Nine Stories: Sleeping on the skin of a nightmare
Nine films for nine J.D. Salinger stories
A friend lent me a small, very pretty old copy of the book Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger about a year ago, and recently I got around to reading it. I did not like Catcher in the Rye when I encountered it as required reading in high school, but for some reason haven’t reflected in my adulthood that my reaction to something I read at 16 probably wouldn’t hold today. I don’t remember much of what I read at that age with any specificity anymore, but Catcher is an exception.
When I think of it, vivid traces of its petulance still come back. Its snotty boyish abstention, the delicate and mincing particularity its author tried to sublimate into his protagonist, who tried to hide it from the reader. Images loosely associated with its plot still come to mind too — desolate playgrounds and suburban streets populated only by the morose Holden Caulfield and his gymnastic, cheery-bright sister. These images are like newspaper comics, faint outlines with empty speech bubbles hovering overhead, blotted over with cloudy grays and blacks. I remember the reading experience as colorless and humorless, yet at the same time precious, yearning, yet embarrassed of its own yearning, caustic with swollen, conflicted feelings, and still hamstrung by fear of reader disapproval into expressions that are pert and frictionless.
Even writing this now I see the defense — how the form itself immerses the reader into the mind of a teenage boy more completely than dialogue and description could, but it didn’t matter to me then. It might now, though, because I loved Nine Stories.
With the slight exception of the first story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Nine Stories is a wonderful, varied, and surprising collection. Salinger’s choice of subjects surprised me — women more often than men, children and adults more often than teenagers. His tone surprised me. Often precocious and insistently twee, but too polyphonous and multi-tonal to be reduced. Like Hemingway, Salinger buouys most of his stories most of the time in the present moment, focusing on narrating events as they’re unfolding and keeping you occupied with rapid-fire dialogue. Meanwhile, he’s gearing up for a wild tonal, perspective, or plot shift that adds another dimension to the story with such speed and so unexpectedly that it strikes you dizzy. His sincerity surprised me. Or not his ability to be sincere in his treatment of the very plain and human experiences of loneliness, disconnection, and frustrated desire, but the fact that a sincere pleading with the reader to care about these experiences seemed to be the goal of many stories. I was also happy to discover in story after story a curiosity about the realm of possibility beyond the “real” - the clairvoyant child of “Teddy,” the talismanic non-human character in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” the fabulist mode of character development in “The Laughing Man.”
Again like Hemingway, Salinger is fascinating when it comes to men and women. Not quite as fascinating, but Hemingway is elite … like him, though, Salinger is able to overwhelm and surpass the rocky, roughshod exterior of the man and the pose he strikes toward the world. Even more interesting (Hemingway doesn’t often bother with this), Salinger’s women characters are so deep and tenderly wrought! Especially up top, in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” Salinger writes female interiority in a way that reminded me of Alice Adams or Lorrie Moore. Wry, deep, melancholic. He evokes fragility without being fetishistic and strength without being patronizing. Above all, Salinger is extraordinary when it comes to children. In “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “For Esme – With Love and Squalor,” “Teddy,” and especially “The Laughing Man” and “Down at the Dinghy,” Salinger executes a complicated maneuver in which he both heightens tension and intrigue by confining reader perception within the painful limits of child’s POV, and converts those limits into a tool, a kind of viewfinder the reader can briefly access to peer out onto the full drama of things being seen but not fully understood within the text.
Anyway … it’s my understanding that Salinger left some kind of contractural stipulation behind after his death that prohibited any possibility of future film adaptations of his work, especially Catcher … you think about how prolific writers like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and even William Faulkner were in Hollywood, and how enduring their work has been on film long after their deaths … Salinger has no Intruder in the Dust, no The Killers … maybe it’s just as well he has no Great Gatsby. I’ve just learned that “Uncle Wiggily” was adapted into the 1949 film My Foolish Heart, starring the incredible Susan Hayward. Salinger hated it, and I haven’t seen it, but while I read through these stories so many different films resonated, either with the tone, the story, the characters, something less tangible and more essential … so, here are the nine stories of the book paired with nine films, elaborated on and analyzed.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” | The Naked Kiss
Without any context, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” makes a lot of sense as the introduction to Nine Stories. It’s the perfect bridge between Catcher, which came before, and the rest of the stories that come after. All of those are more mature, sophisticated, complex, and wide-ranging in their sympathies and concerns. Catcher and “Bananafish” both deal with the alienation of young men after the second world war, and both contain barely-there female side characters who exist for use as table settings — stand-ins for the ignorant, homogenous, nullifying culture which surrounds the male leads.
