A dream upon viewing
episodes 1 and 2
I had this dream the night after I watched the first two
episodes of the season back in February and jotted it down. Having finished the
remainder of the season and the remainder of the year, I stand by it as a
prescient review.
I did not act in the dream. I only observed and became
aware. This is the dream.
The studio lot is unblemished in its Los Angeles way. Just
as Autumnal New York is an elusive perfection, so the perfect Los Angeles Day:
un-muggy, un-smoggy, not a shadow drawn from the pure blue Disney sunlight. The
numbered buildings rise up and flank the broad tramway avenue like Greek
marble. It is a studio lot’s idea of a studio lot.
A crew and all its accessories bestride the avenue, random
and intentional – a quorum gathered to cut a scene: the riggers with their
electrical tape, the gaffers and grips with their scorpion booms, the best
boys, the C.M.E.s. The whole dutiful role of credits is there, and they and
each article of equipment is a light-sucking muted black. The director too,
immaculate and center.
To what intent does this dark retinue attend?
The scene is thus: two new lovers sheet covered and
attended, sit ready upon a sofa couch. Their uncovered flesh and the matching
pony wall behind them are the only warmth under that bluest sky. Before them,
suspended, hangs a metal and glass box and all around prop cameras blink cold
red lights.
Ready is commanded and made and the flimsy cover removed.
The real cameras blinked red now. The two people, naked, begin that naked
simulacrum of love. On cue, they stop and look toward the shuddering gape of a
box. Again on cue, they share some words of false surprise and wonder.
And then, off cue, what should be false is real. The post-production
man’s best attempt at nightmare leaps through time to the present, shakes its
lightless eyes, and shakes a scrambled shape into being. And then off cue, what
was false is real. The blinking cameras catch a moment of true surprise and
wonder, then terror between the two new lovers until the shape shoots out of
the box and consumes their too real naked faces, and then vanishes.
As if all were false and intentional as before, the director
happily has his scene. The two young actors, naked now as possible, are
covered, and the black clad crew disassembles, disperses and dissembles, all
knowing what I too know somehow:
The spirit of man, so long ago released incrementally in
ripe garden fruit, in well-tossed children, in enslavement and brutality, and most
suddenly in fusion’s annihilative power, had finally been condensed and
captured in art, and would be shared like a virus through the eyes and ears.
Every eye on set had been infested by it and had become a willing incubator, and
every screen became a vector. The dispersed spirit would infect every man
exposed through his screen. Infection would make bad men worse and free of
account. Perhaps, some good men would be immune, but -- like our hero – the best of us would be
made most malignant and corrupt. Monstrous.
I 
