Universal Harvester(5)
“No problem,” Jeremy said. It was how he’d been raised.
“Pizza?” She gestured toward a Casey’s box on the counter.
“Sure,” said Jeremy. He knew he should eat better, but he didn’t ever get around to trying. He pulled up a stool and set his backpack down, and he looked up at the screen; Sarah Jane was watching the news, which was all about the weather, which roads were open and which ones weren’t, how long it was going to take to drive from Des Moines to Urbandale or Ankeny to Clive.
“Hey, a customer complained about this one so I took it home,” he said after a while, wiping his hand on his jeans. “Somebody taped over onto it.”
“Somebody what?”
“Taped over it. It’s got some scene in a barn with these people in it. Kinda freaked me out.”
She reached over for the tape and looked at it as if it might reveal something right then and there. “Don’t these have erase tabs?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “I didn’t think you could tape over ’em, anyway.”
“Well, I’ll have a look,” said Sarah Jane, and she got up and went off to the break room, which wasn’t big enough for anybody to really take breaks in and so served as a coat closet. Jeremy thought for a second to suggest that they look at it in the store, but then considered that he didn’t really want to see it again, and that it wasn’t his problem any further than to report it to his boss.
There was a pretty decent rush of customers toward four o’clock: people who’d made it into work but expected to be home all the weekend. They were stocking up on things to watch. The Kids and Family section was nearly empty by 5:30, and then the stampede died down. Sarah Jane went home and said Jeremy could close early if he wanted, but he stuck it out until 9:00. He didn’t mind an empty store. Better to drive home when there were fewer people on the roads.
4
Targets is a film by Peter Bogdanovich. Released in 1968, it tracks two lives about to intersect: Byron Orlok, an aging film icon in the twilight of his career, played by Boris Karloff, and Bobby Thompson, a young soldier recently home from Vietnam, played by Tim O’Kelly, who also played Danno in the pilot episode of Hawaii Five-O.
Karloff was eighty years old when he landed the role of Byron Orlok. Contracted to shoot for two days, he liked the script so well that when an additional three days were needed to complete his scenes, he worked without pay. His performance represents a victory of human will over stubborn flesh; suffering from emphysema and rheumatoid arthritis, wearing braces on his legs, able to walk or stand only with the help of a cane, Karloff acts his way through these obstacles of ill health and old age. Orlok, like the actor, is a surviving remnant of a bygone age; the monsters he played when he was younger and stronger have given way to the ongoing shocks of the late twentieth century, to atrocities of war and the isolation of modern life. There are new monsters now.
In Targets, the monster is Bobby, who, without any identifiable provocation, kills half his family and a deliveryman after breakfast one morning, then gets into his car and takes to the road. Climbing an oil tank by an abandoned amusement park, from a perch overlooking the freeway, he eats lunch, drinks a Coca-Cola, and then snipes, emotionless, at the speeding cars below; located and then pursued by police, he flees, seeking cover at a drive-in theater.
The film’s climax follows. From a hiding place inside the drive-in’s screen, he takes aim at patrons in their cars. He hits one man in a phone booth; he gets another at the concession stand. Outraged filmgoers, some armed, storm down the asphalt. In attendance for the premiere of The Terror, his swan song, Orlok exits his limousine, and, in the half-darkness of the projection booth, encounters Bobby. A struggle follows; the older man disarms the younger with his cane. As the police lead the shooter away in handcuffs, he wonders aloud how high his kill tally will run, and if he’ll be on the evening news.
The VHS copy of Targets in the racks at Video Hut features two scenes not present on the original print. The first of these is brief, and profoundly empty: it’s a stationary view of a chair that sits in the corner of an outbuilding somewhere, maybe a barn or toolshed. Without any external cues it’s hard to say. There’s a workbench partially visible at the left of the frame, or a sawhorse; this view holds for two silent minutes, fairly steady. Halfway through, there’s a momentary jerk, like a sweaty thumb slipping from the camera’s housing, but other than this there is no action to describe. The chair, the corner of something; behind the chair, a wall, corrugated aluminum or tin. There’s sound, but nobody makes any noise. Microphone hiss serves to indicate that the air was still and quiet within the walls where the scene was shot.
The second scene is longer. It again features the chair in the outbuilding, but there’s a person sitting in it now. She, or he, wears a canvas bag for a hood; some yellow vinyl-coated polypropylene rope attaches the bag to her head at the neck. Clad in a billowing T-shirt and jeans, the chair lady could be anybody: there’s no way of placing her in any external context. You might think, when you first see her, that she’s bound to her chair; the hood and the rope suggest captivity, confinement, restraint. Her hands are behind her. But then she rises to her feet, or he to his, it makes no difference and it’s impossible to tell, and raises both arms from behind her back up and over her head, hands held like claws, fingers splayed and pointed downward as one poised to descend onto the keys of a piano or shoot lightning bolts at the ground. Slowly, she lifts her left foot; her right knee quivers, and half-buckles, but she holds the pose.