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Something In the Air
Sweet.
"Sweet" is the word that all the local news organizations (including the New York Times) have been using to describe a four-year-old named Valery who was abandoned in Queens very early one morning last week. She was found cold and barefoot, weeping in the street. Her story has played itself out over the last few days with the kind of intensity usually reserved for end of the season prime-time television dramas. We've been on the edges of our seats.
First, no one claimed her. Then videotape of the child talking about her beautiful mother, her cat and her favorite foods was broadcast extensively on the local news channels (although my favorite one was more restrained than the others). Some unhappy closure was reached over the weekend, when the man who deposited her on the street was arrested and charged with abandoning a child, endangering the welfare of a child, evidence tampering and murder. He was the little girl's mother's boyfriend, a doctor who claims he smothered the woman with a pillow in self-defense and then cut her throat to "open up an airway." We now know a lot about Valery, the heroine of this story, and the fact that we know what happened is cold comfort. From the beginning, it was apparent that something terrible had happened. It was just a matter of discovering what it was.
The air is full right now of tales of lost children. For the second week in a row, the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan is number one at the box office. I haven't seen it, but I know that the picture is about a woman whose child goes missing on an airplane. At first I thought the picture sounded a little like Bunny Lake Is Missing (an Otto Preminger movie from 1965) because the Jodie Foster character apparently has to prove her daughter's existence. But as it turns out, the movie is more like Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes, because we always know that the missing person is real. In Bunny Lake, there is the distinct possibility that the mother is a lunatic and has imagined a daughter.
In art houses right now there's another movie that brushes against Bunny Lake. Keane, which is in limited release in major cities, is an aftermath story. The hero, obsessively, convulsively haunts New York City's Port Authority bus depot trying to find his daughter who went missing months before- though there is here some question of whether he ever had a child- and comes up with a terrible thing he could do to mitigate his loss. Indeed, Keane offers less closure than the real events of the week.
I'm a bit vulnerable to these stories of abandonment and the threat of untouchable loneliness, though I don't believe I'm necessarily more susceptible now that I have a child than before. We all have our weaknesses, and I have many. I can't stand stories that involve animal threat (you know, where an innocent pet is sacrificed to give the movie or book or play or what have you some toughness), but don't mind all sorts of other grimness at all. Post-Felix, though, I find I can fall into a kind of Dickensian projection fugue state where just hearing the horror makes me yearn for Felix and have to run and check on him- as if he were the one who had been found, miserable, on a residential block in Queens. But I get it in the end because my prodding him generally produces screaming that brings me rapidly back to earth.
Of course I'm not alone- there's a reason these stories are so gripping and it has to do with bruised innocence, cruelty, hope, redemption... all of those themes we want from our stories, fictional or torn from the headlines. But there is something about the moment, the shorter days, the beginning of chill, that makes me wonder where this swarm of stories about lost children came from.
I'm not entirely soft, though. I was not alone in thinking that there was little hope of a happy ending for Valery's mother, though I am a bit on tenterhooks about where the little girl will go, and the movie I've seen most recently that I liked best was a picture called A History of Violence- a movie about a father who might not be what he says he is. I love the director David Cronenberg, and perhaps he can make some sense of this current grim tendency in stories. When asked about his narrative interests in a recent interview, he said: "If you admit to the possibilities of the most horrific things, then maybe they won't happen."
Gentle words from a man who tends to make movies where people's heads explode.
posted by Elise at 8:54 AM
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