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The gun goes off at 6:20 a.m. A policeman, crouched on a roof, throws a canister of tear gas through the window. A hush, then, and a strange kind of peace: a man lies still on the floor of his bedroom, next to an upturned chair and, incongruously, a teddy bear. The gas slowly possesses the room. An alarm begins to sound. It rings and rings, and as the camera pulls back, the clock on the table is revealed, of no purpose now, its cry never to be answered.
These are the final moments of the 1939 French film Le jour se lève [Daybreak], in which a murderer—played by the great Jean Gabin, craggy king of loners and torchbearer of the working class—muses through the night on his crime of passion. (He has killed his lover’s lover.) The police are at the door; barricaded behind his armoire, he knows there is only so long he can hold them at bay. The English title is harsher than the French: the day breaks, we say, as if it could only begin with violence; as if night must be put a stop to, wrested power from.
Morning cracks open, spilling its yolk. The soul is yanked back to earth. So much drama packed into the simple act of waking: crossing the border from the land of sleep, willingly and more often not, meeting the day with uncertainty, panic or outright dread. Between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m., clock after clock erupts and is immediately silenced. Three get smashed. The radio alarm in Groundhog Day from 1993 merits special fury, as Sonny & Cher cheerfully chirp their way through “I Got You Babe,” condemning the hero anew to his fate, to repeat the same day, never progressing.
But aren’t we, too, trapped in a loop with our regimented lives, chasing a tomorrow that turns out to be just more of yesterday? Here are the disembodied ritual gestures of rising and rejoining the world: feet tucked into slippers, juice poured—anyone’s feet, anyone’s juice. Some people dispense with angst and simply get on with it, like the farm boy pitching hay, the frantic editorial assistant clutching half a dozen orders of coffee, or the American soldiers in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp mounting their escape. But others resist the righteousness of day and its call to labor, preferring the sly time-out-of-time of night. One man comes home at dawn and sneaks into bed next to his sleeping wife with seconds to spare before the alarm goes off, so she wakes up none the wiser.
Morning can be cruel. Everything that seemed possible under cover of darkness disintegrates in the sun’s glare. Three men sit stunned on a couch staring at the debris of their revelries—cocaine on a silver tray, a bottle of Wild Turkey—and start to question their lives, toiling on the assembly line at the car factory and surviving on credit, constantly buying things but owning nothing. A girl in a homemade prom dress wakes up on a football field half lost to mist. Embedded in these scenes are all we do not see, the stories continuing offscreen: the factory workers, suddenly conscious of their discontent, will plot a misbegotten robbery (Blue Collar [1978]); the girl, abandoned by her prom date and long past curfew, will never be allowed to leave her house again (The Virgin Suicides [1999]).
What is supposed to be a beginning is haunted by the end. A patient flatlines. A woman behind bars—do we need to know that she is the head of the British secret service, James Bond’s unflappable boss?—asks her captor, “What’s the time?” The answer: “Time for you to die.” A man with red eyes and fangs flinches, mouth agape, as the dozens of clocks on the walls of his house start to chime; for who is most obsessed with time but a vampire, to whom the sun is death? (Is Marclay winking at the audience here, warning us to beware of those who keep too close an eye on clocks?)
What is one more day, after all, but one less day, one step closer to that imagined other side. Young lovers in Vienna lie on the steps below a statue of an archduke and his horse. The boy offers a quote from W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” a poem that pits a promise of eternal love against all-conquering time. “Vaguely life leaks away,” Auden writes, but this is not the line the boy chooses to remember. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he and the girl were strangers. They have been up all night and may never see each other again. For all they know, these were their only hours. Just before sunrise, he says, half to her, half to himself: And the years shall run like rabbits.
Ligaya Mishan writes for the New York Times. She has won a James Beard Award and twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards. Her essays have been selected for the Best American anthologies in magazine, food, and travel writing, and her criticism has appeared in the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.