118 The Meadow movies: tall views and high sound, screens that curled around you, that brought you in close like a fine-pitched one-night stand. Out here, scale’s more diffident, quality more natural. Screen’s flat and none too large, framed with redundant half-columns. Out here you work for your illusions. Can tell straight off something’s not right with the show. The gray of the lead-in too pale and flighty. Swift scratches and bubbles of white—not seen that since the switch to disks. Brass and strings don’t open like any chick crap. My lungs inflate, a protest ready: this film’s in black and white. Big, solemn credits, punched by clouded horns, play serious scary. In case we don’t got it yet, scene opens on a milky wash of stars, on a night bleached the charcoal of old film stock. A meteor hits over. Pull back and below that sky, a town spread through a valley—congealed at its center, fragmenting edges float houses into speckled hills. The hills have a jostling closeness: they cherish and observe. The plains look to be grass, not sand. Through the scratched soundtrack, a whirr of machinery gathers. Hear music from the house we focus in on. The wall dissolves—in a bright parlor, a young man vamps superficial jazz on a family piano. The daughter of the house jigs her shoulders, a little domestic rebellion. I reach to twist my cigarette in the glass ashtray. “Time you kids called it a night.” The girl’s tough shoulders punch toward me. “Dad. It’s only ten-thirty.” This room is monochrome—off-white and shadows. “Jimmy has work in the morning. And you have to practice, young lady.” With everyone looking, I lay a firm move. “How’s things at the shop, Jimmy?” He stops playing, lights a cigarette—makes obeying my order look like a choice. His nails, his hands, pristine after maybe two showers to scorch off the oil. “Pretty good, Mr Henderson. Mr Ritchie was saying I’ll soon be fixing up jobs without him.”
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