In a scene that was extravagant, silly, off-kilter and technically impressive all at the same time, the scientist fires the ray gun at a victim, who begins to glow in the dark, jerking and dancing and then looking rather wanly at his arm, which starts to melt away.
Other victims appeared, muscles and bones reshaped, slits for eyes, shuffling on stump legs.
Klara thought of the radiation monsters in Japanese science-fiction movies and looked down the aisle at Miles, who was a scholar of the form.
Was Eisenstein being prescient about nuclear menace or about Japanese cinema?
She thought of the prehistoric reptiles that came mutating out of the slime and the insects with chromosome damage poking from the desert near some test site, ants the size of bookmobiles-these were movies for the drive-ins of the fifties, a boy and girl yanking at each other's buckles and snaps while the bomb footage unfurls and the giant leeches and scorpions appear on the horizon, all radioactive and seeking revenge, and the fleeing crowds, of course, because in the end these creatures not only come from the bomb but displace it, and the armies mobilize and the crowds flee and the sirens wail like sirens.
Eisenstein's creatures were fully human and this complicated the fun. They humped and scuttled through the shadows, hump-lurched with hands dragging, and you can always convince yourself it's okay to laugh at cripples and mutants if everybody else is laughing, it's a way to play off your aversion, and it wasn't just the twisted features and elaborate gestures and the curious sort of lip-gloss effect you've noticed on the faces of male actors in silent movies but the music as well, this was pretty broad too-string sections of soaring melodrama.
A title now and then, in Russian, untranslated, not that it mattered-it made in fact for a giddy kind of total confusion.
Jack said, "Getting claustrophobic, are you?"
And it was true, the film was embedded so completely in the viewpoint of the prisoners that Klara was beginning to squirm.
Jack said, "I bet you'd give a hundred dollars to stand in the rain right now and smoke a cigarette."
"Is it raining?"
"Does it matter?"
The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some nether-land crevice. There was none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive-the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed, and this was disappointing to Klara. She loved the martial architecture of huge moving bodies, the armies and mobs in other Eisenstein films, and she felt she was in some ambiguous filmscape somewhere between the Soviet model and Hollywood 's vaulted heaven of love, sex, crime and individual heroism, of scenery and luxury and gorgeous toilets.
All you have to do is think of the other Underworld, a 1927 gangster film and box office smash.
Esther said, "I want to be rewarded for this ordeal."
Admit it, you're bored. Klara tried to take encouragement from Miles. He was in a state of rapt elation, that pure surrender he undertakes, able to lose himself in the eye and mind of the movie, totally drawn and charmed-charmed at some level even when he doesn't like what he's watching. But she knew he liked this. It was remote and fragmentary and made on the cheap, supposedly personal, and it had a kind of suspense even as it crawled along.
How and when would it reveal itself?
She wondered why the film was silent. Maybe it was shot earlier than the experts surmised. But she thought it was more likely that Eisenstein knew he'd have an easier time doing the film in secret if he did not use sound. And maybe silence suited the development of his themes.
What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism, against the party-minded mandate to produce art that advanced the Soviet cause. Was he in secret rebellion? He'd been condemned for earlier work, according to Miles, and had seemed to capitulate. But what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?
Even better. Doesn't this movie seem to anticipate the terror that was mounted against Russian artists in the late nineteen-thirties? The secret police. The arrests, the torture, the disappearances, the executions.
The mad scientist aims the gun.
A figure stands against a wall, his body going white.
The scientist shows a tight smile.
The victim is transfigured, pain-racked, his lower lip dribbling off his face, a growth appearing at the side of his neck, a radiant time-lapse melanoma.
The scientist approaches and touches the man, tenderly, on the cheek.
Abruptly the screen went dark. Intermission seemed a timely idea and Klara thought she'd take Esther on a tour of the powder rooms, there were quite a few, she thought, on several levels, and well worth beholding-murals, sculpture, furniture, things she'd seen through her mother's eyes, suddenly free in space, independent of memory
Miles went up to a private viewing room in the third mezzanine to confer with his colleagues. The two women left Jack in a chair in the grand lounge, downstairs, a carpeted area about two hundred feet in length, and they went into the nearest powder room.
"I've got a question," Esther said.
Klara lit a cigarette. Esther, who'd stopped smoking, bummed one and lit it and inhaled and then looked away to protect the sensation, to guard it from distraction.
They heard a rumble. They felt something shaking under their feet and Klara studied the white parchment wall, listening carefully.
Then she took a drag and said, "S'okay, friend. Only the subway. The IND plowing under Sixth Avenue with its cargo of human souls."
They went up to the mezzanine levels and peered in at the walnut and pigskin in the men's smoking rooms and Klara said, "So what's your question?"
"Do we have to stay for the rest of it?"
"Miles went to a certain amount of trouble. Besides I want to see what happens."
"What could happen?"
"I don't know. But it's an interesting movie to look at from time to time."
"There's something about the tone," Esther said. "The photography. The glances that get exchanged. It's awfully shrouded of course. And the way the scientist."
"Touched the victim."
"What do you know about Eisenstein?"
"He was your friend, not mine," Klara said.
They made their rounds of the powder rooms and went back down to find Jack on the lower level, sitting above the rattle of another subway run.
The train was one of his, Moonman's, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before banging shut.
Ismael Munoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it's all live jive, it jumps and shouts-even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.