With context it makes even more sense, but in a different way, one that makes me like it more. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was published in The New Yorker in 1948, his second story for the magazine. "Slight Rebellion off Madison," a kind of proto-Catcher mock-up depicting Holden Caulfield’s pre-deployment ennui, was accepted for submission in November 1941, but canceled after Pearl Harbor was bombed a few weeks later. The story generated little fanfare when it eventually appeared after the armistice in 1946. According to Kenneth Slawenski’s biography of Salinger, the acceptance of “Bananafish” in 1948 after seven subsequent rejections felt to Salinger like the first time, also marking the first time the author consented to being heavily edited. William Maxwell is the editor who saw enough promise in “Bananafish” to break Salinger’s rejection streak and take him on for a second go, provided the author work with him through a rigorous revision process.
“Bananafish” is a story in three parts. First, a young woman (Muriel Glass) anxiously paints her nails in her resort suite while bickering with her mother over the phone about her husband Seymour, who has just returned from the war. The second section finds a seemingly jocular though distantly characterized Seymour combing the beach. He eventually forms an unusual relationship with young girl named Sybil, whom he tells a story about a “tragic” made-up creature called bananfish. These fish gorge themselves so thoroughly on bananas that they die, unable to escape their subaqueous dens. In the final section, Seymour returns to the suite and kills himself.
In its elliptical way, “Bananafish” is the most didactic story in Nine Stories. Its pleasures derive primarily from its third act subversion. Muriel and her mother’s tittering, feminine phone call, the thrumming undercurrent of Muriel’s superficial concern for Seymour, the vapid indolence of Sybil’s mother on the beach, the incuriosity Sybil displays in diverting Seymour away from the story of the bananafish and toward Seymour’s trivial flouting of convention the previous night, letting another girl named Sharon Lipschutz sit beside him at a piano bench. These things thatch together to form a grid, an inflexible yet permeable barrier that orders the world of the story into the elements which defy the status quo (Seymour) from those which conform to it (everything else). The conformist signifiers combine to produce a low frequency static that underscores the whole story. It’s the music of postwar materialism — loud, cheery, and false.
This is one of Salinger’s favored sleights of hands, and for me it never got old. Keep the reader entranced like a baby with the tinkling babble of chit chat, gossip, shopping, vacationing, and consuming. Then with the other, strategically place the elements which resist, scramble, and disadhere from the nullifying order of society to be activated at the precise moment in which they can present the most fulsome challenge to it. Or maybe just expose it.
What I like in a lot of the other stories here is that Salinger doesn’t lose track of the fact that the people who conform also have complex inner lives, face unique conflicts, and render the stories they find themselves in richer when approached with curiosity, not contempt. The characters here are caught irrevocably in Seymour’s orbit, in fact they are formed from the dust and debris the Seymour satellite kicks off. There is interdependence — Seymour’s fate is bound up in their adherence to the status quo — but none of them exist as much more than emblems of that status quo. Seymour creates them, but is not created by them. Each of the types that the characters in “Bananafish” represent return in fuller, more compelling forms in later stories. The disaffected young man who struggles to communicate how he really feels takes the reader on a far more powerful journey in “The Laughing Man,” the nervous housewife is rendered with more startling empathy in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” her nagging mother appears in far less prescriptive form in “Down at the Dinghy,” and the precocious child is her own person with much more to do in “For Esme — With Love and Squalor.”
Maybe it’s because I didn’t care much for the story being told that no cinematic parallels came to mind while I read it. It was only after I’d finished the collection and allowed myself to think beyond plot to the essence of each story that an analogue came to mind: Samuel Fuller’s icepick to the frontal lobe of the 1950s, The Naked Kiss.
Where Salinger constructs a scale model of the repressive, obsequious, hall of slanted mirrors that was the American postwar period only to tear it down on the last page, Fuller opens his film with a knife through screen. The first image you see is Constance Towers beating the camera with her pocketbook. The first line you hear comes from the man she’s beating — “Kelly, I’m drunk!” She rips his wallet out of his pocket, takes “only what I’m owed,” and throws the rest in his face. By minute three we get the hallmark woman’s film scene audiences had become accustomed to for 30 years — a woman reapplying her makeup in the mirror. But now we know why some women’s lipstick smears, and where they get the money to buy brow pencils.
