EXTREME CLOSE UP. ARCHITECT
Just his eyes. Weeping.
ARCHITECT
I still haven’t been in his room. I just
– I can’t bring myself to. It feels like
he should still be in there.
CLOSE UP. ARCHITECT
His face slowly pulls into frame. Cheeks patterned with
tears. Skin blanched red.
THERAPIST (O.S.)
Maybe you could try a smaller step
first? Like opening the door but not
walking in?
ARCHITECT
Even that feels too much. If that door
stays closed, I can keep lying to myself
that he’s still in there. That nothing
ever changed. That the silence isn’t
absence.
MEDIUM CLOSE UP. ARCHITECT
As the camera continues to slowly pull away from his face,
we now see he is sat on a plump sofa. A slender hand with
long, pink nails rests comfortingly on his shoulder.
THERAPIST (O.S.)
Whilst lying might make you feel better
now, it won’t make you feel better
forever. We also need to consider that
lying might make you feel better, but you
aren’t the only one who has lost their
child in this situation.
MEDIUM SHOT. ARCHITECT
We see more of the person sat next to him on the sofa. An
arm. A shoulder. A few curls of BLONDE HAIR.
THERAPIST (O.S.)
Sometimes denial, lying to ourselves,
isolates others in our life who have
different coping mechanisms. Shall we ask
your wife how she feels about this?
WIDE SHOT. ARCHITECT AND WIFE 2
Architect nods and turns to the woman next to him on the sofa.
THE PENNY DROPS.
She is now in full view and is NOT HIS WIFE. Or so it seems.
Wife 1 has not dyed her hair from brown to blonde. Son 1
is not dead. This is WIFE 2. Therapist is referencing SON
2. ARCHITECT HAS LIED TO WIFE 1 AND TO US.
He has two families. Two lives. SO MANY LIES.
The first time Jade and I met, we discussed what we wanted to do for this digital residency. We started by getting to know each other in order to find a topic that we were equally invested in. We discovered a shared love for cinema, for poems with strange formal constraints, and a strong personal connection to Chelmsford. I spent an unfortunate amount of time waxing lyrical about Chelmsford Flyover (my childhood involved a lot of a particular stretch of the M25 so any interesting roads were a welcome change).
In a previous post as part of this residency we disclosed that our eureka moment of working together was discovering that we both happened to have seen a student film called ‘House of Cards’. Unless there are loads of other times this film had been screened, and barring the possibility it is out there on YouTube or Vimeo with millions of views, we guessed that we must be two of maybe a few hundred people who have seen it. Such an unbelievable coincidence seemed worthy of building our collaborative project around.
However, it is time for us to come clean. The is no film. The coincidence was a lie.
In someways, what we might have been exploring in this project was ‘the lyric as kayfabe’. (I’m pretty sure I’ve read or heard this idea of exploring ‘the lyric’ through this idea of kayfabe before, but I couldn’t find anything on it). Kayfabe is a part of professional wrestling where the performers maintain their characters outside the show itself. The ‘good guys’ are not seen with the ‘bad guys’ out in public, so it doesn’t shatter the illusion of the stories they tell in the ring.
At some point as an audience member, you share in this performance. Your cheers and boos help to reinforce the reality for the younger members of the audience, but also increases your own investment.
It might be fair to say that something similar might be happening with ‘the lyric’. The poet performs a fictionalised version of themselves, and the reader, in turn, reacts as if they believe the poem to be 100% factual. Through the mediation of kayfabe, we can experience our feelings more directly.
Of course, this opens a can of poetic worms: what about autofiction?, what about confessional poetry?, what is the poetry equivalent of The Undertaker throwing Mankind of the Hell in the Cell in 1998?
But answers will have to wait for another time, or for the comment section. Ultimately these posts and this project was mainly, for Jade and I to give ourselves licence to be as playful as possible. If you would like us to create the real ‘House of Cards’ film, contact us. Jade has already written part of the script.
