Matinee
By Kevin Canfield
An afternoon movie plays on a television screen. A woman in a lavender Victorian dress holds a man’s head, which is not attached to a man, though how it was severed remains unclear, at least to you. The man, you can see, wore a mustache and parted his dark brown hair on the left side. There’s no blood on his neck or face. Apart from the absence of a body, the only evidence that something’s wrong is the man’s facial expression, which betrays moderate to severe shock—understandable given the circumstances. His eyebrows are raised, his mouth open, his lips slightly extended, as if he died in the midst of pronouncing a long “o.” The woman’s interlaced fingers form a cradle beneath the back of the head, which she carries face up. As she begins to run down a grassy slope, heavy wind blows from the right side of the frame to the left. Rain is falling, though not heavily. Over her shoulder, you can see an open umbrella cartwheeling across the grass. She might have dropped it to pick up the head; you can’t tell. In any event, she’s prioritizing the head, which, of course, precludes the use of an umbrella. She comes to a footbridge, where she tosses the head into a narrow but deep river far below. A friend tells you that the movie you saw that afternoon might be Toby Dammit. You didn’t see the whole movie, just a scene, you remind the friend, who laughs at your insistence on this point but recommends that you watch it nonetheless. You do. Promisingly, you see Terence Stamp’s head come free from his body. But no one runs anywhere with it, not to mention that Stamp drives a convertible sports car, so we’re definitely not in Victorian England. The friend then recommends The Pit and the Pendulum, your viewing of which yields the same result. You spend some time searching for answers online, but you soon stop. You realize that you don’t want to know what movie you saw a snippet of those many years ago, or if such a movie exists at all. Not knowing is good, it’s natural, it’s the only way, really, to carry on.
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York City. His work has appeared in Cineaste, Film Comment, World Literature Today, and other publications.
