HUSH AND HEAR - A NOTE ABOUT MARY WEISS

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark


Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.


The pungent oranges and bright, green wings


Seem things in some procession of the dead,


Winding across wide water, without sound.


The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet…

From Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

Outside my window Portland is blooming noisily – scattered rain, creaking bicycles, adults conversing, children playing ­– all in the warm wind that hisses over the city, tossing blizzards of apple and cherry blossoms over the streets – so many petals you could make a snowman of them.

On the screen in front of me is a scene from Off Label – a scene with Mary Weiss talking about the death of her son.  I will never forget having the headphones on, the microphone delivering each word, each breath between as she told us of her son’s delusions of satanic cults and demons after him; of how he was coerced by his doctors into a drug marketing study; and the grisly details of his final moments. She sat across the table but her anger, her horror, and her terrible sadness might as well have been whispered into my ear. I can’t say that I’ve ever had a more intimate experience with a human voice. And I can’t imagine Mike ever had a more intimate experience of a human face through a lens.  The last sounds on that audio clip are long, shaky sighs from her, from me, from Mike, as the story finished. Not a word, only breath.  It’s fitting that this scene begins and end with the wind – a thick sound that brings us to her, hides beneath her story, and then takes us away of over the water. 

Mary was gracious enough to give us those details of her son’s death that she had never allowed to be made public. And she was gracious enough to allow them into the film. Needless to say, we are grateful and proud to present her story.  There’s a terrible irony then in the fact that  several severe strokes have crippled her speech functions.  Even as her story goes public again, this time with her own voice speaking it, she is struggling to regain her own ability to speak.   Mary is also a woman of faith. She believes her son’s spirit has found peace. She has a complex belief in angels.  When I hear the wind during her scene or now, rushing with blossoms and raindrops by my window, I hope it is caused by the wings of her angels, delivering her voice back to her.

Links:

 For the film trailer : OFF LABEL 

 Please read Carl Elliott's article on Mary Weiss and Dan Markingson for Mother Jones magazine: the deadly corruption of clinical trials

Crossing Over (of sorts)

PORTLAND

KOSOVO

At 5 AM the drinks are still flowing. At one end of the table the talk is about the gunfire on the Serbian border and the historical tensions that underlie the entire country  A German journalist says “ I walked in to a courtyard theater to see the film about America, but I suddenly remembered  how years ago bodies had been stacked in similar courtyards all over the region.  I couldn’t help but imagine them there.”  At the other end of the table the talk  is  of the loveliness of Prizen and the film festival – how magical it is too see films from all over the world projected on the city’s medieval fortress walls and over its gentle river. From some nearby café speakers Rhianna yelps about how she likes S&M, while above the town prayer calls begin.

PHILADELPHIA

The heat reaches a sullen100 degrees then breaks with lightening above the city.  In minutes the streets are all downpour and cold sizzle. Wet and shivering, I nab a broken umbrella from the gutter as it sails by.  A block later I give it to a woman trying to make a dry bed in an archway.  She’d covered as much of herself as she could with a black garbage bag. The dark, wet plastic looks as if she’s pulled the soaked asphalt off the street to protect herself. 

MINNEAPOLIS

After 2 years of filming, this is the city where the ghost of Dan Markingson walks gently in his mother’s home, peaceful after his horrific suicide; where Lucinda Williams wants her blood to flow red again into that whitening snow; where Carl Elliot appalls us with stories of medical horror and corruption but delights us with his constant, compassionate, black humor; where gold booths sparkle in gorgeous, tawdry bars and mayflies cluster like living hoarfrost on neon lit windows; where a Patsy Cline tribute band brings tears to the eyes of the old man dancing, seemingly desperately, with his wife; where a handsome actor tells me he specializes in gruesome death scenes and  fills two hours with whisky, fake blood, the perils of playing dead, and flirtatious touches of knees and hands.  Later, as we walk on a street showing the first signs of autumn, I realize that I don’t know when I’ll be back. The kiss outside the hotel feels like kissing the city goodbye. 

