WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
“We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But [we] were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy … It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the total film we carried inside ourselves.”
—JEAN-PIERRE LéAUD AS PAUL, MASCULIN FéMININ (1966)
THE TOTAL FILMS WE CARRY INSIDE OURSELVES ARE distillations of our dreams, of movies we’ve read about or half-remembered, unencumbered by the deadening finitude of execution. Such is the eternal fascination and promise of the unseen film—but also of the unseeable film. By unseeable films, I mean those that reside solely in the imagination: most particularly, in the imaginations of authors who seed their books with allusions to films—whether as little as a stray mention of a title, or as much as a full description or behind-the-scenes drama—existing only in their characters’ fictional world.
These authors build castles in the air that never collapse under the pressure of all the hundreds of thousands of dynamic, finite inventions necessary to bring a shadowy vision into brittle light. The imaginary movie’s admixture of absence and of possibility—basically, the recipe for longing—reverberates through novels, whether the author is rhapsodizing the fascination of movies, rearranging the puzzle-boxes that are artworks in the age of mechanical reproduction, or laying bare the workings of Hollywood.
The oracle-editor protagonist of Steve Erickson’s proclaims that “In every false movie is the true movie that is haunted by an unfinished silent masterpiece called , just as in , by contributor Farran Smith Nehme, a quest for a lost silent called —purportedly an Ann Radcliffe adaptation directed by a demanding Ufa-import artiste—is the MacGuffin that crystallizes the longings of her cinephile characters.
