![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
There's no need to take such a grim topic any further
Daniel Zimbler's Exit (2012) closely follows its oft-anthologized source material by Harry Farjeon, which means it's a twelve-minute creep-out for Christmas accomplished through the softly radio-tested expedient of simply speaking something dreadful into existence, or out of it, as the case may be.
The smartest tweak of the screenplay from the short story concerns the character of the mysterious Mr. Geeles, on whose supposed knowledge of "de-creation" rests the difference between a good fireside shiver and the queasily seamless reweaving of reality. "Well, it doesn't interest me to bring a rabbit out of a hat. I'm more interested in the process of putting one back . . . I should put it back so completely that you would never have had it at all." On the page, he's a more conventionally sinister figure with his watchfulness and his disconcerting voice, his papery age itself a kind of memento mori at the double holiday of a Christmas wedding. Played with genial modesty by the robust white-haired Julian Glover, Mr. Geeles on film is disarming rather than offputting, a family friend of a vintage such that the bride's uncle can remind the younger generation a touch mischievously as well as instructively, "He's been to places you couldn't even imagine. Seen some queer things." He's introduced absently brushing off a spill of brandy, the quietest of the seven guests left to pass the time in the grey-watered afternoon until the newlyweds with their hands inseparably twined and their eagerly teasing argument about settling in the country or the city depart for their honeymoon in Paris; he's heard from first in an affable attempt to redirect the best man, whose toastmaster jesting has slipped a personal gear since the ceremony and is grinding the conversation to awkward halts. He has none of the stonefish overtones of Farjeon's Geeles, lying in wait to unsettle. If anything, he seems content with his peripheral part in the company, an accustomed witness to its coziness and frictions, which makes it that much weirder for his center stage to involve, to begin with, a matter-of-fact explanation of the distinction between a murder, which still leaves behind the traces of a life, and the process whose theory he outlines, which emphatically does not: "You would be sponged from the page of human history. Not even your memory would remain."
With Farjeon, the reader has to wait for the casual stab of the last lines to learn which of the guests has been redacted by the process which Mr. Geeles admits, once set in motion, is out of his hands to the point that his own—it is never really named, though for all intents and purposes it is a spell—could just as easily erase him. Writer-director Zimbler tips his hand earlier, but in a way which amplifies rather than undercuts the horror of the resolution. In both versions, the power of de-creation is put to the test at the insistence of the incessant Todman, who canonically never knows when to back down. Farjeon's rendition is merely irresponsible in the way of the chronic life of the party, but Ed Coleman gives him a recklessly self-inflicted edge, a mostly emptied glass in his hand and an ill-concealed impatience with the conspicuous nesting of the Christmas lovebirds under their red ribbons and green boughs. The audience could feel for him, left standing more than once in politely dead air like a tiresome comedian, were his efforts not so obviously spurred by a heinous case of bros before hos. He is always tugging the limelight from the couple, interrupting their infant domesticity with a non sequitur epigram or a call for parlor games. He nettles the groom with indiscreet little sallies about their bachelor days in Paris and recovers his balance from the inevitable blowback with the reproachful snipe, "Must be the brandy talking. He's not normally so bad to his friends." Despite a Leiberesque warning about the necessarily undetectable nature of Mr. Geeles' "black magic," Todman pushes with such deliberately offensive skepticism for a demonstration that he seems the most deserving candidate to be snuffed from the record of time, especially if he only seized on it in the first place as a distraction from the marital happiness of his best friend. Indeed, in the early moments after the curtains have been drawn to plunge the airily overcast gallery, oak-panelled, holly-wreathed, into a cold artificial gloom, his defensive sneer wilts just as quickly into the same apprehension as the other guests, caught suddenly in the thickening images intoned by Mr. Geeles as dispassionately as a diagnosis:
"Do you feel something against your throat? That is how it happens. Something soft and fluttery, as though a giant moth were beating its wings against your thorax in a feeble effort to fly. Whoever is feeling it is thinking, 'I am imagining. It will pass. It will go.' But it is not going. Is it?"
