And to

AUDIO COMMENTARY TRACK

As you can already see, everything is fucked.
I really can’t remember why
but we hadn’t slept in three days,
downing rubbing alcohol by the bottle
and falling into stuporous public sex
at skating rinks and professional wrestling matches.
And there were the strange dares:
someone had heard lethally ascetic Canadian monks
were able to cause their intestines
to erupt in horrifying geysers from their abdomens
and all of us wanted to be the first
to figure out the trick of it.
So maybe in context you’ll understand
why most of the movie is missing sound
as we come to know this painfully shy woman.
Why Samantha weeps during sex
or is emotionally unavailable
to the people who need her most—
the dullards in the inexact change lane.
That we all forgot to rig the microphones
really does challenge the audience
to stay with the story by reading lips.
Or by accurately guessing her thoughts
as she naps on the sofa under general anesthesia.
And her feelings for this man
unlike any she’s known before
with his toothless optimism and total amnesia.
If you’re able to overlook how close
we all were to massive organ failure,
you’ll see some magic. Like this shot
of a tear streaking down her cheek
and through the precipitous ravine of her cleavage.
They were real, I should add, the tears.
The producer would call from Bogotá
where he had arranged
for her children to be tutored in cages.
The shoot was hard on everyone
and the parasites didn’t help
so I tried to keep the atmosphere light.
Which was hard to do
when everyone suffered from 106 degree fevers
and clinically undiagnosed paranoia.
But we pushed through
because we cared about the story
and eventually bothered to look at the dailies.
The only scene with sound was the last.
Which seemed almost poetic.
Above the landfill and their naked bodies,
above their clothes left in hurried heaps,
a choir of gulls are sadly cawing.
To me each convulsive sob sounds like joy.