The Naked Kiss puts the 1950s in an electric chair, delivering one of the strongest shocks to an audience’s sense of the recent past you can come across in cinema. By the time he released it in 1964, Fuller had already directed 16 films, the lion’s share for Daryl F. Zanuck, who signed him to a multi-picture deal at Fox when Hollywood was still run by the studio system. Like Salinger, Fuller served in active duty in World War II. Both men participated in the liberation of concentration camps — Fuller shot 16mm footage at Falkenau, located in the heart of Germany, and Salinger later wrote of the numerous Dachau subcamps he entered, “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live” (quoted in Salinger’s daughter Margaret’s memoir, Dream Catcher).
Their respective experiences in the war left left profound marks, puncture wounds on their souls that bled out any chance at a fullness of heart, and leaving both of their styles with an indelible bleeding edge. Both men were also Jews — one can detect in many of Fuller’s films and as many of Salinger’s stories a grave, foreboding sense of possibility. Or more accurately its inverse: what can’t be stopped. Douglas Sirk, who fled Germany after his Jewish wife was persecuted by the Nazis and went on to direct some of the finest films of Hollywood’s first century, once claimed that he set many of his technicolor melodramas in the American suburbs because that’s where fascism takes root. Stories from Nine Stories like “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “The Laughing Man” all make this same tacit connection, and turn from the suburbs in fear and loathing. Fuller, who was so displeased with Sirk’s treatment of his Shockproof script he decided to try directing his own work, came as close to any director in matching the ferocious condemnation roaring beneath the placid surface of All That Heaven Allows in The Naked Kiss.
In the film, Towers plays Kelly, a sex worker who flees from her vengeful former pimp to the serene suburb of Grantville. Kelly becomes ensnared in a triangle of desire, reformation, and retribution with the sophisticated tycoon and town namesake J.L. Grant (Michael Dante) and his best friend, the gruff police captain Griff (Anthony Eisley). The Naked Kiss outright depicts or intimates rape, child molestation, prostitution, murder, larceny, a brothel, and all manner of indelicate emotions. Nothing distinguishes The Naked Kiss from the women’s films that preceded it, like The Hard Way, Heat Lightning, or Kitty Foyle, in terms of these films’ ambition to expose the rot beneath the perfect veneer of womanhood’s public face. All that The Naked Kiss did differently was take advantage of the collapse of the studio system, and the Hays Code with it, to show more.
But those sterling, smoldering gems of “now you listen to me”-style rants perfected by Joan Crawford remain in tact in The Naked Kiss. Here’s a prime example, from Kelly, trying to talk her young coworker Buff out of joining the brothel she followed Kelly to (and after Kelly shoves Buff’s $25 cash advance down the throat of Virginia Grey’s Madame Candy):
“All right, go ahead. You know what's different about the first night? Nothing. Nothing except it lasts forever, that's all. You'll be sleeping on the skin of a nightmare for the rest of your life. You're a beautiful girl, Buff. Young... oh, they'll outbid each other for you. You'll get clothes, compliments, cash. You'll meet men you live on, and men who’ll live on you. And those are the only men you'll meet. And after a steady grind of making every John feel at home, you'll become a block of ice. If you do happen to melt a little, you'll get slipped a tip behind Candy's back. You'll be every man's wife-in-law, and no man's wife. Why, your world with Candy will become so warped that you'll hate all men — and you'll hate yourself. Because you'll become a social problem, a medical problem, a mental problem, and a despicable failure as a woman.”
The Naked Kiss and “A Perfect Day for Bananfish” chart opposite courses for the same destination: the true postwar years as their authors lived them. No poodle skirts, no soda fountains, no little boxes on the hillside. Just a throbbing, plaque-spangled vein rendered numb and sparkling by a wash of Novocain.