Although it dangles the possibility longer than it does for any of the guests whose fingers are seen tentatively stirring in the minuscule, vital movements which assure their escape from the obscure selection of the process, Exit would be less of a conte cruel if it disappeared Todman. Instead, as his eyes rove uneasily in the dimness, they come to fix on the tightly, stilly folded hands of the bride herself, Helena Johnson's Jessamy with her autumn-colored hair and her wedding string of pearls and the girlish thrill in her voice that he kept breaking in on, who never hurt him personally or even wanted to be spun on this wheel of existential roulette. "I'm not in on this! We leave for Paris in the morning—" Her protests were overruled by Christopher Brandon's Jake, casting a malicious glance of his own up at his wrong-footed friend: "Well, for Todman's sake, darling. It'd be bad form to leave the best man in such a pickle." He praised her courage, to his best man's eyeroll. Now as if that stupid, schoolboyish dislike made the decision for the process, Todman is the witness to her dissolution, unknitted in the measure of Mr. Geeles' words as the gasp of her breath and the panicked flick of her lashes merge with the insectile flurry of the moth that Todman watched batter itself dustily against the sill, only a few minutes and another reality ago. "Nothing." Motionless, diminishing, Jessamy fogs like film left too long in its chemicals, alone as the dark swims in on her as if all the rest of the world had drowned away. It rushes back in at a jerk of the curtains, the wan winter afternoon like a slap in the face and Todman blinks in it a moment, swallowing his fright under the benignly unchanged eye of Mr. Geeles. Laughter rills in around him, the spring-snap of tension that is half the reason we tell ourselves these scary stories in the dark. Turning in the same déjà vu of a motion, he sees no one seated on the embroidered footstool beside Jake, and then no one was ever there to be seated at all.
Farjeon's ending is short sharp shock enough, with Jake carelessly overturning the de-occupied footstool and a macabre chime in the topper that in this resected history, there's room in the car for one more. Extended that beat of uncertainty, Zimbler's ending gives the shock not so much a twist as a heart-sink: Todman gets not only the proof of altered realities that he jeered for, but its awful recognition as the Christmas wish of his pettiest spite, and in that same instant as the last of reality ravels itself into place, his consternation clears to his normal, slightly acid jocularity, the embarrassed relief of really having believed for a moment in the dark that anyone could disappear. "Oh, Todman. And I thought you would be the one who was for it." So much cosmic horror wants to create a terror of meaninglessness, but the Christmas good cheer of this short film's fade-out does it. Whatever abysses our antihero glimpsed within himself and the most snugly heritage red brick and hedged gardens of English tradition are gone as surely as the girl who suffered them, not repressed, not forgotten, undone as Mr. Geeles promised in the prelude to his annual spellbinding scare, and what's left is festivity and camaraderie and a never-was-best man who is considerably less unpleasant when not passively-aggressively competing for the attention of the uninterrupted friend with whom he has a holiday planned: "Yes, I'm sure Paris can hardly wait, what with old Jake the juggernaut champing at the bit." He holds for his laugh, the arch master of ceremonies; he gets it, too. He can't hear his own rimshot. "Why do you think all the women are fleeing the city?" Pedantically, if Jessamy never existed, some other contrivance must explain the acquaintance of the men in her former life, but Exit operates on the terms of magic rather than Bradbury, a ghastly shadow of It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Imagine if you had never been born—it wouldn't change a thing. Surely Mr. Geeles must remember, midwife to this process of subtraction which leaves no difference. For the good it does Jessamy, the audience can't forget.
I would have read Farjeon's "Exit" in one of the innumerable school anthologies in which I was always supposed to be reading some other story—neither the author nor the title stuck with me, but the conceit lodged like a bad dream, instantly recognizable decades after the fact. Its own history is slightly elusive, broadcast before it was published and co-credited in both instances to Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, although without access to any earlier version I have no idea what the text of the short story was "adapted for broadcasting" from. There does exist a one-act play, but its script was not apparently used the one time the material was adapted for television. What blows my mind is that it never seems to have been adapted as a radio drama. As a short film, a short story, even a short story read out over the air, there is a protective layer between the incantation of the process and the audience, the fourth walls of third person omniscient and mise-en-scène. Done straight for radio in unquotated voices, there would be nothing to stop the audience from being included automatically among the number of people who might disappear just from listening to Mr. Geeles, which is so existentially freaky that it seems impossible no one took advantage of it. It is an almost definitional voice-in-the-dark story. It is a tribute to its strength as an uncanny narrative that it makes such a good film when it could have scared the pants off its audience just by handing a copy of Best Broadcast Stories (1944) to Julian Glover. DP Adam Etherington gives the location shooting at Layer Marney Tower the flatness of a washed-out winter's day, the most unnuminous of lighting schemes, but at the height of the process splits briefly, engulfingly into a kind of lepidopteran psychedelia, sound-designed by Alexa Zimmerman and co-edited by Zimbler and Ulysses Guidotti as if its containing shadows have been sliced out of time. The music by Fabian Almazan is somber and wandering, the same color as the tapped-out light until it darkens. The small cast is rounded out by Maggie Robson, Edward McNamee, and Keith Hill, but Coleman struck me so vividly with his face like a snide faun's and his admirable commitment to a Gulf spill of brilliantine, I was chagrined to discover I had last seen him as Ponder Stibbons in Sky One's Hogfather (2006); it made me feel I owed him a film unrelated to Christmas. This one I got from Vimeo after re-reading the short story, its nightmare fuel unimpaired. Of the Farjeon siblings, Harry was the composer, but if he had to make one literary contribution, what a beaut. This process brought to you by my best backers at Patreon.
