The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [219]
“Surely not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around—filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”
“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear them in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action—foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He’s seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”
“So screenwriters are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”
“You got it,” said Crosetti. “I mean we’re in a movie now. Why in hell are the two of us waiting in an isolated cabin for a bunch of gangsters? It’s nuts. Why is a hundred-million-dollar manuscript sitting on a table in that isolated cabin? Totally wack. I’ll tell you why. Because we both made a chain of decisions, and each of those decisions was conditioned by a movie theme. When the mysterious girl calls John Cusack and tells him to rescue her, he doesn’t say, ‘Get real, bitch!’ He moves heaven and earth to rescue her, because he knows that’s the script, and here I am, and right next to me is William Hurt, the slightly corrupt, guilty guy, still clinging to decency, but not sure if he wants to live or not and he’s put himself in this dangerous situation for…for what? Oh, there’s his mysterious girl, of course, but mainly it’s self-punishment, a need to have some major explosion to either wipe him out or blow him the hell out of his expensive unsatisfactory life. Stay tuned.”
“William Hurt. That’s not bad.”
“No, and when the gangsters get here, they’ll act like gangsters in the movies, or, and here’s a subtlety that’s not often used, they’ll act the opposite of movie gangsters. That’s the great thing about The Sopranos—movie gangsters pretending to be real gangsters watching movie gangsters and changing their style to be more like the fake ones, but the fact is, it really happens. The one thing you can be sure of is they’re not going to be authentic. There’s no authentic left.”
“Amalie is authentic,” said Mishkin, after a moment.
“Yeah, she is,” Crosetti agreed. “But Amalie’s unplugged from the culture, or maybe she’s plugged into something else, God maybe. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and notice, she’s not in this movie.”
“No, she’s not. But I’ll tell you one thing: you’re wrong about me. I don’t mean about my character, the William Hurt business, but about what I’m doing here. It’s not just a vague despair. It’s part of a plot.”
“Yeah, but that’s just what I’ve been say—”
“No, not a movie-type plot. A scheme, a device, a manipulation, so that the bad guys get theirs.”
“What is it? The plot, I mean.”
“I’m not going to tell you,