Point Omega - Don Delillo [2]
When an actor moved a muscle, when eyes blinked, it was a revelation. Every action was broken into components so distinct from the entity that the watcher found himself isolated from every expectation.
Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress.
Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn’t sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?
For the first time he didn’t mind not being alone here. These two men had strong reason to be here and he wondered if they were seeing what he was seeing. Even if they were, they would draw different conclusions, find references across a range of filmographies and disciplines. Filmography. The word used to make him draw back his head as if to put an antiseptic distance between him and it.
He thought he might want to time the shower scene. Then he thought this was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew it was a brief scene in the original movie, less than a minute, famously less, and he’d watched the prolonged scene here some days earlier, all broken motion, without suspense or dread or urgent pulsing screech-owl sound. Curtain rings, that’s what he recalled most clearly, the rings on the shower curtain spinning on the rod when the curtain is torn loose, a moment lost at normal speed, four rings spinning slowly over the fallen figure of Janet Leigh, a stray poem above the hellish death, and then the bloody water curling and cresting at the shower drain, minute by minute, and eventually swirling down.
He was eager to watch again. He wanted to count the curtain rings, maybe four, possibly five or more or less. He knew that the two men at the adjacent wall would also be watching intently. He felt they shared something, we three, that’s what he felt. It was the kind of rare fellowship that singular events engender, even if the others didn’t know he was here.
Almost no one entered the room alone. They came in teams, in squads, shuffling in and milling briefly near the door and then leaving. One or two would turn and leave and then the others, forgetting what they’d seen in the seconds it took to turn and move toward the door. He thought of them as members of theater groups. Film, he thought, is solitary.
Janet Leigh in the long interval of her unawareness. He watched her begin to drop her robe. He understood for the first time that black-and-white was the only true medium for film as an idea, film in the mind. He almost knew why but not quite. The men standing nearby would know why. For this film, in this cold dark space, it was completely necessary, black-and-white, one more neutralizing element, a way in which the action becomes something near to elemental life, a thing receding into its drugged parts. Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.
Then they left, just like that, they were moving toward the door. He didn’t know how to take this. He took it personally. The tall door slid open for the man with the cane and then the assistant. They walked out. What, bored? They went past the guard and were gone. They had to think in words. This was their problem. The action moved too slowly to