I haven’t seen Broken Embraces yet, but the plot set off a memory I’d forgotten.
I was late to a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
I had come into the theater with my popcorn, and while I was scanning the crowd through the on-again, off-again illumination — looking for my seat buddies, see — I caught a woman leaning over to her seat-mate, whispering, and her seat mate was blind — glasses, cane, slightly up-turned head and all.
And I turned to the screen to check to see if there was something I wasn’t seeing, looked back to make sure that he was blind, felt one of those weird bouts of elation I get when I meet one kind of impossible in public for the first time, and made my way to my eventual seat, all the while thinking, “Pirates of the Caribbean 3? Really?”
I even tried to write a story about it. I was going to call the chapbook, Book Titles Aren’t Found in Phonebooks, but it didn’t amount to much of anything, though these two bits are about as much worth sharing as anything else:
They had been brother and sister for as long as they could remember — maybe there was a time when they were crab and goose, olive branch and forehead, but that was then — and Mary had played caretaker from the get-go.
…
Mary described the films when there weren’t many people in the theater. When the place was a palace of bobbleheads, Mary kept quiet, and it was the luck of the draw whether or not the movie could recreate the scene like something out of the radio. When it did, Steven was as happy as the first lark being wedded to his lifelong simile; when it didn’t, when it was a silent film or a film with long, quiet takes, Steven didn’t know what to do with his thumbs, thought about taking a nap, and would have wondered what would be so interesting about two to three minutes of leaf noises if it weren’t for the god damn avant garde records he had stacked up at his house. The Cha-Cha Chakras, indeed.
When I later saw the film and heard the last line — “Films have to be finished, even if blindly” — I only had one word to add: a silent neologism where a lens snapped shut.
