Shudder Mornings

The world is a screen and your eyes the projector lights. Life is a movie, a tableaux vivant—at the very least, a soap. Happiness means every moment qualifies for a film still: the whole spectrum from suspense to denouement as if staged in anticipation of its future life as image. A blown-out candle, a barely moon-lit sky, the brown-scale view from a bridge. You pay witness to your life through the romantic framing of windows turned mirrors turned screens and notice how quiet it is. Like an exhale, or closing one’s eyes in the middle of the day. Then you notice something else. That cinematic sweep, the drama lodged in a close crop, a sudden cut. A sense of abandon, frame-by-frame, as intensity builds, feeling develops.

Early cinema-goers had the impulse to clap at the end of the film as they would have in the theatre. But the impulse would be stunted by the glaring emptiness of the screen after the phantom had faded. There was no one there to be applauded. Finis said the screen, prophetically. The audience would rub their eyes and stare vacantly ahead as the lights came on, wishing themselves back in the darkness.