IGMS Issue 38 Page 10

  But Death could end this. One touch and it would be over.

  It was his job. His duty.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, despairing. If I tried to touch him and missed, if he left me here alone again . . .

  I couldn't stand it if that happened. It would break me. Utterly.

  "Why?" I repeated. "Why won't you just do it?"

  Death grinned cheerfully. I may as well have asked a child why he wouldn't clean his room. Don't feel like it, Ma.

  Asshole.

  I lay down, flat on my back in the grass, watching the sky drift by. I didn't feel calm, I didn't feel relaxed. I just knew that if I didn't get off my feet I would do something stupid.

  "Isn't there anything else you want to know?" he asked. "Like why you're still alive after all these years?"

  I had been focusing on a high, thin, wispy cloud lazing across a lagoon-blue sky, but that question froze me. For too many decades that had been the consuming question. The one I had given up on.

  I propped myself up on my elbows, realizing even as I did it that I was nodding my head, and that I couldn't seem to stop.

  Death approved. He shrugged and spoke so matter-of-factly that you'd have thought I had just asked him why the ocean was wet. He said, "I couldn't find you."

  I blinked, twice, thrice, lingering with the idea for a moment to be sure I had heard him correctly. I couldn't have. It was ridiculously insane. Insanely ridiculous. I think my mouth tried to spit out the word "What?" but I was so flabbergasted I'm not sure anything actually made it all the way past my lips.

  I gathered myself, convinced myself that yes, I had really just heard what I thought I heard, and said, "What do you mean you couldn't find me? How could you not find me?"

  Thoroughly irritated, I started to climb to my feet. But Death made little fluttering motions with his hands. I'm not sure if he was saying I should sit back down or if he was threatening to fly away, but the result was the same: I stayed where I was.

  "What do you mean you couldn't find me?" I repeated. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

  Death laughed. It was a deep, rich, resonant, horrifying sound. The sound of a gigantic wave rising from the depths of the ocean and rushing over beaches and towns and fields, crushing, crashing, and shattering everything in its path.

  "I couldn't find you," he repeated. "It's pretty simple. I'm naturally drawn to the terminally ill, injured, and old, and you managed to avoid all three."

  This was making less sense all the time.

  "Okay, that's --" I cut myself off. At this point I had no idea what question I should even be asking. "How . . .?"

  "How does someone avoid aging?" he said for me.

  I nodded.

  Death was amused, but mercifully he did not laugh again. He said, "Ironically, by being one of the last people on Earth. Back when the planet was swarming with people, the ones that were, if you'll pardon the pun, deathly sick or injured, called out to me. I answered them. And on my way, I brushed past the living -- and they aged. Only slightly, but age they did.

  "The problem was, when I got down to the last handful of humans, you started getting hard to find. Damned hard. I wasn't brushing past people on my way to claim other lives, so people weren't aging. And the world has become such a healthy paradise --" He said the word "healthy" as if it had been marinated in vinegar before it passed through his mouth "-- that unless someone became mortally wounded or -- as a few lonely souls did -- intentionally killed themselves, I simply couldn't find them.

  "And to be honest, I've stopped trying quite so hard in this last century. Maybe I'm just bored, but there's certainly no need for all that rush, rush, rush. Not when there are only four people left on the entire planet." He paused, pulled a small notebook and pencil out of his back pocket, flipped the notebook open and thumbed to a particular page. He made a little check mark. Then he looked back at me, suddenly all business. "Well, it'll be four -- in a moment."

  He slipped the notebook back into his pocket.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "There are others? Besides me?"

  "Oh yes," he said, climbing to his feet. The grass where he had been sitting was dead. He took another step toward me and another patch of green grass withered and turned scorched brown.

  I backed up. "After all this time, now you tell me there are still people out there? That I'm not alone. That's not fair. You have to let me find them. See them."

  "But you said you wanted to die." His demeanor was markedly different. Hard.

  "No! I said I was tired of being alone." I jerked my head around, panicked, desperate to find some avenue of escape.