“Just Before the War with the Eskimos” | Hard, Fast, and Beautiful
There is a wonderful movie by Ida Lupino called Hard, Fast, and Beautiful that was released in 1951. Lupino became an anomaly in Hollywood when she decided in the late 1940s to form her own production company for the purposes of developing scripts for her to direct. There was precedent for women directing films, but not actresses stepping behind the camera to do so. She had had enough of Hollywood’s aversion to plain realities of modern life, and was frustrated by her peers’ ignorance of the stylistic revolution of realism overtaking filmmaking colonies in countries like Italy, Denmark, and Japan. What she sought above all was to depart from their squeamishness and indifference in the face of vexing social issues, like rape, unwed motherhood, and the stigma of disease, the subjects of her first three films as director.
Lupino wanted to “make pictures of a sociological nature … to tackle serious themes and problem dramas,” and though Hard, Fast, and Beautiful represents a bit of a downshift in thematic rigor, Lupino brings such psychological intensity to the issue at hand — the fractious fault lines that lie dormant in all mother-daughter relationships — that any concerns about her subject’s seriousness are dissolved. At times you feel you’re watching The Passion of Anna, not a film that RKO boss Howard Hughes forced to be renamed from the original Loving Cup to make sure the male audience knew it was okay to ogle the women on screen.
I thought of Hard, Fast, and Beautiful on the first page of “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” because they’re both about tennis. It’s silly and superficial, but deeper connections between the story and the film revealed themselves to me as I read on. The Lupino film tells the story of Florence and Millie Farley, a young tennis prodigy and her ambitious mother. Millie, played by the great, hard-boiled character actress Claire Trevor, prods an unwilling Florence (Sally Forrest) forward with the all the toothy hunger of a desperate single mother. Except she isn’t. She leaves Florence’s father sick and confined to bed to travel with her daughter to the Wimbledon women’s single titles, where she flirts with her coach and accepts lavish, rule-breaking gifts. But why does she do it? For her own benefit? Her daughter’s? Or something less clear, less articulable?
One of the triumphs of Hard, Fast, and Beautiful is that Millie’s crude and often cruel behavior isn’t easily reduced to a single motivation. Manipulate her daughter into achievement to avenge her own robbed youth, force her to become the breadwinner for lack of options for a single woman of her age at her time, turn her into a show-pony to reap the benefits of her success, roughly encourage her daughter’s budding talent in hopes of shoring up a better life for her than the one she herself had? Millie’s propelled by each of these desires in turn, and at many times at once, throwing her daughter’s simple desire to go on dates, get married, become a mother, and retreat into suburban anonymity into painful relief. “A girl’s best friend is her mother,” Florence quotes with bitter irony during an argument with Millie.
This contrast between the fragile simplicity of youth and the burdensome complexity of adulthood lies at the core of so many of the stories in Nine Stories. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” adds another wrinkle. This story centers on Ginnie Maddox, a young girl who plays tennis with her private school classmate Selena Graff each Saturday morning. Ginnie doesn’t come from the money Selena comes from, and it’s less that mere fact than the effect it’s had on both of their personalities that goads Ginnie to irritability and brittle sarcasm in most of her interactions with Selena. “I never in my life would’ve thought you could be so small about anything,” Selena says over a spat about successive weeks of unapid cab fare Ginnie’s no longer willing to eat. “Now you know,” Ginnie flatly replies, opening a copy of Vogue that’d never be found in the Maddox household “in front of her face.”
Ginnie possesses a needling quality that’s common among the women in Nine Stories. She’s constantly swiping at Selena, in her mind, behind her back, and to her face. Because of Selena’s wealth she’s sheltered, and because she’s sheltered she has a hard time comprehending Ginnie’s resentment, so she mainly responds with a sad kind of condescension. What happens in “Eskimos” is Ginnie follows Selena back up to her family’s townhouse so that Selena can wake her “sick” (sedated) mother for the cash Ginnie’s owed. While she waits, Ginnie has a long conversation with Selena’s eccentric older brother, who’s constantly griping, cursing, and thinking out loud. Here’s a typical interaction between them:
"Ginnie briefly held her fire. Very briefly. ‘What were you doing in Ohio?’ she asked.
‘Me? Working in a goddam airplane factory.’
‘You were?’ said Ginnie. ‘Did you like it?’
‘’Did you like it?’’ he mimicked. ‘I loved it. I just adore airplanes. They’re so cute.’
Ginnie was much too involved now to feel affronted. ‘How long did you work there? In the airplane factory.’
‘I don’t know, for Chrissake. Thirty-seven months.’ He stood up and walked over to the window. He looked down at the street, scratching his spine with his thumb. ‘Look at ‘em,’ he said. ‘Goddamn fools.’
