"Missing Reels" and "The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing:" Two Very Different Movie-Mad Novels

This month sees the pub­lic­a­tion of two nov­els about both movies and movie love—or movie lust, or movie mad­ness, it all depends on how you look at it, I guess. I am very fond of both of these books and believe you ought to buy them. So there.

The first is Missing Reels, by Farran Smith Nehme, pub­lished by The Overlook Press. I shall have to dis­close my bias here: Farran, who blogs as The Self Styled Siren (you knew that already, did you not?) is one of my dearest friends in the whole wide world. I believe that she too holds me in some esteem (I blush as I write this), and take as evid­ence the fact that in her nov­el she gives my sur­name to a fic­tion­al silent-movie lead­ing man. So, those cards are on the table. And it’s because I love Farran that I was actu­ally vaguely ter­ri­fied to read this nov­el, her first. Although of course I should not have been. She can write, I always knew that.  

The book is both a steady and rol­lick­ing New York story of the late 1980s. The heroine is Ceinwen, a feisty, resource­ful young woman work­ing at a vin­tage cloth­ing shop in the East Village, who dis­cov­ers that her quietly eleg­ant neigh­bor Miriam, an old woman who guards an air of mys­tery, may have been a silent movie act­ress. Ceinwen’s not-entirely-inchoate vintage-movie love is hence mel­ded with the curi­os­ity of an ama­teur detect­ive, and both of these aspects of the char­ac­ter are nur­tured and/or thwarted by a mot­ley crew of aca­dem­ics, film pre­ser­va­tion­ists, and some romantic foils, both genu­ine and poten­tial, asso­ci­ated with those fields. The sig­ni­fic­ant amor­ous con­nec­tion in Missing Reels is the dash­ing, not-that-movie-crazy math­em­atician Matthew, who’s also got a hot romance going with an Italian col­league, which he insists he’s not about to drop on Ceinwen’s account. And then there’s Fred, the put-upon min­ion of a mys­ter­i­ous film-preservation organ­iz­a­tion who intro­duces Ceinwen to a sort of old-movie uto­pia when he brings her to a spe­cial screen­ing of some Fatty Arbuckle rarities: 

“I think these people are awe­some,” whispered Ceinwen.

“They know their stuff, that’s for sure,” muttered Fred.

It became clear, about two minutes into He Did and He Didn’t, that this was the best silent-movie audi­ence she’d ever encountered. No rest­less­ness, unless you coun­ted Fred’s shifts of his legs and arms, and he always did that. No talk­ing. Every laugh was related to some­thing on screen. They picked up every ges­ture, no mat­ter how small. The first glimpse of Fatty—Roscoe got a round of applause, Mabel Normand’s pretty face got an aud­ible sigh, Buster Keaton got a shout of recog­ni­tion. Fred wasn’t a lout laugh­er, bu he was com­pletely caught up in what was hap­pen­ing on screen, lean­ing for­ward and occa­sion­ally giv­ing her a side glance to see if she got the joke. And Arbuckle was a mar­vel, hold­ing his own even with Keaton, supple and flex­ible in the way he moved.

When the applause at the last film died down and the lights came back up, she told him, “I don’t know what you’re com­plain­ing about.”

“I’m not com­plain­ing about the movies. Arbuckle’s great.”

“I like the audi­ence, too. They’re so into it.”

“I like most of them.” She’d stood up to stretch, but he was still sprawled in his seat, legs straight out and hands in his jack­et pockets.

Pretty wide vari­ety of ages here, and some big-time vin­tage cloth­ing. That was a real 1920s sail­or dress on that little bru­nette. That older had an alligator bag. And some people had gone all the way into actu­al cos­tume. There was a Louise Brooks, and a Mary Pickford with a tiered lace dress, flat Mary Janes and cas­cad­ing blonde curls. No Tramps, but that man had on a zoot suit.