  "That's better," he said softly. He began circling me, gliding, muscles rippling. "It's no fun when they want to die . . ." Louder, he added "Those people have been out there all along. One man and three women. One of them is even on this continent. You just didn't look hard enough."

  His inward spiral was bringing him closer and closer to me. I pivoted as I retreated, trying to keep him in front of me. "It took you over two hundred years to find me . . . and I didn't look hard enough?"

  But with each word I uttered, he drew closer still. One second, he had said. All it took was one full second of contact.

  "I got bored," he said. "I could have found you sooner, but I've learned to savor the moment; to relish the hunt. There are so few of you left."

  I had been about to make a break for it, to try to run. But I knew it wouldn't do any good. On the other hand, when a man is about to be pounced on by a lion, doesn't he at least try to get away?

  That was the answer.

  I immediately stopped backpedaling.

  He stopped pursuing.

  "What are you doing?" he demanded. His eyes turned a deep shade of red, cherry red, if cherries grew in Hell.

  "What are you doing?" I said. I jabbed a finger in his direction; he flinched away from it. "You say you're bored. You say you've learned to savor the hunt --" I moved toward him. He retreated two steps backward for every one I took forward. "-- yet you're on the verge of killing me, killing off one of the last of the humans. If you think you're bored now, what are you going to do when we're all gone?"

  Death stopped retreating. He crossed his arms, folding them over the skull and cross bones on his t-shirt. His pupils dilated until they completely disappeared.

  I had his attention.

  "What do you have in mind?" he asked.

  That stopped me cold. What did I have in mind? My mind had been racing, trying to find a way to get him to wait, to think, but I never thought he'd actually listen. Now that I had his attention, what did I do with it?

  "I don't know," I said.

  I counted the nine dead-grass footprints he had left as he backed up. Then I assessed the wide swath of green that surrounded us.

  I said, "You could give me time. If I can find the others and bring them together, it's inevitable that babies will be born. Then you'll have more people to kill. More work to do." It sounded reasonable to me.

  But not to Death. "No," he said, and his eyes flushed pink again. "I don't think so. I'm enjoying these hunts precisely because they'll be my last. After all this time, I'll finally be done. You think it's tough being alive for a few hundred years, try living a few hundred thousand."

  I might have felt sorry for him if he weren't here to kill me.

  "You don't want to kill us off," I said. "It would be the biggest mistake you ever made."

  Death looked at me like I was insane -- but he was listening.

  "I don't know if you ever were human," I said. "Maybe it's just because you've lived among us for so long, I don't know. But look at yourself. Look at all the human traits you're exhibiting. First you didn't want to take me when I wanted to die. No, you wanted to do it on your own terms. That's incredibly human. Then you said you were bored. In fact, you've said it twice now. Trust me, I counted. Boredom is a quintessentially human emotion.

  "Well let me tell you something -- something I j
ust figured out about myself. Seeing how excited I got when I learned there were still people out there? It made me realize I wasn't miserable simply because I was lonely. Yeah, I was lonely; I won't deny that. But I was miserable because I had no purpose. Without purpose people are nothing. And without a sense of purpose -- without humans to hunt -- you'll be more miserable than I ever was."

  As I spoke, Death's eye-color swirled like a Halloween hurricane before they finally settled on black.

  It was the first time I had been glad to see them that color. They were still unnerving, but at least they weren't in flux.

  "I can't sit around and wait another century for you to find these people," he said. "Patience is one thing, but asking me to sit around is another thing all together. And I honestly don't know where the others are." He paused, then narrowed his eyes and added, "So why don't we just get this over with?"

  Before I knew it, Death was inches from my face, his fist clutching a handful of my shirt. I leaned back as far as the shirt's fabric would allow -- which gained me maybe three inches.

  "Wait," I gasped. "Don't you understand? That's exactly why this is going to work."

  He didn't let go, but his demeanor shifted oh so slightly.

  "Why what's going to work?"

