girl and a boy make a dark discovery that forces them on a journey into the slithering, sick secrets of adulthood. We decide that our story is the girl’s pilgrimage, and its shape is that of a parabola: the finding, the forgetting, the remembering. The descent into a life in which she consumes everything to fill the void blasted into her by the realization that this darkness exists, tamping the hunger down with food and sex and work and sheer hours of distraction, the more involved, the better. There are shots of the girl as an adult, at the drawing board, the closest she ever comes to hitting the truth of anything. Ailing on the inside and the outside, both pursuer and pursued. So much heat in her head. She shatters.

For the stroke, we try to envision what it would look like for a brain to break. We go textural for the creeper factor, using ripped pages from the KJV and defunct Houghton Mifflin grade school readers as backdrop and then smearing them with coffee grounds to simulate the oncoming storm, the thick, shitty haze that conceals everything. We envision the stroke as a night tour through a deep forest, a George Romero–Tobe Hooper monsterscape in which trees cry blood and faceless hunters watch, hands gripping blades, gory hammers. An abandoned murder house, frozen in a mid-1980s Christmas, provides shelter for one brief night. Dead Magnavoxes lie discarded in bushes, screens shattered. Ravens rise from a pond in one slick stream. Discarded love seats fill the clearings, stuffing and snakes emerging from their ripped bellies.

It is a chase. The woman needs to find her way out, become stronger, better, faster, before she is consumed. To survive means to escape. And when the footfalls come so close, she can feel the ground behind her trembling, she sees a rim of daylight on the horizon. She shakes off her limp at last. She runs.

The film is largely without dialogue. There is respiration and gut gurgles and sighs, footsteps in leaves. A wildcat screaming like a woman. In the forest, distant singing, too faint to hear the words. With scenes featuring me and the boy Teddy, we got two kids—the son and daughter of one of Donnie’s friends—to talk gibberish over each other, a warm tangle of singing and giggling.

We wanted to create the experience of going through a tunnel—it has its bright spots, but for the most part the viewer is closed within, dunked in something dark blue and viscous for seventy-five minutes. I wanted to make something that made me feel the way I felt that summer we found the pictures. The summer I discovered that there were things that could wound me so badly, I might not be the same person after. The summer I also discovered that there were things that could keep me existing in the world, good things that made me forget.

Irrefutable Love is us making a place where redemption exists, a place where we can all be together. Me and the girls from the pictures. They are there to meet me as I crawl from the woods, scratched and bleeding. Their faces open up. They have eyes again. They part their lips and I hear cicadas, one or one hundred, impossible to tell. Their mouths open wide and the cicadas are loosed in a warm, iridescent stream, the rich alto hum filling the air. To forgive, to forgive. They hum.

I draw as I always have, maybe better. I draw what I’d most like to have. And we come to make a beautiful and horrible thing, a gentle beast with a deadly underbelly. It is funny/not funny. It is filled with ghosts. It is the happiest ending we have ever envisioned.

—

It becomes fall.

My life away from the drawing board has a spooky reverb quality. I often go a solid week without showering. I forget to pay our electric bill and Con Ed shuts off the power for a whole day. I sleep in fits and starts, never able to settle in for more than two hours.

My mother calls and leaves messages. I delete them without listening. When Shauna calls, I pick up. “Are you really making a movie out of us?” she says.

“No, it’s not about you.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“It’s about me.”

“Well. That should be interesting.”

“Maybe.”

“You should make a movie about my dipshit husband,” she says. “He’s funny as hell to watch. You’d make a million dollars.”

“I might take you up on that. When the teat of inspiration runs dry.”

She giggles. “You say the weirdest shit.”

“Completely involuntary.”

“Why don’t you pick up when Mom calls?”

“I am not talking to her, Shauna.”

“She feels bad. Maybe she has a hard time saying so, but she’s sorry.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“She’s not sleeping at night. She got after Jaeden the other day for spilling something on the rug. And she almost never gripes at the kids.”

“Did she tell you to call? She’s sitting right there, isn’t she.”

“No. Oh my God. What do you think I am?”

“Sorry.”

“You think Mom and I are, like, besties or something. Do you think I’m on her side about any of this?”

“So she told you what she told me?” I say. “About Honus Caudill and the other, what, three contestants for my paternity? She can go fuck herself. Period.”

“Oh, I know. It’s disgusting. If I were you, I wouldn’t be talking to her, either.”

It occurs to me that I shovel a lot onto Shauna. She probably gets the bad stuff from Mom, too. She lives right next door, after all. I never stopped to think about the shrapnel she might be catching in all this.