jump cuts: unsolved mysteries

Some nights / I just never go to sleep at all /and I stand / shaking in my doorway like a sentinel / all alone.

 – Joanna Newsom

Some nights, I have no bedtime. Mom lets me stay up late watching TV with her when custody switches and Dad picks me up on his way home from second shift. Midnight, one o’clock, 2 AM, later; we spend hours talking through the screen. Mom can turn anything serious ridiculous. She’ll fix on a minor element – the killer’s lilting speech, the werewolf’s runny nose – and the knot of my fear will loosen until it lies limp, subdued somewhere inside me. Soon, I’m laughing with her – we can’t keep from cracking up. Giddiness and exhaustion fold me onto her shoulder. I lie down and rest my head on her lap. My feet barely reach the armrest. She strokes my hair. On the white nubuck loveseat, set flush with the wall directly across from where a dimmed screen sits on its low wood stand between two windows, we glow in the dark. By the time Dad arrives, I will have already settled into sleep.

The man’s voice fills a room he isn’t in. Join me tonight, he implores me, anyone, nobody. Maybe you could help… Blue and pink light buzzes across mist that fills a large space. A shrinking space. To move elsewhere while staying in place. As if in a scene. Now: strange bedroom off a long corridor. Doors clicking shut, but you know they’ll open, or you suspect as much. The camera of your own eye so fixed it fails you – what’s that just out of view? At center: two bodies beside each other under the covers. Under the fog, which reveals itself to be merely a byproduct of 90s tape stock. Vaseline. Is this a reenactment? One of the ones where the people play themselves? Light transmutes to grayscale, shines off something in the corner. Shadow standing in the door. Two horns, a blunt tail: hammer held aloft in the figure’s hand. What comes into relief. What descends on the sleeping men.

I won’t wake up when Dad hoists me over his shoulders to carry me to his truck. If I do, I fake sleep. Dad plays along, lullabies on the drive. Some mornings, I’ll forget where I am. But just for a second.

Dad says I have to keep my eyes closed during the scariest part if I want to watch the movie with him. The scariest part is when the man in a metal cage at the center of a cavernous room engineers his escape: handcuffing one uniformed officer to the bars, he      lunges      toward the other, grabbing his head and shaking it vigorously as they lock lips in a prolonged kiss. Or, what looks like a kiss: the killer is biting the man’s tongue off.

I do what Dad says when this scene plays from the VHS rental. I don’t need to see to know what’s happening. I already watched a week ago with my mom, though I don’t tell Dad that. Mom drove us to the video store the day it came out. Months before, she had tried to take me to see the movie in theaters, but the teenager manning the ticket booth refused to sell to her. Said I was too young to see it. Doesn’t matter if he’s your kid or not.

The first movie I saw in theaters – the first movie I can remember seeing in theaters – was an animated kids film about dinosaur children wandering through the wrecked landscape of their imminent extinction. Early on, the protagonist, a young Apatosaurus, witnesses a Tyrannosaurs Rex murder his mother. To eat her. Despite his grief, he joins a rag-tag team of orphaned herbivores who journey to find the Great Valley – a distant haven full of thick, green, edible vegetation. I remember sobbing in my seat after the little boy long-neck’s mother bites it. But his Mom isn’t really gone, right? My parents didn’t want to do the death talk again, not in a family-filled theater. It’s okay. It’s just a movie. It’s not real.

When I see it three years after The Land Before Time, nothing in The Silence of the Lambs makes me cry. 

Thinking the scariest part of The Silence of the Lambs is when Hannibal Lecter rough-kisses the guard’s tongue off only seems possible if you’re overinvesting the scene with Freudian significance. Is any part of a person’s body a stand-in for a penis? Is every mouth an alternate hungry orifice? These were psychosexual leaps I simply was not ready to make as a first grader. Besides, having already seen the film in full, without any warning from Mom to close my eyes, I knew Dad was wrong. The scariest part of The Silence of the Lambs isn’t the violence of the escape sequence. It’s not when Buffalo Bill lures his victim into the back of a van, nor the horror of her captivity in a pit dug into the earthen floor of his basement, where she’s left to soften up before he’ll murder and skin her to finish his suit made of women’s flesh. The night-vision climax – when it takes a literal shot in the dark to kill the killer and end the story – is scary-suspenseful, but that’s not quite the same as real horror. Real horror – nothing on-screen, but its reflection just beyond it – is the scariest thing about The Silence of the Lambs, or of any movie, any story. Real horror is never any part, but a resonant whole. Something you cannot look away from. Shut your eyes. Turn off the TV. Leave the room. Get out of the house. Stay outside all day. Play all summer. Sometime in the months between the movie’s theatrical debut and VHS distribution, too much of the terror in the movie became real.

