The quotation that opens Pessl’s second novel is by a fictional character, Stanislas Cordova, who seems to be a darker version of Alfred Hitchcock. He’s quoted from a 1977 edition of Rolling Stone. It’s seven lines, few words wasted.
Line 1. “Mortal fear” is as crucial as love. Is that when we are afraid for our lives? Or is it when we risk being scared to death? I like that Pessl says it’s “crucial”. There a point in the prologue when the word “crevice” is employed like a stab wound.
2. Mortal fear shows us what we are. That’s debatable but let’s go along.
3-4. Will you cover your eyes? As a kid going to the movies, I was a big eye-coverer. Pessl uses the word “precipice” That’s very fine.
5. If you turn away from the terror then you’re accepting “the dark delusion” of “this commercial world.” We’re blind caterpillars. We’re cocooned. This sounds a bit arch. Am I having a camp experience? I don’t know. That’s why I’m loving it.
6-7. Will you face it? The language is wonderful in line 7. I won’t quote it.
The film director Stanislas Cordova: A contraband copy of a Cordova movie is viewed. It’s so horrific that it can’t be discussed. Yet Cordova’s art is essential. There are times in your life when your soul calls out for it.
Our narrator is jogging around the Central Park Reservoir at 2:32 AM. He has had four scotches. He makes more than one circuit. I’m impressed. I’ve made that run and know what it takes.
He’s journalist Scott McGrath. Lives in Brooklyn. He’s hard boiled. He’d go to hell to interview Lucifer. I pause to rub my jaw since I’ve just been word gobbed. Pessl has described a 21st century journalist the way a newspaperman would have been described in a 1940’s noir.
Is the best part of his life behind him? I have a Jimmy Stewart, Vertigo moment. There’s mist. The contours of things are hazy. Of the great Fifth Avenue buildings, only one or two golden lights can be seen through the haze. I’m wondering if Fifth Avenue buildings can be seen from the Reservoir anyway. I don’t remember. But the suspicion that what I’m reading may not be factually accurate is adding to my literary pleasure. What kind of a document am I reading? I greatly respect Pessl’s mist. For me, it represents the ambiguity in the text that I’m enjoying.
Scott is at the South Gatehouse starting his 6th lap. Every lap around the Central Park Reservoir is 1.5 miles. That’s a run nearly half the length of a marathon. And Scott has four scotches in him. This feeling I’m getting that I don’t know what I should believe makes the Night Film prologue such a seducing puzzler.
Such a classic old school style. Pumping along, Scott glances over his shoulder and sees a woman with dark hair, a vivid red coat and black boots leaning against a lamp post. Her face is obscured in the dark. I liked it that the woman appears behind him, that’s more threatening, more suggestive than a frontal confrontation. I’ve been in Central Park after midnight with friends as a way to wrap up a night out. There are people in there but it’s erie. You round a curve in the black, Central Park is almost all curves, and you spy a sole figure sitting on top of a park bench. You pass by. Silence.
And he sees her again. And again. At one point she appears on the stairs of the North Gatehouse, the doors of which are chained shut. Somewhere else she appears to be wandering away in the dark. Just fading into invisibility as he runs by, her talismanic red coat appearing brown…worn…haunted at the edges. It puzzles me that Scott takes a shortcut through some bushes on one of his laps. How can you take a shortcut if you’re doing laps around the Reservoir? The only way would be to run on water.
Or this damned city had finally gotten to me.
Scott exits the park nearby to take the 86th Street Lexington Ave line to Brooklyn. The geography is accurate. The Park after midnight is a very special zone. Are we safe now outside it? As Scott’s subway train leaves the platform and glides into the safe obscurity of a tunnel, like when we have one of those nightmares where we barely escape the monster, Scott sees…
Marisha Pessl in Night Film is throwing off a dazzling level of panache, producing a text with multivalent emotional and intellectual images. This seems to be a novel that needs to be unpacked rather than read. Or unpacked as it is read. And that’s just the prologue!