Night Film – A Tenacious Reporter’s Pursuit for Infernal Truth

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.

Have you heard about the legendary film-maker Stanislas Cordova? He has made 15 or so terrifying psychological horrors from the 1960s. More than a decade after his final film, the reverence for the director among his dedicated, obsessed fans have advanced dramatically, making them to throw secret underground screenings of his banned films. The ‘Cordovites’ also get-together through a flawlessly encrypted forum named ‘Blackboards’ to collect clues about Cordova’s fiercely enshrouded private life and to share crazy fans theories or other interesting tidbits. The film-maker’s radical philosophy of life and the indestructible darkness encircling his works has made the general public to equate his private life with the unmitigated debauchery of his movies. And, Mr. Cordova's long silence and very rare public appearances after his weird, short interview for ‘Rolling Stone’ in 1977 has only increased the speculations, regarding his enigmatic, if not ‘maniacal’ tendencies. From the late 1970s, he lives on his spooky, 300-acre compound in upstate New York, where he makes his films without ever having to leave his lavish mansion. Perhaps as a cinephile, now you might begin to wonder why you haven’t heard about the great Stanislas Cordova? The terse explanation is that he doesn’t exist – at least not in the reality.   

The first 100 pages or so in Marsha Pessl’s second novel Night Film (her first novel ‘Special Topics In Calamity Physics’ was hailed by New York Times as one of the ’10 Best Books of 2006’) does very well in establishing the eerie cult surrounding the life and films of fictional movie director Stanislas Cordova. She conjures web pages, well warranted slideshows, forum posts, police investigation reports, and similar multimedia information providers to focus and augment our attention on the mysterious identity of Cordova. It’s pretty much a gimmick (at time akin to click-bait online articles), which could be easily misconstrued as ‘post-modernist’. But this nevertheless elevates the novel’s page-turning qualities, gradually immersing us into its vast atmosphere of terror and dread. Pessl largely succeeds in this myth-making. We don’t meet Cordova directly and only hear his alleged wisdom through the idolizers, yet the dominance of this elusive, so-called ‘amoral’ director could be felt through each twists & turns. The fuzzy shots of the fictional film-maker’s profile, the tragic and bizarre details saturating his works are meticulously provided to digital-age readers in a form they are very familiar with. But, it’s important to note that Marsha Pessl isn’t using the tricky conventions to make thick commentary on pop-culture. It’s just a device to support the labyrinthine plot machinations of the 600 page novel.

Author Marsha Pessl

Although the legend of Cordova is diffused throughout the story, the protagonist is a disgraced investigative reporter Scott McGrath. The novel opens at a night in 2011 with Scott jogging around the reservoir in Central Park, New York. He spots a ghost-like young woman in a red coat. She literally moves in mysterious ways and when he tries to catch up with her, she figuratively evaporates. Few days later, Scott learns that Cordova’s only daughter, Ashley has committed suicide by jumping from top floor of vacant, dilapidated warehouse in Chinatown. A little investigation showers a fact upon McGrath: he was one of the last people to see her (the woman in redcoat). Five years back, while working on an investigative story on Cordova, Scott McGrath got a tip from an anonymous caller. The tip suggested that Cordova was abusing children, safely tucked under his heavily fortified 300-acre property (‘there’s something he does to the children’, eerily whispers the caller). Later, Scott, who had just been blessed with fatherhood, uncharacteristically slanders Cordova in an interview. He is immediately sued (agrees to $250,000 settlement) and the anonymous caller couldn’t be tracked down. Scott’s wife Cynthia leaves him and now his 5 year old daughter Samantha visits him over alternate weekends. After hearing about Ashley’s death, Scott once again becomes obsessed with Cordova. In an effort to gain back his journalistic reputation and personal finances, Scott dives headlong into the creepy, sinister universe of the madcap artistic genius.

The plot is very linear and thrillingly moves between bleak underground atmospheres of S&M night club, unnerving mansion, insane asylum, etc. The prospect of black magic curse, ghosts, haunted dolls, and Satan even though extends a bit into preposterous territory, nonetheless offers a solidly entertaining, page-turning reading experience. Pessl’s prose is littered with spellbinding flourishes, providing all the necessary words to get lost inside Scott’s perspective. But after 400 plus pages (especially from that very long, wildly adventurous chapter), I stopped taking the story seriously and prepared myself for the sequence of twists, which of course is marred by lack of psychological and narrative credibility. Marsha Pessl keeps the thrill of the chase up until the last, chilly revelations of the novel. But the supposedly ambiguous destination we reach after the extended fall down the rabbit hole isn’t as gratifying or tantalizing as I expected. The promise of a high-brow literary thriller, felt in the early set-up of the narrative, isn’t fully realized by the rhetorical ending.

Perhaps, the ineradicable flaw in Night Film, which renders it forgettable in the long-run, is its perfunctory characterization. Most of the characters, populating the novel, are written in to provide the crucial details. They mostly remain as plot-forwarding devices. Moreover, Scott’s increasingly foolhardy nature makes it difficult for us to invest any real emotional feeling to his eventual predicament. Nevertheless, the greatest creation in the novel, as I mentioned earlier, is the mixture of myth and truth spun around the life of Cordova. The fictional director seems to be an impeccably fabricated amalgamation of fickle directorial geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, John Cassavettes, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and David Lynch. But the single weakening factor of 'Cordova' story line concerns the plot details of the director’s works. While Pessl’s prose establishes Cordova as the maker of profoundly dark cinema, the general details of the plot appear to be cliched and silly. If Cordova’s temperament brings to mind those aforementioned geniuses, his story-line only brings to mind the works of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. Known as ‘Masters of Macabre’, these two film-makers’ projects would seem spectacular for horror fans, although it couldn’t be termed as deeply philosophical. These problems, though, mostly troubles you in retrospect. So you can thoroughly enjoy the mystery while reading it, and contemplate on its implausibilities & other weaknesses after the ending. It’s edgy, nightmarish but ultimately forgettable.