‘Who?’ said Ginnie.
‘I don’t know. Anybody.’”
Ginnie shifts into a similar position to Florence toward the end of Hard, Fast, and Beautiful. As she her tennis career takes off, she likes it less and less, but Millie enjoys it more and more. Not simply enjoyment, really, something darker like satiation, the satisfaction of slightly perverse, unmentionable needs. But as the tension mounts between the two of them, Millie begins to waylay her investment in her daughter’s success out of genuine concern for her health and happiness. Florence’s motivation, meanwhile, absorbs the complications her mother sheds off. By the end of the film, she’s as convicted against continuing to play as ever, but not just because she wants to marry young Gordon McKay (Robert Clarke), but because she wants to spite her mother. Even her spite is complicated. It’s mainly an act of refusal — refusing to grant her mother satisfaction that’s predicated on her own immiseration. But it’s also an instinctual refusal to indulge an older woman’s desires. Millie’s strident ambition embarrasses Florence, her tennis coach Fletcher (Carleton G. Young), Gordon, and just about anyone who meets her. By her age, everyone feels, Millie should be resigned to what she has, even if she deserves more, even if she has what it takes to get it. Florence’s reprimand is both personal and social, originating from within and outside of their relationship.
In addition to the refusal, there’s an element of sadomasochism. Florence wants to hurt her mother, but when her mother’s hurt she’s hurt. The ferocious abandon with which she throws herself into arguments by the film’s end reveals flickers of a gestating masochistic impulse. She partly wants to hurt her mother because it will hurt her. And it’s reflexive. Once Millie restores the empathy she’d been suppressing toward her daughter in their relationship, she gets hurt when Florence is hurt, so the wheel turns, stretching them both to the point of contusion.
Ginnie gets caught up in this same kind of organic, constantly revolving cycle. She simply wants the money she’s owed from Selena, but she resents her wealth, so asks for it in a way designed to hurt her. When she finds out Selena’s relationship with her mother (the moneyholder) is a stress point, she presser harder on principle, but starts to regret it, softening as she waits alone in the reading room. Then when she begins to swoon over Ginnie’s brother, she softens further to Selena, but only because it’s in her best interest to befriend her crush’s close relative.
“Just Before the War with the Eskimos’” character arcs conclude on a similar note as Hard, Fast, and Beautiful’s, with the demure and disadvantaged Ginnie and Florence ascended to a position of haughty, resentful power over the people who once had them under their thumb — Selena and Millie, who in turn leave us more confused and fragile than they’ve likely ever been made to feel.
“The Laughing Man” | The World is Full of Secrets
“The Laughing Man” was to me the most riveting story in Nine Stories. It is a story about storytelling, which at first gave me pause, and is also vaguely set in the world of sports, which, after “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” seemed a bit overkill. But it’s the best distillation of Salinger’s quirked up, child-like, slightly fabulist embellishment of the Hemingway model, with its spiritual evocation of the private worlds of men, deceptively empty female side characters who are actually characterized just as richly, only indirectly through contrast, and flat, realist pose that conceals many hidden curves and switchbacks.
Like the stories that immediately precede and follow it, “The Laughing Man” is told from a child’s perspective. The unnamed narrator recounts the series of events that form the story in retrospect. When he was nine years old, he belonged to a Boy Scouts-type extracurricular group called the Comanche Club. It’s 1928, and the leader of the Comanches is a brooding and mysterious twentysomething NYU law student named John Gedsudski, whom Salinger describes in incredibly late ‘40s fashion as if “all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.”
The Chief spends some of his weekends taking a group of Morningside Heights/Columbia-area boys on excursions to museums and such. Mostly they play baseball at Van Cortland Park in Yonkers, but the main action of “The Laughing Man” is the fantastical story within the story the Comanche Chief tells the boys on drives to and from the park. Also called “The Laughing Man,” the story plays out like a typical mid-century pulp paperback adventure written for boys. At first.
“Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. ‘The Laughing Man’ was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.”
