The Brooklyn Rail

Out of all the exquisite lines woven by Manuel Puig, the one I cherish the most is maybe something he didn’t actually write: “I want to be a movie.” In my notebook, his name lies beside the quote, so it must be true. Or maybe the “truth” of the line is exactly the desire to transubstantiate reality, to make it as porous and permanent as a movie. Maybe it was my own fantasy, my own desire: I want to be a movie, and underneath the aspirational maxim lies Manuel Puig’s name, because who else but the exiled Argentine author to offer me a framework for melting the medium of the screen? In perhaps his best-known work, the 1976 novel El beso de la mujer araña (translated into English as Kiss of the Spider Woman three years later and itself adapted, as both a film in 1985 and a Broadway musical in 1993), two prisoners, Luis Molina and Valentín Arregui, share a cell in a Buenos Aires prison, passing the time by passing the stories of others onto or into each other. In such moments, as any reader/viewer/listener knows well, the line between the aesthetic encounter and the erotic encounter often feels liquid.

Perhaps it’s not that cinema is immortal so much as infectious; because of any film’s ensemble production, one cannot talk about movies without invoking other movies, other experiences of looking, of sometimes finding things and people, and finding yourself in other people, both fictional and real. I’d like to imagine that Marie Buck and Matthew Walker picked up where Kiss of the Spider Woman left off, decades later, in a similar setting of arrested movement, neither the exile of its author nor its diegetic jail cell but the immediate aftermath of our extant pandemic. Their collaborative text—a series of epistolary poems, an ekphrastic novel, a monograph on watching—Spoilers (re)casts both a narrative of love and the theorizations of the conditions for correspondence, witnessing, intimacy, relation, the pretexts and permissions in which “to tell you anything.”

Not unlike Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, almost all of which is written as dialogue, without any indication of who is speaking, Spoilers’ sequences—signaled by a single asterisk—shift from one voice to the other, each speaker addressing the other and, at times, addressing the book’s narratorial staging. “Hi Matt, I know the framing device is that I’m talking to you and to the world at once, but right now I want to describe our intertwined legs to the world, / which I don’t get to do in speaking to you, since I already sent you the picture.” The common filmic technique of “breaking the fourth wall,” which for Buck and Walker also smuggles in a rumination on the political promises of aesthetic experience, activates here in the “you” that dedicates its address to collective solidarity.

In Spoilers, as though the text doubles as a book of spells, it is description itself that allows an individual to transcend the limits of individual subjectivity. And thus “plot” pivots often on the aura of conditional clauses—the if, were, and would which together permit the possibility of a particular thing when and only when something happens: we stage truth and so make it real. Similarly, if the “spoilers” of the title is summed up by its authors as grief—“whether the love fades, the relationship fails, or the body succumbs to death, the final endpoint of love, whether mutual or unrequited, will always be grief”—I’d like to think that the one thing capable of outlasting the trauma of bereavement is the wish fulfillment that makes the text possible as a constellation of desires. Between the bodies of those inside the movies and the bodies of those outside the movies and between the bodies—hardware, infrastructure—of media, too, the buggy digital apps and historic theaters that each convey the movies to us, the media that conveys the movies but also coincides the worlds of surface and skin, the discrepancies of translation allow the authors to overlay their own past and present lives over the footage, entangling not just bodies and histories but the world of the instantaneous present and the world of a past without a record, memories without recordings, life absent mediation.

Consider the interval between one speaker’s early retelling of their time working at the same theater used in the film The Notebook—“there is a scenario in which I sit in the theater watching The Notebook, and I emerge from the theater and whatever I have just seen onscreen will then be duplicated in real life. I can walk out of the theater and onto the set.”—and the admission that graces the book’s final page: “There is nothing I love more than someone accidentally exiting the frame and entering real life.” The point is not just to watch, or rather, that watching is never just passive, but an active response that is re-membered in the body; that the culmination of every story is not its end but its being passed on to others, what we might think of as the spectral or ghostly audience members of past and future tellings: all the backstories, spinoffs, reruns, and, moreover, characters—lives—unspooling on the periphery, always there, even if not always visible, just waiting to be cited (literally summoned) to become reanimated. In Spoilers’ pages, any distinctions between user and producer disperses in the interpenetrating space of reception brought by correspondence, in all its significations, stretching our perspective on what it means to “make movies,” particularly in light of mobile technology’s contestation and reshaping of borders, gaps in the ground plan through which to enter virtual experience as real time.