The smartest tweak of the screenplay from the short story concerns the character of the mysterious Mr. Geeles, on whose supposed knowledge of "de-creation" rests the difference between a good fireside shiver and the queasily seamless reweaving of reality. "Well, it doesn't interest me to bring a rabbit out of a hat. I'm more interested in the process of putting one back . . . I should put it back so completely that you would never have had it at all." On the page, he's a more conventionally sinister figure with his watchfulness and his disconcerting voice, his papery age itself a kind of memento mori at the double holiday of a Christmas wedding. Played with genial modesty by the robust white-haired Julian Glover, Mr. Geeles on film is disarming rather than offputting, a family friend of a vintage such that the bride's uncle can remind the younger generation a touch mischievously as well as instructively, "He's been to places you couldn't even imagine. Seen some queer things." He's introduced absently brushing off a spill of brandy, the quietest of the seven guests left to pass the time in the grey-watered afternoon until the newlyweds with their hands inseparably twined and their eagerly teasing argument about settling in the country or the city depart for their honeymoon in Paris; he's heard from first in an affable attempt to redirect the best man, whose toastmaster jesting has slipped a personal gear since the ceremony and is grinding the conversation to awkward halts. He has none of the stonefish overtones of Farjeon's Geeles, lying in wait to unsettle. If anything, he seems content with his peripheral part in the company, an accustomed witness to its coziness and frictions, which makes it that much weirder for his center stage to involve, to begin with, a matter-of-fact explanation of the distinction between a murder, which still leaves behind the traces of a life, and the process whose theory he outlines, which emphatically does not: "You would be sponged from the page of human history. Not even your memory would remain."
With Farjeon, the reader has to wait for the casual stab of the last lines to learn which of the guests has been redacted by the process which Mr. Geeles admits, once set in motion, is out of his hands to the point that his own—it is never really named, though for all intents and purposes it is a spell—could just as easily erase him. Writer-director Zimbler tips his hand earlier, but in a way which amplifies rather than undercuts the horror of the resolution. In both versions, the power of de-creation is put to the test at the insistence of the incessant Todman, who canonically never knows when to back down. Farjeon's rendition is merely irresponsible in the way of the chronic life of the party, but Ed Coleman gives him a recklessly self-inflicted edge, a mostly emptied glass in his hand and an ill-concealed impatience with the conspicuous nesting of the Christmas lovebirds under their red ribbons and green boughs. The audience could feel for him, left standing more than once in politely dead air like a tiresome comedian, were his efforts not so obviously spurred by a heinous case of bros before hos. He is always tugging the limelight from the couple, interrupting their infant domesticity with a non sequitur epigram or a call for parlor games. He nettles the groom with indiscreet little sallies about their bachelor days in Paris and recovers his balance from the inevitable blowback with the reproachful snipe, "Must be the brandy talking. He's not normally so bad to his friends." Despite a Leiberesque warning about the necessarily undetectable nature of Mr. Geeles' "black magic," Todman pushes with such deliberately offensive skepticism for a demonstration that he seems the most deserving candidate to be snuffed from the record of time, especially if he only seized on it in the first place as a distraction from the marital happiness of his best friend. Indeed, in the early moments after the curtains have been drawn to plunge the airily overcast gallery, oak-panelled, holly-wreathed, into a cold artificial gloom, his defensive sneer wilts just as quickly into the same apprehension as the other guests, caught suddenly in the thickening images intoned by Mr. Geeles as dispassionately as a diagnosis:
"Do you feel something against your throat? That is how it happens. Something soft and fluttery, as though a giant moth were beating its wings against your thorax in a feeble effort to fly. Whoever is feeling it is thinking, 'I am imagining. It will pass. It will go.' But it is not going. Is it?"
Although it dangles the possibility longer than it does for any of the guests whose fingers are seen tentatively stirring in the minuscule, vital movements which assure their escape from the obscure selection of the process, Exit would be less of a conte cruel if it disappeared Todman. Instead, as his eyes rove uneasily in the dimness, they come to fix on the tightly, stilly folded hands of the bride herself, Helena Johnson's Jessamy with her autumn-colored hair and her wedding string of pearls and the girlish thrill in her voice that he kept breaking in on, who never hurt him personally or even wanted to be spun on this wheel of existential roulette. "I'm not in on this! We leave for Paris in the morning—" Her protests were overruled by Christopher Brandon's Jake, casting a malicious glance of his own up at his wrong-footed friend: "Well, for Todman's sake, darling. It'd be bad form to leave the best man in such a pickle." He praised her courage, to his best man's eyeroll. Now as if that stupid, schoolboyish dislike made the decision for the process, Todman is the witness to her dissolution, unknitted in the measure of Mr. Geeles' words as the gasp of her breath and the panicked flick of her lashes merge with the insectile flurry of the moth that Todman watched batter itself dustily against the sill, only a few minutes and another reality ago. "Nothing." Motionless, diminishing, Jessamy fogs like film left too long in its chemicals, alone as the dark swims in on her as if all the rest of the world had drowned away. It rushes back in at a jerk of the curtains, the wan winter afternoon like a slap in the face and Todman blinks in it a moment, swallowing his fright under the benignly unchanged eye of Mr. Geeles. Laughter rills in around him, the spring-snap of tension that is half the reason we tell ourselves these scary stories in the dark. Turning in the same déjà vu of a motion, he sees no one seated on the embroidered footstool beside Jake, and then no one was ever there to be seated at all.