The story within the story is about a grotesque yet heroic figure known as the laughing man because of the gaping maw, the “mirthless gap” at the center of what should be his face. He was the “only son of Christian missionaries” who’d been “kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits” and tortured to a hideous extent. He wears a “pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals” that disguises his face, to spare his comrades the horror and build up potency in case he needs to unleash the curdling sight on their enemies. Looking back, the narrator explains that he only now realizes that the true draw of those excursions was the Laughing Man story. Not the museums, the other boys, baseball, or even the Chief himself. The boys are drawn into an intensely close relationship with the story, to the point where, as the narrator puts it, “I happen to regard the Laughing Man as some kind of super-distinguished ancestor of mine.” Not happened — happen. However old the narrator is now — and given his diction, vocabulary, and the maturity of his insights, some years have passed — his connection to the “Laughing Man” story is still visceral and immediate.
One of the great effects you can achieve by telling a parallel story in fits and spurts within your main story is, essentially, distraction. By casting shadow puppets against the side wall of the main house, you’re able to occupy your readers’ attention enough to provide cover to build out elaborate narrative and structural turns right before their very eyes. They’d normally see what you’re doing a mile away and either reject it as gimmick — too much effort — or ignore it as gimmick — too obvious, not enough effort at concealment.
This is how Salinger is able to deploy a kind of structural femme fatale into the story without even the reader seeing what’s coming. A young woman whom the Chief obviously holds a flame for, Mary Hudson, begins playing with the boys. Their feeling toward Mary grows from confused irritation over the presence of the older girl, to reluctant acceptance because she clearly means something to the Chief, to enamored enthusiasm, as she demonstrates real skill and becomes something of a mascot, honorary inductee, and MVP all in one. The pieces all lock into place and begin to fire: things go sour between the Chief and Mary, but the child’s perspective we’re locked into puts blinders on the perspectival periphery, where it’s all happening. The fact that this isn’t true child’s perspective but a remembered child’s perspective should liberate us from naive, painfully-pure hearted distortions, but that psychic link to the Laughing Man overrides whatever retroactive clarity the narrator may have been able to offer.
“After another inning, the light got bad for fielding. The game was called, and we started picking up all the equipment. The last good look I had at Mary Hudson, she was over near third base crying. The Chief had hold of the sleeve of her beaver coat, but she got away from him. She ran off the field onto the cement path and kept running till I couldn't see her any more. The Chief didn't go after her. He just stood watching her disappear. Then he turned around and walked down to home plate and picked up our two bats; we always left the bats for him to carry. I went over to him and asked if he and Mary Hudson had had a fight. He told me to tuck my shirt in.”
The blows Salinger deals the boys in this passage are decisive and unmeasured. But they’re dealt invisibly, only ascertained by a paradoxical loosening of focus. The reader has to back into the outfield to to take in the whole scene, combine just as much inference of what isn’t said and isn’t described with what is said and shown to understand. This shadowplay mirrors the discursive games the Chief plays with the boys via the Laughing Man story. The parallel constructions collide on the final bus ride home. The Chief kills off the the Laughing Man in a cold and brutal way. Many of his accomplices are tortured and die. Those who survive will have to endure under the crippling strain of immense fear. Salinger suggests the boys rank among the survivors, when he writes that after the narrator “stepped out of the Chief's bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone's poppy-petal mask.”
To create the small miracle that is The World Is Full of Secrets, director Graham Swon utilizes the same two critical instruments — the child’s view and the storytelling distraction. The film is a gauzy, somnambulistic look at a group of young girls who gather for a slumber party and tell each other terrible stories. It’s also structured in much the same way as “The Laughing Man” — an older version of one of the principal players looks back at the great cleaving point in she and her friends’ young lives — the night they became adults too soon, the night their fragile children’s trust in the goodness of adults was shattered. “It isn’t something I talk about,” intones the voice (Peggy Steffans) which sets us up on shaky, subjective ground that in our own unavoidable, innocent credulousness, we eventually accept as unshakeable maiden stone when left to ourselves. She continues:
“It was so many years ago, no one remembers. Hardly anyone would still care. A million equally terrible things have happened in the decades since. I never spoke to the other girls much after. We all just fell out of touch. Everybody who knew anything about it is out of my life now. Dead, or forgotten. I’m a different person, the world is a different place. And it’s very painful to revisit. But, you’ve come all this way, and I can see in your eyes that you won’t take no for an answer. So, I’ll tell you what you want to hear. It’s no secret what happened. It’s just the kind of terrible story that always happens to someone else. But it happened to them. It happened to me. It happened to us all. And as they used to say on the TV, it’s all true. It was the summer of 1996, and we were young.”
