Fiction

The people of the movie

When my son was small, I used to listen from the next room as he tried to draw the godlike eye of whatever movie he was watching away from the plight of its people.

Hey, Movie, look at this, he would say, waggling a blue plush dog in front of the screen, while the people of the movie clung to one another in desperate terror as the ship’s hull was torn open by submerged sea junk or the de-extincted megalodon broke loose from the underwater laboratory or somebody sneezed and the bad guys discovered the secret hiding place.

My son was self-sacrificing in this mission, offering up his most-loved toys as decoys, as movie bait. Or maybe he was confident that if the lens did one day miraculously swing and that bloodthirsty attention came raging into our living room, he would be able to protect them too, his sacrificial favourites, always one step ahead in outwitting that all-seeing presence.

(I never thought to ask him about this plan, though I am certain he had a plan.)

When the blue dog diversion proved not quite enough, he’d squeeze the bark-squeak of the dog’s tummy repeatedly, with increasing urgency, in hope the disruption might buy the people of the movie the few crucial moments to escape. When this too failed to alter the course of events – when the lifeboats were found to be missing or sabotaged, and the prehistoric megashark caught a whiff of human blood, and the baddies blasted through the false back of the boiler room – my son would call in reinforcements: a remote control snake with flashing red eyes, whose hyperrealistic sidewinding was reassuringly offset by a grating mechanical whirr. When the snake, too, failed to deflect catastrophe, my son would call on higher powers, reverently producing a small box containing an opalised ammonite, which his grandmother had given him shortly before she died. The ammonite was too precious to be a plaything but was imbued with special powers – the ghost of my mother, apparently – and so was allowed in special circumstances, such as when the fate of humanity was at stake.

Whatever he did, things went as directed – the ship went down, the megashark picked off the hapless scientists one by one as they worked to repair the ruptured bathysphere, before cruising on to open seas.

But who’s to say worse fates weren’t averted? It was only the minor characters who became shark food, or those who more or less karmically deserved it, before the ancient predator was recaptured and ambiguously sequestered by a military testing facility.

The bad guys got what was coming to them, in the end.

I can’t remember, exactly, what became of the shipwreckers. When a ship goes down it usually stays down, but that’s never the whole of it. There may have been some stroke of felicity, a passing Scandinavian freighter or a new and more just society established on some time-forgotten island idyll.

My son grew into the kind of person you might expect; sensitive, innovative if risk averse, and married a woman much bolder than himself, who in turn was marrying for safety, a man she knew would never sneak around or leave her.

The good thing about marrying for safety is that one way or another, you probably only ever do it the once. Either it proves out – buona fortuna – and there’s your life, smoothly and snugly laid out. Not without its own dramas and disillusionments and claustrophobias, granted, its fair share of screaming into pillows and sneaking in a covert cigarette or two while wheeling the bins to the curb on a Sunday night and swearing quietly at the stars.

Or else it all gets blown to smithereens anyhow – the safe choice not so safe after all – and you learn that it wasn’t worth the compromise, perhaps learn never to compromise, that shacking up for safety or doing anything for safety is, in the long haul, the greater gamble.

Of course the smartest thing is to never marry at all, for any reason, except perhaps for visas or for kicks. Each of these – visas and kicks – having a mutually understood, realistically truncated life span, a clearly illuminated exit clause.

I might have told her this, the young woman who became, for some time, my daughter-in-law. I watched her coming. Appreciated: her loud jewellery and wide laugh that flashed molars. Did not appreciate: her carelessness with house plants and habit of turning off “sad news”. Did not understand: her stick-and-poke tattoos of the Japanese characters for “stick” and “poke”, or her way of saying, Sorry, baby, in a babying voice – Sowee, baybee – to someone offstage (the Patriarchy? the Matriarchy? God?) whenever she said or did something she thought anticonformist.

It was not my place to warn. Or was it?

In truth I did try, in subtle, revocable ways that must have seemed to both of them a shallow and condescending projection of my own failures and mishandlings as a partner/mother/woman/etc.

In the end I doubt it would have made any difference, the things I said or didn’t say. They were like the people of the movie, and there was nothing I could do, no diversion I could invent or counter-monster I could manifest that might be powerful enough to overwrite the inevitable.

Incidentally it bothers me, when I think of it, that I cannot recall the fate of the shipwreckers.

Of course, it’s very possible it was all part of the same movie.

When I ask my son, his recollection is no better. He does not remember much or will not admit to remembering much from that time in our lives, which was around the point his father left. If he does remember, it is only enough to ask where I was and what I was thinking, letting him watch such things, why I did not step in.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 22, 2025 as "The people of the movie".

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