Farjeon's ending is short sharp shock enough, with Jake carelessly overturning the de-occupied footstool and a macabre chime in the topper that in this resected history, there's room in the car for one more. Extended that beat of uncertainty, Zimbler's ending gives the shock not so much a twist as a heart-sink: Todman gets not only the proof of altered realities that he jeered for, but its awful recognition as the Christmas wish of his pettiest spite, and in that same instant as the last of reality ravels itself into place, his consternation clears to his normal, slightly acid jocularity, the embarrassed relief of really having believed for a moment in the dark that anyone could disappear. "Oh, Todman. And I thought you would be the one who was for it." So much cosmic horror wants to create a terror of meaninglessness, but the Christmas good cheer of this short film's fade-out does it. Whatever abysses our antihero glimpsed within himself and the most snugly heritage red brick and hedged gardens of English tradition are gone as surely as the girl who suffered them, not repressed, not forgotten, undone as Mr. Geeles promised in the prelude to his annual spellbinding scare, and what's left is festivity and camaraderie and a never-was-best man who is considerably less unpleasant when not passively-aggressively competing for the attention of the uninterrupted friend with whom he has a holiday planned: "Yes, I'm sure Paris can hardly wait, what with old Jake the juggernaut champing at the bit." He holds for his laugh, the arch master of ceremonies; he gets it, too. He can't hear his own rimshot. "Why do you think all the women are fleeing the city?" Pedantically, if Jessamy never existed, some other contrivance must explain the acquaintance of the men in her former life, but Exit operates on the terms of magic rather than Bradbury, a ghastly shadow of It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Imagine if you had never been born—it wouldn't change a thing. Surely Mr. Geeles must remember, midwife to this process of subtraction which leaves no difference. For the good it does Jessamy, the audience can't forget.
I would have read Farjeon's "Exit" in one of the innumerable school anthologies in which I was always supposed to be reading some other story—neither the author nor the title stuck with me, but the conceit lodged like a bad dream, instantly recognizable decades after the fact. Its own history is slightly elusive, broadcast before it was published and co-credited in both instances to Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, although without access to any earlier version I have no idea what the text of the short story was "adapted for broadcasting" from. There does exist a one-act play, but its script was not apparently used the one time the material was adapted for television. What blows my mind is that it never seems to have been adapted as a radio drama. As a short film, a short story, even a short story read out over the air, there is a protective layer between the incantation of the process and the audience, the fourth walls of third person omniscient and mise-en-scène. Done straight for radio in unquotated voices, there would be nothing to stop the audience from being included automatically among the number of people who might disappear just from listening to Mr. Geeles, which is so existentially freaky that it seems impossible no one took advantage of it. It is an almost definitional voice-in-the-dark story. It is a tribute to its strength as an uncanny narrative that it makes such a good film when it could have scared the pants off its audience just by handing a copy of Best Broadcast Stories (1944) to Julian Glover. DP Adam Etherington gives the location shooting at Layer Marney Tower the flatness of a washed-out winter's day, the most unnuminous of lighting schemes, but at the height of the process splits briefly, engulfingly into a kind of lepidopteran psychedelia, sound-designed by Alexa Zimmerman and co-edited by Zimbler and Ulysses Guidotti as if its containing shadows have been sliced out of time. The music by Fabian Almazan is somber and wandering, the same color as the tapped-out light until it darkens. The small cast is rounded out by Maggie Robson, Edward McNamee, and Keith Hill, but Coleman struck me so vividly with his face like a snide faun's and his admirable commitment to a Gulf spill of brilliantine, I was chagrined to discover I had last seen him as Ponder Stibbons in Sky One's Hogfather (2006); it made me feel I owed him a film unrelated to Christmas. This one I got from Vimeo after re-reading the short story, its nightmare fuel unimpaired. Of the Farjeon siblings, Harry was the composer, but if he had to make one literary contribution, what a beaut. This process brought to you by my best backers at Patreon.