  "You don't know where the other people are. I don't know where the other people are. So we'll have a race. Or a treasure hunt. Call it whatever you like. We'll both go looking for the last people. Anybody you find first is yours. But anybody I find first, you can't touch for three generations."

  "During which time you'll breed like bunnies."

  I nodded. "I'm assuming that growing up is not the same thing as growing old, so you won't need to touch the children in order for them to develop."

  He nodded.

  "And none of that 'faster-than-a-speeding-bullet' stuff," I added. "You move at my speed -- regular human."

  I could tell by the look on his face that he was considering it.

  "And every five years we'll meet back up," I said, trying to sweeten the pot. "We'll compare notes, see how it's going."

  "Make it ten years," he said. "Right here. I have fond memories of this little bunker of yours. Collected a lot of people here on your doorstep."

  He extended his hand to shake on the deal and laughed heartily when I almost fell for it. His laugh didn't sound any less horrible than it did the first time around.

  When he walked off, he was still laughing. It was clear that this wasn't going to be a friendly competition; it was going to be the strangest deathmatch ever.

  But he had gone for it. That was all that mattered.

  Or at least I think he went for it. As he walked away, I couldn't help but wonder if I had talked him into this race, or if he had tricked me into thinking it was my idea. It's possible he knew all along that he needed something to do, something to keep life interesting. Whether that something lasts for the next few years, the next few hundred, or more, I can't say. And it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that he's set all five of us in motion at the same time, just to make things more interesting.

  Whatever it is he's up to, I don't care. There are others out there. Four of them. And I'm going to find them. Before he does.

  This time I'm not going to escape Death; I'm going to beat him.

  Considering the way things had turned out last time, I wonder how thoroughly I might be able to meet that goal . . .

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  * * *

  New wave

  If there's any justice, the recent crop of strong female characters will change Hollywood's gender paradigm, at least a little

  Did you notice those torches passing? Sure you did. Couldn't miss 'em.

  A mysterious uncle shows up and passes along his, shall we say, unique lifestyle (and accompanying skill set) to an inquisitive niece. A father passes away, and his daughter, years later, picks up where he leaves off. A mother and daughter subvert, and ultimately overcome, a centuries-old patriarchal tradition. An alpha male, out in the middle of space, floats to his presumed death, leaving an audience in the hands of a woman who proceeds to command the screen for the duration of the film.

  Some variation of this kind of scenario has popped up again and again in recent months and years; the message couldn't be clearer.

  It's long been the accepted custom that Hollywood is, for all intents and purposes, run by 13-year-old boys. Their dollars are worth the most. It's yielded a robust superhero- and robot-based economy. It's why every year is dominated by male crimefighters and heroes of all stripes. Nothing has exactly changed on that front (yet), but what you may have noticed is that, on quality if not quantity, the women are kicking the men's asses.

  I touched on this in my 2013 Year in Review, but didn't get into too much detail. Now, to be fair, I must acknowledge that my own top 10 of last year included movies about: a solitary man on a boat, a solitary folk singer with a cat, a solitary man whose great romance is with a computer program, a solitary man in Rome's high society, and a bunch of male white-collar crooks and scumbags. But bear with me here. That was, again, largely a matter of quantity.

  But what struck me were the signs, baby steps though they may be, of things trending in a different direction - or at the very least a burning desire to push them that way. Especially given the particular places where these trends are showing up. Sci-fi and fantasy have been more male-dominated than anything else, yet filmmakers did dramatically more interesting work with their female leads this year than their males.

  While studios over the last few years have carved out the YA niche to target female audiences (condescendingly offering them their own little corner of the sandbox), boy-centric action pics remain the industry's bell cow.

  The gender dynamics in sci-fi - slyly upended in Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity - are particularly interesting. There's no shortage of brilliant women in sci-fi cinema, but the Ellen Ripley model didn't exactly catch on. Aside from Alien, Aliens and that fake Julia Roberts/Anna Scott flick from Notting Hill, I don't remember the last science-fiction film so wholly dominated by a female character the way Sandra Bullock does so memorably in Gravity.

