HE WROTE: Everything Serves A Purpose

Perhaps I should have said Princess is tentatively back in. We shall see. Everything in a book has to serve a purpose. Even better, multiple purposes. So if Princess is in the opening scene for Shane, that would, of course, mean that would not be her only appearance in the book. I can’t tell too much more because then it would give away too much of the work in progress.

Watched a very interesting movie last night. CACHE, which is in French with subtitles (in French it means hidden). That’s the extent of my French. Oui. In Special Forces a cache was something we hid to be used later. Like ammunition or weapons. It was a very precise operation. Usually a French movie means there has to be at least one scene of a man on a bicycle with a bacquet riding mournfully in circles around a fountain. There was a man on a bicycle but he did not have a bacquet. It had a brilliant idea at the core and what’s even better was it didn’t ‘explain’ things. There were scenes where you had to actually figure out what had happened. Most particularly at the end where the movie just sort of, well, ends. It’s never really pointed out to you who was doing this thing to the family that was at the core of the movie. Here’s the thing that was done to them: someone simply hid and videotaped them.

There were also scenes where you had to figure out what was going on from gestures and from visuals. For example, the wife is with a male friend in a café crying because her husband had lied to her about who he suspected was sending them these videotapes of the outside of their apartment and the house where the father grew up in. She says she has to get back to the apartment and the friend looks at his watch and says, well, not so soon, perhaps. And then it’s night and she’s back in the apartment. What do you think they were doing? No one ever shows it or says it, but then the son disappears for an entire night, telling no one where he is and the parents are frantic. Well he finally shows up the next day after spending the night at a friends and is cold to the mother. And it never occurs to either of the parents, and it is never shown or said, but don’t you think whoever was videoing the house, videoed the mother with the ‘friend’ in the café and sent the tape to the son? It’s the only thing that explains his abrupt change in behavior and what he says.

Also, there is an Eminem poster prominently displayed in the son’s room all the time. I know he’s not popular with many people but if you know anything about him, he’s literally, no pun intended, the poster child for kids and even adults who are victims of child-hood abuse. For some reason they love his music. So what does that say about the family? Again, nothing is ever made of that poster except it being displayed.

Anyway, I’m off on a tangent, but it was an extremely disturbing movie. Maybe because it was about broken people being shown they were broken and that’s what my book, CHASING THE DEAD is about in terms of character, except in CACHE, (spoiler alert) at the end, the father, simply takes two sleeping pills and goes to bed. Of course, taking the not explaining thing a step further, it can also be considered a very confusing movie. Like MEMENTO, which you either love or you hate.

Anyway. Back to Agnes. Poor Joey the Gent. Everyone’s after him. But Shane isn’t feeling too hot himself because he’s keeping a secret from Agnes. But then again, Agnes hasn’t totally leveled with Shane. And Joey is keeping the biggest secret of all. Well, maybe not. There’s someone there with a whopper. But to top it all off, none of them really knows what happened thirty years ago, the night of the Little Train Robbery. Let me look at my high speed Excel spreadsheet. Does the Don’s consigliore arrive today (today being today in the book, not today, today)? Nope, dang, he comes in tomorrow because we got a lot going on today, such as Four Wheels Thibault showing up and tonight Hit Man #1. Agnes got a lot coming at her. Back to writing.