Moment of Truth

By: David Stansfield | illustration by Neel Muller Studios | January 30, 2009 | Fiction Profile

A whimsical account of what went through the author’s mind at the moment of conception of his forthcoming novel, Muybridge (based on a screenplay he wrote with Denise Boiteau and under option to a Hollywood production company as a TV mini-series). The book invites the reader to live through the key moments in Eadweard Muybridge’s extraordinary life in which he is almost killed twice, battles insanity, wins and loses the love of two women half his age, kills one of their lovers, escapes hanging for it, takes thousands of nude photographs, and befriends a Who’s Who of Victorian legends, from Lewis Carroll and Leland Stanford to Sarah Bernhardt and Jack the Ripper. Oh, yes, and creates the world’s first motion picture a dozen years before Edison, who steals the idea from him.

The cowled figure in the baggy everything behind the counter of the Malibu bookstore was a study in entomological contrast: his body movements a wasp in treacle, his hands epileptic spiders dancing across the computer keyboard.
The sound was a cross between tiny horses clattering over cobblestones and the clicking of Queen Victoria’s knitting needles. Stare and click, stare and click. Half the planet did little else the livelong day; 10,000 years of civilization had come to this. And every day, more keystrokes. I was only checking the store discount on a paperback on the history of the movies, but it might have been War and Peace.
From clatter to clutter. While I was waiting for surf boy, I’d been looking around precisely as the Loyalty Management experts at the Harvard Business School had hoped at the usual assortment of amusing little spur-of-the-moment things to pad your bill when I spotted it. It had been half hidden by a set of star maps and a calendar of Pamela Anderson in her underwear, but there was the Tom Thumb flipbook of photographs of a horse of a different color, in fact no real color at all, just a gentle sepia, another shade of Victoria Regina.
Splat. A drop of blood lands on the picture.
I turned the pages. At first glance, all the photographs looked the same, only they weren’t of course, they were all slightly, cunningly different. We all knew how that worked because moving pictures were our other principal occupation. When we came home from another hard day of click-clattering, we instantly shifted screens to our flickering cave shadows, watching the disembodied thereby disembodying ourselves, wired to everything and connected to nothing, glued to spectacle, to the game that nobody plays and everybody watches — living in the present tense because there is no past and there is no future, only he goes and she goes, and oh my God — video ergo sum. We were true shadow people now, isolated from reality for most of our waking lives (reality only takes place in our dreams?), more and more convinced that our pixelated world was all there is. If it wasn’t shot through the phallus of a camera it didn’t exist.
I was in the Malibu Video Store one day (where else?), its street-front a giant picture window so you couldn’t miss the movie shelves. Suddenly, there was a sound like a flurry of bone-dry autumn leaves as the glass grew dark. Had a giant honeybee from outer space escaped from the horror section to press its multifaceted eye against the pane? No, this was closer to home and its name was paparazzi, and the honey the twinkling lenses of Fellini’s “buzzing insects” were trained on was a pubescent starlet shopping for images of herself as the green-eyed monsters mocked the meat they fed on. Because of them, she existed, deified by their cameras. Without them, she disappeared. Cinderella at midnight.
I turned back to the flipbook that started it all, the Stone Age version of our endless stream of videos and DVDs, the do-it-yourself Steven Spielberg: director, editor and projectionist all in one. Just flip and flutter. The long-ago pictures riffled beneath my thumb, the paper hooves tickling my skin, a starlet’s eyelashes against my cheek. Then the magic happened as it always, inevitably does. What was still becomes live; what was dead becomes quick. It was endlessly, eternally, urgently fascinating. It was a matter of life and death, after all. But how could this be? How could a series of slightly different, but dead-as-a-doornail, stone-cold images — surely, this horse’s eyelashes never fluttered — suddenly spring to warm life just by shifting my gaze from one picture to the next?
Back in the 1930s heyday of Hollywood, when the Malibu Colony was the cheapest place to live in L.A. County, Walter Benjamin said that the photograph, like the souvenir, is the corpse of an experience; it is death itself. How could merely stringing a bunch of corpses together and looking at them whizz by make them alive again? I was holding resurrection in my hand. But it was just paper — or celluloid or magnetic tape or ruts in a silver disk; it all came to the same.

