The Brooklyn Rail

Come closer, share time in a dark theater. An endless film loops. I could tell you the time now, but it won’t matter in a second. 

I’m meant to write about the 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. hour. That used to be prime time, when most people watched the most popular TV shows; but today, there are no more time constraints on watching of any kind. Marlene Dietrich blows out a candle; Greta Garbo lights one. Here there’s no empty silence before a first light beams through the celluloid, no cinematic sunrise. It’s hard to see by the flicker of streetlamps, nautical twilight, a child’s night light, or barroom overheads. My writing is spliced, one line runs over another: jump cuts, smash cuts, match cuts, and the occasional dissolve. Christian Marclay cut thousands of film clips into twenty-four hours. Can I cut my 188-page daybook of thoughts on a clock down to three?

I really wish I’d made this film. (“You had me at hello.”) It’s obsessive, monumental, fun. I wish I’d spent years searching for time. But my kind—my reel time—is observational, documentary. What if someone else had made The Clock? What if women had? What if the rest of us had been given the rest of time? My phone alarms sound off at random intervals, so I don’t lose track, so I right my course. Subversively, I embrace the breaks we need in everyday life, when we’re intentionally off the clock: baking bread (knead, rise, knead, bake), throwing pottery (throw, fire, glaze, fire), playing records that finish in what feels like no time and linger, needing to be turned over. This is how I unwind time for myself, easing its weight, flaunting its fragility. I wasn’t wasting time when I had to watch so many films this past month just to experience the reliable catharsis of narrative resolution that The Clock steals from you. Trees and trees, no forest ever.

TV news anchors used to start their nightly broadcast with, “It’s 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” Years ago, when I had four little kids to get ready for school, I set our clocks all differently to trick us into being on time. The bedroom clock was twenty-eight minutes fast, the kitchen clock eighteen minutes fast, and the one in the car (only used when we needed to make up time) was eight minutes fast. We woke up, made lunch, and left for school, all at the very same time. It is fine that our clocks didn’t play by the rules because eventually I taught my kids to “tell time.” They moved away from boundless, carefree days to an acceptance of a system based on structured cycles. And the classroom reinforced the matter. For parents, the days are long, but the years are short.

My youngest, now grown, was happy for me: “9:00 to 10:00 is the most exciting time, when everything happens!” I hated to break it to him that in the movie at that time, people mostly fear for their lives—violence, death, guns, and a heavy sense of finality, not just for the day, but for something larger: a story unraveling toward its inevitable end. The ticking of risk, often in the rain. I remind him that 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. was also when I helped them “fall” to sleep, or go back to bed if they had startled awake feeling scared and alone in the dark, feelings shared in real time with folks on screen and in the audience. Shadows lurk. Threats emerge. Scenes recur from The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). We’re all about to kill or be killed. Or we’re gambling.

The Mars rover, named Opportunity, broke my daughter’s heart when, after fifteen years in the galaxy, it sent its final message, popularly interpreted as: “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” The gas runs out. My energy. Your patience. The pen runs out of ink. I run out of paper. But The Clock keeps going.

Seems to me that time used to be more forgiving. We lost its roundness when we went digital, when we stopped handwriting. We lost the handmade-ness of it, the ability to take up space with words. Time isn’t neutral. It’s a metaphor, but its hands hold real power. Ironically, there’s an urgency to the now. The past teeters on erasure, as Timothy Snyder writes. Now is the time to be vigilant. To stay alert in the dark. “We’ll always have Paris,” says Bogart to Bergman. Will we? How’s freedom represented in this film? By tossing away a watch or destroying a timepiece. At 9:00 p.m., Jackie Earle Haley playing Ronnie J. McGorvey (Little Children) smashes clocks on the floor.

The settings of my mother’s cuckoo clocks are off. None of them tweet on the hour. One is six minutes late, another twelve minutes early. The third one changes all the time. When I step outside, I hear birds. It’s nothing o’clock.