The rest of The World is Full of Secrets unfolds like a slow rush of hazy memories. Incomplete images sift together, accumulating like dust over the lens. Often when a a girl begins telling her story, Swon and DP Barton Cortright fix her with a stark close-up. But the image is unfocused, with a radial blur of golden light that feathers your concentration. Unusual framings, where figures are bisected and half left off screen demote the eminence of the girls in physical reality, dispersing the emphasis over an unseen interior geography. The locus of energy does not reform where you think it might — around the stories themselves, whose narration is much more crisp and commanding than the languorous superimpositions, double exposures, shallow focus compositions, and impressionistic montages that dominate the visual sphere.
There isn’t a lot of writing on the film, but much of what exists grapples with the fact that The World is Full of Secrets doesn’t seem to have a center. The images are not commanding, yet they seem to be in a critical kind of dialogue with the stories being told, which do strike your nerve centers, calling you to attention. But they spiral, break apart, reform, step momentarily behind modesty screens, surge back with clarity, then end without any clear directives for analogy or meaning-making. For me, the most arresting moment in the film comes when Steffans admits that she doesn’t quite remember one girl’s story, so she tries her best to summarize it. She ultimately contents herself to describing the tone and demeanor the girl took when telling the story, as if that’s a suitable substitute for the story itself.
But isn’t it? When I think about “The Laughing Man,” a story I read and re-read quite recently and would say I have a good memory of, I can barely say what happens in the story within the story. Like my memory of Catcher, vivid details come to mind — the poppy petal mask, the Laughing Man tied to a tree while his friend Black Wing is tortured. But they don’t cohere. It’s as if this small collection of clearly-defined objects skate over the surface of a pond of blurry, frozen-over impressions. What the Chief felt like as a character, not what he said; the feeling of the team’s rise and fall, not the lines and gestures that led to its assembly and dissembly. What lingers is the spell of the story, not the story itself. Swon spins a whole film out of this thread, one resilient enough to withstand the excision of a traditional climax and resolution.
Again we have the childhood experience of pain and the adult memory of it. But there is more connecting these positions than in “The Laughing Man.” There is a sense there that the adult who grew from the trauma never grew out of it. Couldn’t reconcile the impact that something which did not literally happen had on him. Whereas in The World is Full of Secrets, something did actually happen to the narrator. Something terrible that the ellipses in narration is imposed to conceal. Here, there is a command of narrative — it is used to ensorcel the viewer in the same way the story within “The Laughing Man” is used to ensorcel the Comanche Club. The adult survivor of that trauma is too broken and too confused by the break to relay anything more than what happened. The adult survivor of The World is Full of Secrets has had to learn how to use narrative to survive a break so profound that one shudders to think what it would have done to her had she not risen to defend her life.
What she does with this knowledge is disappear the precise details of what hurt her and how from the story of her great injury. We understand the abiding impact this event had on her life by the fact of its own absence from the story. But that’s not all. The tightening and loosening of her memory’s grasp on each story, the way certain details advance into focus and others elude discernment, the apparent incongruity of image and narration. Why are we seeing a sheath of leaves along the branch of an oak tree shivering in the wind while hearing a story about a young girl buried alive by her friends? Because the tree is what the other girls focused on when they heard the story, because memories of atrocity resist direct visualization, because the mind is a substitution machine even when not under stress, because childhood memories lose their immediacy over time, but they don’t lose their intensity.
The World is Full of Secrets sets down the same boundaries for its own operation: the child’s limited perspective; the action of the story sequestered to the margins while a spectacle, related in mysterious ways to the action, overwhelms the reader/viewer’s field of vision. But they offer different things to the reader/viewer patient enough to let the stories be told in their own way, at their own time. “The Laughing Man,” to me, is more of a story about storytelling — its power to manipulate, how easily it becomes instrumentalized for good or for bad depending on the storyteller, the bloody joint where it connects, never painlessly, to real life. The World is Full of Secrets, meanwhile, uses storytelling to explore memory, trauma, and the ethics of articulating atrocity. The stories become a distraction, like the Laughing Man story, but not a bludgeon. Real life intercedes and produces its own trauma. Storytelling then become both a way of chasing after that memory, trying to understand it, and burying it, terrified and exhausted when confronted by its ever-changing face.
“I hope you got what you came for,” the narrator says. “Even if it wasn't quite what you expected.”