The conditions for the emergence of the public as writers is of course contingent upon the realization that writing could be public as soon as it is written. The frequency by which individual users publish our daily stories is not only an embrace of discursive relation but, moreover, a resistance to relation’s assimilation into linear narrative chronology. Each message—image, video, voice memo, alphabetical text—that is posted today is also responded to, screenshotted, annotated, appropriated, and republished, a gathering of relations and narratives whose addresses and timelines branch out and multiply within a space that is likewise distributed unevenly. An accompanying inquiry: how has the nature of storytelling changed through new media? “Everyone who’s on Twitter at 1 a.m. is watching this sleight of hand over and over again, together,” Buck/Walker write, depicting the communal ritual of late-night scrolling at the onset of the pandemic: “this sparkly gleam moving straight from the ear to being safely closed in the palm.” A clip of Diana Ross singing with the other Supremes inspires a detail of the whole—a slow-motion sample of the “original” clip—which generates another video: Ross’s rainstorm concert in Central Park years later: every story, indeed, is only one thread in a larger tapestry of collective storytelling. Among the questions solicited by Spoilers is not just whether storytelling has changed through new media, but more provocatively, whether our contemporary form of sharing is really “new” at all. In Spoilers’ intermingling of anecdotes involving screens both big and portable, the conventional trajectory of old and new media also becomes troubled, alongside the representational logic organizing original and remake.

Of the role of the reader/viewer/listener, Spoilers has much to say, not in spite of the fragility of memory, of the moments of the past that have gone unrecorded and thereby turned unreliable, but because of these frictions of mediation, generative discrepancies that demonstrate the originality of every copy. And the permission to tell one’s story is underscored by the privileged to be listened to, to have an audience: if it’s the telling that matters—if it’s mediation that makes a text meaningful in its erratic transit from one subject or sign system to another—then every telling is contingent upon an audience, to which and for which we might share pieces of our lives, pieces that are ours and not ours, a life that is nothing if not shared:

Do I love the cat because he bears witness to me or because I bear witness to him? If the former, does it mean that I need someone to know me only in my non-language parts—singing to him and knowing it’s only noise, being a body to warm against, sleeping, using the toilet, cooking food, entering and leaving the house, these motions as my only traits?

Today more so than any other moment of our past, isn’t it true that content is overridden by contribution; that information recedes for the primacy of affect, the internal transport between users, in which thoughts and memories that are not our own move us beyond ourselves? Stories, of course, aren’t just a mode of survival but a form of life, a method for reliving. Rooted in the same speaker’s proclamation a page later is an invitation: “And now I’ll address the universe again: please record us many times over, document us.… Let these material traces be haunted by our consciousness, let the self live fully in them. And the poem can oscillate between prayer and love letter.” So the book does oscillate, it shifts between speakers, between positions, between subjects, between memories and experience, between any original event and its displacement, between “projector” and “flesh”—the book’s two sections—between the preparations necessary to fall in love and the preparations we make in order to die, that is between the improvisational charge of living and the knowledge of one’s inevitable expiration, between wanting to be seen and the price of being looked at. Almost every film recounted by Buck and Walker elicits more than plot details but everyday parables: the convergence of desire and murder presupposed through spectatorship (Cruising); the lure of repetition as purpose, purpose as repetition (Mary Poppins); the compulsion to create distance rather than close in on some truth (Slacker, the Zapruder film); the efficacy of undoing one’s own authority (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm).

Close-Up, Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 docufiction about the real-life trial of a man who impersonated a famous filmmaker in order to make a movie, and the family he conned into believing they would star in it, is re-cited again and again throughout Spoilers, becoming a leitmotif for the book as a whole, and its authors’ desires to transcend one’s lived experience for the fantasy of mass communication, for mutual and consensual experience, for the porousness and permanence of the screen, for secondhand pleasures and illicit recordings, for making movies by talking about them, for the interdependence of bearing witness, and what is born in that act of love: to be the one telling and also, to be the one listening. “It’s all more Close-Up than Close-Up, even,” one speaker tells the other, again invoking Kiarostami’s cinematic Möbius strip to reference another film, another life inside this one. I’d like to think they are also describing the book they are writing, as they are writing it, or maybe, again, I’m describing my own fantasy, my own desire: to converge the narrative scene and the scene of narrative. Spoilers reminds me that in life as in literature, the moment of affective encounter can sublimate even death, even life.