For me, at least.

EXT. THE BEACH ROAD: DUSK. Late summer, 1991. A small New England seaside village. THE ROAD is parallel and close to the ocean, which has faded from sight into DUSKING SKY behind high grasses and bushes. The SOUND OF WAVES is constant in the near distance. Cedar shake faded to gray sides the few houses in the background. TWO CHILDREN WALKING on the road enter from CAMERA-RIGHT, speaking animatedly to each other. Their dialogue is audible, but beyond comprehension, as if in a dream. THE BOY is newly SIX YEARS OLD. He vacillates between shy seriousness and goofing off. He has dark hair and eyes, long eyelashes. His slight peach fuzz is visible in CLOSE-UP. The OTHER BOY looks enough like him to be his brother. Their clothes coordinate, in the manner of TWINS, although THE OTHER BOY may or may not be real.

SHAFTS OF LIGHT appear from CAMERA-LEFT, catching on the small bodies of THE BOYS where they amble on the asphalt before fading into the dark growth behind them. From where they stand (the side of the road nearest the shore), THE BOY is closest to the camera. He turns away from the blinding brightness of the oncoming high beams when they hit him, squeezing his eyes shut and facing a brake of reeds. When he opens his eyes, the first thing he sees is his own shadow. The silhouette is magnified in negative space against the wall of tall plants which dip, slightly, in the breeze. The camera performs a sustained DOLLY ZOOM: with only shadow as the frame’s fixed center, the background shifts in and out of indeterminate distance and hyperfocus. The unseeable sea turns to engine noise. A TRUCK slows to idle by the boy. Through its window, THE FATHER:

Careful walking around in the dark. A cute little boy like you? Plenty of faggots out there’d just love to eat you up. LICKS HIS LIPS. You know what I’m talking about. That guy they got last week. You asked who he was when you saw him on the TV.

DANIEL BARNUM is the managing editor of The Journal and a presidential fellow at the Ohio State University. Their poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming from West Branch, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their work is featured in Best New Poets 2020, and included as notable in Best American Essays 2020. Names for Animals, their debut chapbook, is now in its second printing from Seven Kitchens Press. Find them at: danielbarnum.net & @daniel_bar_none

1. We lifted just a few lines from the middle of the song to play over the fade-in to the first shot. The whole of “In California” is simply too long – almost nine minutes of harp! – and in total, a tonal mismatch to these scenes outside of the section you hear here.

2. The first time I saw two men sleeping in bed together, they were bludgeoned to death with a hammer. I was too young to remember clearly. The killer was hidden in shadow.. Something I saw on TV – an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries. The theme song still thrills (nostalgia) and chills me (terror). The show played late at night; I would stay up with my mom to watch. Many nights, I fell asleep to the sound of Robert Stack’s narration over stiff reenactments of murders, disappearances, hauntings…. Recently, I tried rewatching the series to see if I’d stumble on the segment I’m talking about. I only made it a few episodes in before my sleep became shorter, more full of nightmares.

3. The Silence of the Lambs premiered on February 14, 1991. How many Valentine’s Day dinner-and-a-movie dates did it ruin, I wonder? The VHS release was on October 24, 1991. Just in time for Halloween.

4. We wanted to make this scene look like a movie theater. Like a screen with a row of empty seats before it.

5. And we wanted this one to look like some big, squarish TV screen from the 1990s with a couch or a loveseat plopped down in front of it. That’s what we were going for, but you know. If you have to explain something… .

6. I grew up spending a significant portion of each summer at the beach. My grandma had a summer cottage near Charlestown, Rhode Island, less than two hours’ drive across the border from my parents’ separate houses in adjacent towns in a part of northeastern Connecticut nicknamed “The Quiet Corner.” Quonochontaug, the seaside village my family stayed in, might be known best in popular culture (if it is known at all), as the site of Agent Fox Mulder’s mother’s summer cottage in The X-Files. Another show about, among other things, unsolved mysteries. At the beach, strange new children were always appearing and disappearing. Seasonal renters. Strangers met walking somewhere along the dog rose dotted dune trails or goofily shrieking in the waves, these kids became my fast and easy friends for a few weeks at a time. Now, if you asked me any of their names, even what they looked like, I couldn’t tell you. So, how can I know if they were even there?.

7. Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and charged for his serial murders and related crimes in the early hours of July 23rd, 1991. The still used here is from his indictment on Thursday, July 25th, 1991 – an event I can remember watching on TV with my dad, grandma, uncle, and cousins at the beach house in Quonie. The tandem family discussion included grotesque speculation and equally gruesome details ripped from headline news. They spoke about how he preyed on young men, boys. About how he said he had done what he did – dismembered, tasted, preserved his victims – to be close to them. Because he loved them. All of this was, most likely, the first time I’d heard anyone openly talk about gay people. The gay person they were talking about was a real life monster. I listened. I didn’t have much to contribute as a child still a few weeks away from turning six, but I wondered: am I a monster ? Is desire dangerous?

8. No, but in middle school, I certainly felt like one. It’s nice to leave those years a blur when we can.

9. A drive-in movie theater stands near the border of the two towns I grew up between. Its parking lot, unused on weekdays during daylight, was the site of frequent drop-offs/pick-ups after my parents had each married their respective new spouses. Since my mom and Dad had grown to hate each other so extremely, their history of abuse and attorneys looming over any minor interaction, my stepMom and stepDad drove me to and from the switch-off most often. This started some years before both couples married in the summer of 1997 – the summer of my twelfth birthday.

10. Because I lived full time at my dad’s, which was outside of the school district I’d grown up in, I had to apply into an agricultural magnet program to continue on at my high school after freshman year. Hence the Future Farmers of America.

11. How do you talk about something you don’t want to talk about? Danny was a boy I had a crush on in high school, but when I think about it now, maybe I only liked him because it was the first time being queer felt actionable. I hated weed because my dad was always high, but I smoked it as soon as Danny wanted to. He smoked so much it cast him in an eternal haze. Is it cruel to say anything negative about the dead? At first, I thought this haziness was cute, goofy. Eventually it became stupid and annoying. Constant, like my dad’s.

12. Nowhere, directed by Gregg Araki, was released in May 1997, but I would not encounter it in the local Blockbuster until late fall 2001. One thing doing an undergraduate film major taught me was to never trust “best ofs” and ranked lists of movies; but, if there were some sort of desert island scenario, Nowhere remains one likely candidate.

13. What happened in between a vaguely defined period of losing touch in high school and the day of Danny’s murder? A lot. Too much. It’s a haze. I went to college, dropped out. Moved around a couple new cities. I stayed up late watching a lot of movies, but I can’t really remember all of their names, characters, plots.

14. I worked at the Coolidge Corner Theatre for the years I lived in Boston. A historic repertory cinema that houses the tallest movie screen in the country, the Coolidge gives an annual award to some notable contributor to independent film. While staffing the award ceremony years after the scene this treatment describes, I met the 2010 recipient, Jonathan Demme, who had won an Oscar in 1992 for directing The Silence of the Lambs.

15. After I found out about Danny’s murder, I went into some sort of slow shock. Two years of repetitive, numb action in Boston. A cycle of work, one-off classes, and a doomed relationship kept me distracted. From what?

16. At the time, I thought: totalizing fear. The terror of strangers, of ending up like Danny, like his stand-in in the movie I glossed as my own teenage experience. It must have been something deeper, though – something I didn’t know I was avoiding. A grief I was not sure I could own or claim. I knew him before I knew love. Danny, my first kiss, young and giddy, trembling before a feeling I could not name. Danny, tumbling onto the floor, dead in a stranger’s room. Danny, for whom a stranger’s desire proved dangerous.

17. It’s no fun to be known as a survivor, which is what they call the family and friends of those lost to violent crime. This was a name that officially applied to me after my mom was murdered in the summer of 2012. As a survivor, I had the right to access benefits from the state in the form of grief counseling. I was neither owed these benefits nor given the title of survivor in early 2008, when Danny was killed. Outside of close friends from our hometown, a lot of people didn’t know about Danny’s death when it happened. Despite the salacious details and mysterious elements, it didn’t make national news. As the trial went on at length, if people had heard about it, they didn’t know the victim in the case was my first boyfriend. And if they did know, they never reached out. Which I can’t blame them for. Something I’ve learned from being a survivor: condolences are even harder to get than they are to give.

18. My frequent bouts of insomnia stopped almost immediately after we wrapped production on this and took it in to edit. Had I been keeping myself up, watching bad TV and horror movies late into the night all those years when my mind would ask itself what must they have felt in their last moments? At the time, the distractions had felt like comfort, the horror on screen seemed related to what I had known. I could survive by fixing myself and whatever tragedies I knew into some sort of meaningful constellation. To give the unthinkable context: how montage and jump cuts are meant to work, at least in theory. Take away theory and all you have is a pile of images on the cutting room floor, light and no shadow to define it. Scenes played over and over on a loop in the dark with no one else there to put it into sequence. Just ghosts. Which, like any projected image, vanish if you get too close.