  Typically, even the best examples are either paired with a dominant male figure (Sarah Connor with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, Leia with Han and Luke (OK fine, just Han) in the Star Wars trilogy, Trinity with Neo in The Matrix) (what trilogy?), or are part of a larger ensemble (i.e. River in Firefly / Serenity).

  But Gravity - against the outdated expectations of various box-office gurus and insiders - unapologetically went there. Not only that, but Cuarón gave us a fully self-aware subversion of those expectations, presenting us with a heroic male figure with an A-list face, only to get rid of him by the half-hour mark*. And what he left us with was the kind of female protagonist the movies have been missing for a long, long time. Oh, and to the tune of $714 million worldwide, and counting.

  * Yes, with the exception of Ghost Clooney's brief appearance a bit later on. And while, yes, Clooney may be a savior figure in a couple of different scenes, Bullock's character does most of the heavy lifting, survival-wise.

  But Cuarón's Oscar-winner hasn't been alone in nudging us - and, hopefully, Hollywood itself - in a more progressive direction. Even if many of the best examples are too small-scale to make themselves heard on a large scale. To me, the most powerful statement was made by Neil Jordan's Byzantium - written by Moira Buffini based on her play - a brilliant feminist critique of patriarchal social structures, buoyed by a pair of great lead performances by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as immortal mother-and-daughter vampires trying to survive off the grid.

  Hovering over their lives, and the film as a whole, is a set of ancient traditions put in place, maintained and enforced by a priest-like order of vampires for whom the passage of time (an irrelevant concept for an immortal) is no call for progress. Which leaves independent women like Clara (Arterton) out in the cold, and subject to execut
ion.

  Its religious commentary is elegant, if unsubtle, but what really makes it soar is the potency of the two central figures. It's funny - I was revisiting Byzantium around the same time I saw and reviewed 300: Rise of an Empire, and there's a distinct similarity between Arterton's Clara and Eva Green's Artemisia. Both are powerful figures - the former noble and insanely protective (and for good reason); the latter, merely insane. But try pairing up Green's intimidating seduction/sex scene midway through the film with a key scene late in Byzantium, when Clara confronts her daughter's teacher after he has gotten a bit too close to the truth. What ensues is a slow, meticulous and erotic scene of manipulation that ends as badly (and as bloody) as it could possibly end for someone on the receiving end of Clara's maternal instincts.

  Her authority as both a maternal figure and a survivor (thematically not unlike Bullock's character in Gravity) was among the most viscerally affecting things I saw in theatres all year.

  Another favorite example of mine from last year is Chan-wook Park's Stoker, which fills the strangely under-tapped subgenre of a female coming-of-age film (for various reasons, it seems there are countless prominent male-centered coming-of-age stories every year), the twist being that she's coming of age as a killer. When we first meet India (Mia Wasikowska), she's an enigma - observant but strangely aloof, curious but hesitant. The sudden appearance of her dapper, mysterious uncle - all slithery charm and menace - opens up the corners of her psyche that she'd kept buried for 18 years. The way Park's character study / chamber horror piece plays out is not simply mentor and protégé, but something more complex and incestuous, and what's great is the way her relationship to her uncle, and to her own actions, keeps shifting; we see her blossom into a stone-cold psycho. We've seen (and identified with) so many male loners-turned-psychopaths that it's refreshing to see the sardonically playful way Stoker approaches the female version of that.

  Meanwhile, a pair of films refashioned old stories into righteously triumphant feminist fables - Pablo Berger's Blancanieves and Disney's smash hit Frozen. The former reimagines Snow White in the world of bullfighting in the 1920s, focusing on the brilliant young Carmen as she comes into her own, thwarting all her evil stepmother's ill intentions (not to mention an attempted murder) and grows up to follow in her legendary father's footsteps in the ring. Frozen, very loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, features two wildly different but equally compelling princesses in a movie that satirizes the idea of Disney romance and focuses instead on the love between sisters. Even better? It marked the second Disney princess (Elsa) in as many years (joining Brave's Merida) to not be defined by a male relationship whatsoever.