Truly original art tends to defy generic categories, and Pat O’Neill’s 35-millimeter, 73-minute The Decay of Fiction (2002), which Chicago Filmmakers is presenting this Saturday night at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema, is no exception. Inarguably an experimental work, it also reeks of classic Hollywood. The credits list O’Neill as producer, director, and editor and George Lockwood as cinematographer and sound designer, but no one is credited as the screenwriter—even though the film contains as much dialogue as any commercial feature, most of it apparently original. Forty-five cast members are cited alphabetically in those same credits, with no indication of who plays the most significant roles. Eight years in the making, the film partakes equally of the past (roughly the 1920s through the 1960s) and a disquieting version of the present.
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As far as I can make out from the sketchy information available in the press book, most of the images, dialogue, and sound effects are masterful pastiches of snatches from typical Hollywood features (especially noirs and melodramas) while most of the music was lifted from old sound tracks. Most of the black-and-white characters and props seen among the hotel’s ruins are transparent, and the majority of the sounds, including the dialogue and music, are pitched at the periphery of normal perception, so that even when they connote dramatic or violent action, they seem to be on the verge of evaporating.
“The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Coconut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of various sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tile and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction once again.” [The hotel’s demolition is suggested with sound effects rather than seen over the final credits.]
An expert technician, O’Neill has worked on the special effects of such Hollywood features as Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), Superman IV (1987), and The Game (1997), so his ambivalent relationship to the film industry—and to industrialization in general—is more than just theoretical. His best-known previous feature, Water and Power (1989), used time-lapse photography and optical printing (both techniques also central to The Decay of Fiction) to analyze the way water consumption in Los Angeles has despoiled the surrounding countryside. The evanescence of human presence in relation to physical landmarks is no less a major theme of both films. As Fred Camper wrote of Water and Power in these pages, “Using time lapse to make weather changes visible, O’Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale.”
Directed by Pat O’Neill.