I had a Malibu friend, a renowned heart surgeon, who did things you swore could only happen in the movies. One dark and stormy night, he had a handful of hours to find a replacement heart for a patient. The nearest fresh cadaver was 300 miles away in Las Vegas after one too many rolls of the dice. So, they lent him a private plane and waited at the other end with a cardboard hatbox throbbing straight out of Edgar Alan Poe. He sat on that plane, nursing the shivering thing between his legs, praying it wouldn’t cease to tell its tale. In the nick of time, he popped it into his movie-director patient (who else?), turning death back into life.
A Hollywood ending, that is to say no ending at all, is just a ride off into a sunset that never did. It was a lie, but that was the point: Movies moved. If they stopped moving, they died. And you can’t get more final than that. That was why the most horrific moment in horror movies is when they break the rules and the eyelid of the dead man suddenly springs open. Bela, Bela Lugosi. You can’t do that! Ah, but we just did.
And in my hand, my hand the projectionist, my flip-top Frankenstein, I was bringing the dead to life; I was springing open eyelids like crazy. Lazarus, Lazarus, Lazarus. Eternal life. I could flog this dead horse into as many sunsets as I liked.
Now it is raining blood. Washing away my baby boy who is not my baby boy.
I wondered about the man who shot the horse in the first place — and so many, many times, always at a slightly different point in its life. Who killed this Cock Robin? Who cut him up into little pieces and used our persistence of vision to stitch him together again the way they could never do with Humpty Dumpty? And why did he do it? And how? Talk about persistence; it must have taken a Herculean effort to break through this time barrier. And why was our Mach 1 at 24 frames per second? Why did we need almost precisely that number of still images to simulate smooth movement?
Men in white coats had calculated that if you were to make a movie for an audience of honeybees, it would have to run at 250 frames per second, because honeybees, like the paparazzi, live faster than we do, cutting up their time into smaller increments. At the other end of the scale were snails — I looked up at surfer dude whose hands still seemed to be the only part of him this side of the grave — who sliced their reality very thick indeed: Their movie would have to be projected at two frames per second. They’d found this out by training a snail to mount a stationary stick for a piece of lettuce. If it tried to climb a vibrating stick, they punished it with an electric shock, so it learned to avoid vibrating sticks — but only if they were vibrating very slowly, at a maximum of two beats per second. If a stick vibrated at three or more beats per second, the snail would still mount it, and still get shocked, because it perceived the stick as stationary.
So, perhaps I was the snail here and the movements of surfer dude were too fast for me to perceive. Were there things going on in the crevices of my reality of which I was unconscious? What monsters lurked in the cracks in my sidewalk?
Benjamin had talked about the hidden mechanics of what takes place during the “fractional second of a stride” or between hand and metal when we reach for a lighter or a spoon: the subliminal gaps within our movements that only a stop-action movie can reveal. He concluded that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” What really happens while our bodies move and our minds stand still?
More recently, the novelist-philosopher Theodore Roszak wondered about the fact that when a movie is projected, the frames are interspersed with brief moments of darkness (the “flicker” effect). He likened these alternations of image and non-image to a symbolic Manichean combat of light and darkness, good and evil. He even postulated that the Cathars of medieval Provence may have experimented with this application of the persistence of vision more than 800 years ago as a secret way of promoting their dualistic theology: Gnostic flipbooks to demonstrate that all of reality as we perceive it only happens as a side effect of a war between light and dark, between spirit and flesh.
Less mystically, the Canadian film animator Norman McLaren looked at all this from a “montage” point of view when he said, “What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame.” In other words, when two or more images are placed together they create a third thing, a whole more important and meaningful than the sum of its parts, just as a mosaic or a stained-glass window has more magic and meaning than the sum of its constituent chips of tile or shards of glass. It’s the spaces between the chips and the shards that matter, not the tile or the glass itself. That other Canadian was right: The medium really is the message.
All of which begged the question: Were we 24-framers or 250 or 2? What happened between the frames of our reality?
I remembered a BBC Brains Trust wireless program I’d listened to as a child in England. An eccentric old philosopher named Professor Joad, who was famous for starting almost every answer to a question with, “It all depends what you mean by …” explained how we can have a precognition of an event that hasn’t happened yet, or conversely, a déjà vu feeling about an event that is currently happening. Joad’s explanation was based on Dunne’s Time Theory: Think of your life as an escalator, only there are many – perhaps an infinite number — of parallel escalators, all out of sync with your own to varying degrees, either ahead or behind. Occasionally, it was possible to catch sight of one of these other escalators out of the corner of your eye and see into another time dimension. Perhaps that was closest to what happened when we peeked between the frames.
Dunne was a bit out of date now — tracing back to the ’20s — but only recently I’d read an amazing story in the New York Times of his modern equivalent: A team of quantum physicists in Colorado had succeeded in putting half a dozen atoms into a “cat state,” that is to say, existing in two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive. The bizarre cat analogy derived from Erwin Schrödinger’s legendary thought experiment of a cat imprisoned in a steel box with a vial of hydrocyanic acid and a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of this substance decays, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will break the vial and kill the cat. But we will only know whether or not this has occurred when we open the box to take a look. Until that happens — until we decide its fate by “observing” it — according to quantum law, the cat is simultaneously both dead and alive. The Colorado researchers had created a similar paradox by applying pulses of laser radiation to force their atoms into two different and opposite states, spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. This literally incredible turn of events had been likened to a single marble existing simultaneously at opposite sides of a soup bowl, rolling from side to side of the bowl and through itself at the center.
There were many theories as to how this impossibility could in fact be possible. In the “many worlds” or “parallel universe” theory — back to Dunne again — the universe was thought to branch ad infinitum so that every single possibility was realized. As the Times reporter put it, “The Red Sox win and lose and it rains; Schrödinger’s cat lives, dies, has kittens and scratches her master when he tries to put her into the box.” Was this “real” or not? As Professor Joad would have said, it all depends what you mean by reality.

I turned back to my little horse lifting off the page, a miracle of motion, conjured out of sweet nothing, the purest form of make-believe. For in “reality” the pictures weren’t moving at all, the movement was conjured up by our brains, by our struggle to make sense of it all — the “phi phenomenon” as the white coats said. Now you see it, now you don’t.
How apt that it should have been the Victorians, the masters of misdirection, who invented this ultimate illusion, the “crown and flower of 19th century magic.”
As I flipped the horse forwards and backwards through time like Einstein’s cockeyed deity flipping dice for our fate in some celestial café, the hooded one at last wrenched his eyes away from the computer screen:
  “It’s $11.95 with our special red-tag discount. Cash or credit?”
I handed over my credit card and he slid it into the machine.
Shleech-clunk goes the camera, catching the body between life and death as it falls through the trapdoor.

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