PORTLAND

 

This is the first Halloween away from October Country. For the last four autumns my family ghosts were with me, either in person or on screen.  Thanks to editing the new film, the terrors of this season are medical testing gone awry, drug induced suicide, and war trauma –haunting’s that belong to others but bleed just as easily into the holiday as any of the domestic terrors my family have to face.   I catch glimpses of pharmaceutical side effects in the bubbly skin and the vacant eyes of a Walgreens’ monster masks. A plastic severed limb sets off flashes of the bloody photos and footage we were given by a very young medic who suffers PTSD from his service in Irag and Abu Graib.   But just when I think there is no end to this grisly catalogue it is dispelled by the kids shrieking from house to house in their costumes; by the rubber and paper monsters that prowl yards and front windows; by leaving the horrors of the world in the editing room but putting just a touch of them into the murder ballads and ghost songs we play at our party; by watching Mike, handsome in his costume gray hair,  smiling more than he has in days, flirting and mixing potions for the guests; by waking on all saints’ day to find myself curled next to a long warm body and the shaggy pants of a charming satyr on the floor beside the bed.

 

Sin City

In Psycho Janet Leigh is told by the flirtatious tycoon (from whom she will steal $40,000) that she should “go to Las Vegas –it’s the playground of the world.”   He also tells her that you can’t buy happiness, but “you can buy off unhappiness.”  In 1960 these words may have raised Ms. Leigh’s eyebrows in arch disbelief but they seem to be very much be the case in Las Vegas today.  There is plenty of contentment in the passing faces but, strangely, almost no really energetic happiness. Eyes gleam with a thousand lights but I see no exuberance provoked by the spectacle –only a glazed kind of gawking. In the casino the hands of the young and old move at the same mechanical pace over tables and slots. People are certainly enjoying themselves but this is gambling after all.  All around dollar signs rise up and down in digital schizophrenia but I catch no joy or desperation at taking chance, winning, or even surrendering to compulsion.  Instead I see a docile, lackluster determination to gamble and consume, to be drunk, to wear little and think less. The sins of Sin City are maddeningly placid no matter how much flash gets wrapped around them.  Everything here is shattered by mirrors and plastic that give bright and buttery reflections; by explosions of colored bulbs and jumping pixels; by hyper saturated images that flatten and tame vice into the equivalent of a diner menu or travel post card. This place is the inverse of the carnivalesque – vulgarity and carnality here are drained of release and rebellion.   I like some desperation in my sin please. It’s more fun that way and allows me, for better or (usually) worse, to know where pleasure ends and danger begins. It seems impossible that anything could be beneath the surface in Las Vegas, but the real sins here, the capital “S” sins of greed, excess, and waste are exactly that – hidden beneath their own display, waiting patiently for a wallet to empty, for a card to be rejected, for a glass to spill, a high heel to break– anything that could land someone in one of those “personal traps” from which “we claw and tear” discussed by Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in the Bates Motel parlor just before hidden cash and an illicit glimpse of flesh lead to her murder.

THANK YOU SPRINGTIME!

PORTLAND

SEATTLE

SAN FRANCISCO

PORTLAND

Thanks Portland – just when I felt (happily) strangled in your blooming, soothing, green life there on the sidewalk, rough and permanent  “we torture.”

Thanks Seattle – amid the solicitations and  iPhone instant loves and the doldrums of listening to steampunk authors, in their home-shod Jules Vern gear, pontificating on how their nostalgia trip will change the world – there she was on the sidewalk begging the police to just let her pray.

Thanks San Francisco –  After the tight warmth of old friends and new beds, there at the Tea Party Tax Day Rally, a woman gave a full exorcism, in clunky, howling Latin,  to drive away that freedom hating demon called Taxes.  At home, a 23-dollar check was waiting. The first in 3 years.

Thanks Portland ­for the “Drug Take Back Initiative Day”.  In a mega-store parking lot the cars line up drive-thru style, arms reach out with bag after bag of orphaned medicines. On the tables, in boxes and garbage cans, the colors and abundance of the pills put the spring blossoms to shame. Obviously the terms “annuals” and “perennials” now apply to prescriptions as well as plant life.

And one more thanks to the home town  for a lonely night walk guided by Maker’s Mark and the compass of my camera lens, my head full of  filmmaking blues and the day’s footage – a hat box full of prescriptions, an amputation in a medical center in Abu Ghraib,  a swollen hand at prayer, and hotel sign after hotel sign.  My mind edits them to the ever-present sound of the trains passing from north Portland to the south east. There is a dark ferris wheel by the river, a soft fall of pink cherry petals, and all the words written on the city.