w r i t i n g

Fifth of July. Warm summer night. I can hear voices outside my bedroom window through the sound of the ventilator that’s humming on the floor. I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. The cover of the 1970 album depicts a black and white self-portrait of Mitchell with in the folds of her skirt the view from the window of her Laurel Canyon house. Her silhouette reminds me of the women in Tanya Tucker and Patsy Cline songs: former beauties walking around town or along the highway in the middle of the night, suitcase in hand, to say they love the lost “you” of the song. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit juxtaposes their nameless lovers, a faithless man, a dead husband, with the detailed landscapes in which these dramas play themselves out, the latter inevitably being the more enduring love of the two. Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery. We’ll wink at total strangers passing in Morning, Morgantown. He knows I’m gonna stay, California dreamin’. For those who lose the object of their love, a place is what remains, Solnit writes. You can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, and in some cases these scenes become the backdrop of a second draft of history, an imagined past you wish it might have been. The first half of David Lynch’ Mulholland Drive offers the protagonist a version of reality in which she is loved back, and in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino gives late actress Sharon Tate another chance at life. Both set in Los Angeles, the movies render the border between reality and fantasy increasingly permeable: one bleeds into the other like music playing in another room.

Sitting outside at my aunt’s apartment by the lake one summer night, I heard Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car playing next door. I had arrived earlier that day and on my way to the apartment smiled at the neighbor brushing his teeth in the sun. He paused and smiled back. That night I imagined him on the other side of the wall, listening to the song that, as my friend B. would later describe it, made me respond to the call. What was the call? I asked B., curious to hear how he perceived the fragile beginnings of love. To pay attention, he replied. To collaborate with chance. At the end of that summer I had more knowledge of water, of wanting, of fruit trees, of echoes and silences. I return to my aunt’s apartment each year, suitcase in hand. The you of the song has faded, the lake is there, clear and unchanged. “There’ll be new dreams / maybe better dreams and / plenty before the last revolving year is through,” Mitchell sings in Ladies of the Canyon’s closing song. A better dream, or at least a preferred version of reality, is portrayed by Tarantino’s film set in a time and place he created from memory. “Murder, revenge and passionate intrigue” says the voice on the radio that’s on whenever stuntman Cliff Booth drives friend and fading star Rick Dalton around LA of the 60s, passing hitchhikers, sunsets and drive-in cinemas. Cielo Drive transforms from a place where lives were lost to a place where lives are saved, and I think of the view from Laurel Canyon, held by a woman who’s only half drawn.

Weather reports and advertisements frequently interrupt the soundtrack to the fairytale that portrays much more than a simple “this is how it could have been.” Once Upon a Time illustrates that fantasy and reality aren’t two parallel lines running alongside one another but two bodies orbiting elliptically around a common center. The bodies in an elliptical orbit can never be at the same place at the same time. They are destined to pass each other’s line of orbit in opposite locations, thereby creating a realm of duality with at the center one still, beating heart. The question is then what is true for both the fantasy in which Sharon Tate lives and the reality in which she dies. What common center do these variations revolve around? There are things I have found that provide, if not answers, at least landmarks of some kind. There is a note on the last page of my copy of Solnit’s book that says: “a perfect tool of communication between two mysteries (you are the other one).” I could not remember what was meant by the tool and the mysteries and whether the “you” once might have referred to me. Then I saw a name and a date scribbled next to a fragment some hundred pages earlier and realized I had been here before. I know we go round and round on the carousel of time. I know we can’t return. I know when we pass each other we catch a glimpse of each other for as long as we can. I know it must be enough.

This text is part of a series of essays that looks at cinema through the lens of the senses.