Radiance

 (Tranquillity Studios, 1959, dir. Percival Unck) 

Audio recorded for reference by Vincenza Mako, screenwriter

PERCIVAL UNCK: If you want to know about the beginnings of things, you have to talk to the dead.

I know how that sounds. The dead should do endings. Surely that’s their squat. In the space after the story, they’re kings and queens, ruling with bony hands, pulling epilogues, last acts, climaxes, pulling finality from declining action like spinsters at black wheels.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve always been aces at endings. At the Fin I’m like a ball player, balanced hips over knees, brandishing my bat, pointing to the outfield, pointing like I’ve been doing from the first word spoken, the first frame shot, at the revelation I intended to hit all along. Lean into the last scene; you can hear the whiff and the crack of my swing. If anything, I’ve always been too eager to get to the ending. I’ll throw the haunted, wild-eyed gamine from her tower too soon, slaughter a soliloquizing retinue complete with bicyclists and bears five minutes in. Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed. The right ending can’t resist a spread like that. She sidles up like she’s lived there all along, sleepy-eyed, hair a fright, asking the antihero for coffee and be quick about it, wouldn’t you? There’s a love.

But I’m rubbish at beginnings. Listen to that mess. My metaphors all rumpled about my ankles. So I talk to the dead. They’re the only ones who can see the whole story. All they’ve got is story. Look, say the ghosts, she was doomed all along because of how it began. You watched her to death. She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you. No one could have gotten out of this thing alive. Not with Acts I-V stacked against them like that. If Hamlet couldn’t swing it, what hope did she ever have?

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. But the deadest of the dead—the ancient, toga-tugging, sheep-fucking, olive-gobbling, laurel-spangled dead—they rattled on about nothing else. Gardens and clay and the Sky slinging back a nebula or two for courage then slicking back his hair to make nice with the Earth. They had it right. It’s downright dishonest to begin with anything but the Creation of the Known Universe, and a tale that ends before the destruction of all and sundry is a damnable lie. By fire? Well, that’s too obvious. And floods always look amateurish. Maybe it just winks out. Cut. Print.