and when ian sees her, it’s been so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like to see her again, to be with her in all her amandaness again, that energy, that excited state that pronounced her and defined her, that announced her. he hugs her, and it all comes back to him, when he’s come home again, the solidness of her, her body pressed close to him, the smell of her hair. and even though he can never be enough for her and she can never be enough to him, just holding her now is enough to come back home.

she shows me her film and i don’t know to make of it. she did it on the computer i bought her and i think what a waste. i try to smile at first but when the actress goes to the bathroom and sticks her fingers in her mouth on her knees in front of the toilet, we can see the fingers right in there “nice and deep”, she says, “notice the rack focus?” i feel like gagging with her. i see the bile and focus instead to the emblem on the plasma screen and while a part of me wonders what they used for it, i’m distracted by the sound and turn to amanda. “what is this shit?” i ask her but she’s transfixed, in some other fucking place like usual, some place she’s told me i don’t belong. i wish i could grab hold of her and snap her out of it, just as the actress wipe the spittle with the back of her hand. i wish i could her hold her and bring her back to me, as she smiles and i hear the actress flush the toilet in this stupid fucking movie amanda has made.

they write on me with their cocks and their tongues, with their dirty fingernails digging into my hair. harry knows, harry says he knows and he looks at me like i’m a piece of shit but he doesn’t know anything. he smirks like he knows when he knows nothing of it, he knows nothing about it but he tries, goddamn how he tries to look right through me. and my cunt answers to him like he’s calling it to his fucking fingers, like all he has to to do is snap those coarse fingers of his and it should just fucking jump to his whim. i push him onto the bed because he doesn’t fucking know like all the rest but he’ll do for now, he’ll do because he fucking tries. even when he gets it all wrong, his fingers get it right.

do any of them know? does someone need to know? should there be a confidante? no. no confidante. although the idea is appealing, someone to interject some (version of the) truth of amanda, possibly bring in some history, i.e. the sumerian king and his punishment of bashing the offending woman’s teeth out with a tablet of clay.
harry knows, or suspects. doesn’t care? accepts? another twist. no, no. too many.
points to hit-
1. meeting each husband
2. her death
3. each husband meeting the other
4. each husband identifying the body
5. scenes from her childhood
6. on the set of first movie
7. premiere of first movie at festival (?)
not necessarily in that order, nor conclusive
from Moviemaker’s Master Class by Laurent Tirard, the section on John Boorman, “Directing is really about writing, and all serious directors write.”
voices, voices everywhere and overrun her, they write their stories on her and she eventually frames, puts them in the picture. they write and talk about her, all over her, their words on her skin, they skin her alive, and she puts them in the frame, mocks them, seduces them, uses them, discards them, over and over, they talk and she gets them in the shot, shoots them all down, scripts them until they no longer see themselves, stupid and blind with their talking, with their pointing, their figuring of her, as if they could figure her out and she’s got them all splashed across the screen, she’s got them in 35mm.

amanda is an aspiring independent filmmaker from spokane, washington who was kicked out of her home when she turned eighteen. her father left her when she was relatively young but her mother soon remarried a rancher. the rancher was a good man, strict and fair, but let her mother have the most say in her upbringing.

amanda met harry at an atm machine he was fixing while she waited to withdraw some cash, a little over year after she had married tom. he is, on the surface, a brute but with a self deprecating sense of humor. well read and seemingly knowledgeable, they both felt easy and also uneasy with each other. harry ultimately is an odd mixture of anger and kindness, coldly analytical but also impulsive. for the most part he cannot be reasoned with, resolute in his opinions and even more so if argued with or contested.
out of the three, amanda had the most chemistry with him although neither of them could specifically point out as to why. his job confused her, it seemed out of place for him, particularly when he often wrote pieces that had, as amanda would say, “an attention to mundane details that leave you haunted.” she would often trawl through them for material, never finding anything suitable for her films. he had no interest in publishing, claiming it was just something he did to pass the time, just something he felt compelled to do.
he often chided amanda for “not thinking things through” which she thought ridiculous considering the plethora of details involved in filmmaking (cinematography, sound, editing,) that harry, as technically minded as he was, barely had a grasp on. for harry i’m debating whether or not to shoot his story through with straight minimalist prose (i.e. carver, a little beckett-but not too much), poetic/elliptical prose (i.e. “without the inherent sickness of blanchot” -don byrd) or something along the lines of a technical manual (since he is an atm technician); it depends how far out there i want to be.

tom is amanda’s second husband, a native new yorker in his early thirties who fashions himself a real estate developer and often points out how he is already a millionaire. he owns a bar in the lower east side handed down to him from his father who also owned the building, near where amanda’s corpse was found. he met amanda during her last year at film school, when she asked him if she could film her final project in his bar. taken by her and intrigued by the idea of his father’s bar showing up in a film that, who knows, might end up on tv one day, he’d agree if she went out to dinner with him. they were married in a civil ceremony a little over a year later, tom becoming her patron and often funding a great portion of her projects.
however, with his financial support came a degree of paranoia and an overwhelming desire to control her. he often accused her lying when she wasn’t, even though he had never even asked her if she was involved with anyone else when they had met, let alone if she was already married. the idea just never occurred to him but he doubted her fidelity and honesty at every turn. they often fought about the subject matter of her movies, accusing her of the same sort of promiscuous behavior some of her early work depicted. he would talk while they watched classics, offering opinions that were not only uncalled for but drove amanda completely up the wall. but he could also be kind and incredibly patient with her, particularly when she felt an overwhelming anxiety that left her powerless.
while touching upon some of their early moments together, tom’s storyline will be one of him piecing together his accusations with her absences into the lives of her other husbands. he will be wrong most of the time, as he’d often been, but will never know it. for tom, there will be a mixture of regret and betrayal, an overwhelming sense that he had done more than enough for her but it wasn’t enough competing with the feeling that he could have done more to keep her, that he was guilty in not only keeping her faithful in their marriage, but also in not preventing her death. given his possessive and controlling nature, the police believe he might have had a hand in her death.

ian is unbelievably handsome, amanda has told him time & again he has “a certain kind of quality that makes you immediately fuckable, almost impossible to resist if you weren’t so not there.” he is amanda’s first husband, having moved with her to new york when she started film school there, modeling underwear for one of the department store chains.
he has no ambition, avoids confrontation, usually stares off into the distance during heated arguments with amanda. he never initiates contact, affection or conversation. he watches the occasional football or baseball game but doesn’t root for any particular team. he doesn’t even have a preference for any specific beer, taking whatever is offered to him. since arriving in new york, he’s had multiple flings with photographers’ assistants, none of which ever amounting to a full blown affair.
his storyline will consist of these sort of scenes, starting from their first fight but jumping back and forth throughout the course of their lives. from his perspective, amanda will appear passionate and often times apparently jealous, clearly yearning for something more from him other than his constant neutrality and inertia. out of the three husbands, however, ian will be the most heart broken with amanda’s death, his reflections on her being the most poignant.