What makes Farran’s book par­tic­u­larly bra­cing is that, as romantic com­ed­ies go, it’s as tart as it is sweet, maybe even more so. For all her energy and intel­li­gence, Ceinwen is fully cap­able of being a bit of a petu­lant brat. Matthew’s oh-so-European faux-progressive rationales for his have-it-both-ways man­age­ment of the affair with Ceinwen seemed trans­par­ently oppor­tun­ist­ic to this straight white male who came of age in the early ‘80s. And while nobody as pas­sion­ate as movies as Farran is would con­struct a nar­rat­ive that argued some films are bet­ter off not being found, Missing Reels is pretty blunt in its acknow­ledge­ment that many Old Hollywood stor­ies are pretty unpleas­ant ones, and that the people who lived them maybe have the right not to have those stor­ies exhumed. I’m mak­ing the book sound like a Moral Tale or some­thing right about now, so I should hasten to add that what it actu­ally is, its con­sid­er­able human wis­dom aside, is a par­agon of wit, a beau­ti­fully plot­ted story, and a romp­ing good read. 

Nicholas Rombes’s nov­el The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, pub­lished later by Two Dollar Radio, is an incred­ibly grip­ping but entirely less com­ic pro­pos­i­tion. Rombes was kind enough to send me a gal­ley, along with a note in which he pro­fessed to be a long­time admirer of my work (actu­ally, it’s about eth­ics in film blog­ging, amir­ite?), and I gave him per­mis­sion to use as a blurb a note I wrote back to him with my reac­tion, which is/was: “The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is an uncanny pleas­ure, a secret his­tory in a series of alchem­ic­al cel­lu­loid prose poems. I enjoyed the hell out of it even as it began to con­spire with my dreams.” The story is of a schol­ar who tracks down and inter­views a notori­ous fig­ure who, some­how, has man­aged to come into pos­ses­sion of, and then des­troy, single-print films of extraordin­ary proven­ance. The schol­ar finds Laing in a seedy motel (one can almost feel the moist­ness of the car­pet under ones feet while read­ing) and com­pels him to relate the details of the des­troyed films as best he can. In recount­ing his encounter with Laing, the nar­rat­or gives upset­ting hints con­cern­ing his own tragedy. Here is a par­tic­u­larly strik­ing passage: 

I’m not exactly cer­tain that the per­son who returned to the motel room with the gro­cery bag was, in fact, R. Laing. Listen, of course it was him. I don’t mean I doubt it was him lit­er­ally, in the sense that Christ is “Christ” or Satan is “Satan.” Something had changed, that’s all I’m try­ing to say. At the time I had no such sus­pi­cions that it wasn’t him, or at least not out­right sus­pi­cions, rather some­thing more like very thin spider-webbed doubts spread so del­ic­ately out upon my thoughts that I couldn’t col­lect it all into a single thought. It was only later, in pre­par­ing this manu­script in fact, that these doubts began to take shape into some­thing more fixed and per­man­ent. And even now, like I’ve said, of course I know it was the same Laing as before, just as the resur­rec­ted Christ is the same as the pre-crucified Christ, of Satan is the same as the rebel­li­ous angel that became Satan. It’s just that when I think about it now, look­ing back, I have the feel­ing that it wasn’t him or at least not the same him. But it’s just a feel­ing and noth­ing more.

            And yet, his descrip­tions of the films changed some­how, lin­guist­ic­ally, in ways that I’m only now begin­ning to sort out. For I’ve come to see, in ret­ro­spect, that there was a void at the heart of the films that Laing des­troyed, and that through his descrip­tions of these films he was attempt­ing to fill, some­how, that void, as if talk­ing about the films might fill in the mean­ing that they them­selves lacked. I also came to under­stand that Laing didn’t think of the des­troyed films as “lost treas­ures” as all, but instead as some­thing more dan­ger­ous, as expres­sions of pure nothingness. 

Rombes abjures con­ven­tion­al nar­rat­ive in favor of stor­ies with­in stories…or rather stor­ies loc­ated at par­tic­u­lar nodes and modes of nar­rat­ive form: oral syn­opses, tran­scripts of notes, a “screen­play” “treat­ment,” and so on. And yet, from the peri­phery of the map this slim book con­jures, a stabbingly vivid account of loss worms its way into the work, sug­gest­ing that the sought abso­lu­tion of the novel’s title is less for Laing than it is for the book’s nar­rat­or. A rather remark­able effect.