Turning the Corner
On jump scares and My Best Friend's Wedding
Grayson here.
Recently, M and I encountered a weird guy in the lobby of a restaurant near Yosemite. The restaurant was in a lakeside, log-cabin-esque resort hotel. In the lobby was an assortment of chairs and an empty reception desk. The ceilings were high, lending a weird echo to the space. The guy was across the room from us, standing directly under an enormous moose head. He began by staring at me with his wide eyes and asking unprompted where we were from. With the music playing and people walking between us, it was difficult to hear him.
It seemed he was telling us about places he’d lived, how expensive this hotel was ($200 a night). Occasionally he’d say something he thought was funny, and he’d get this surprised look on his face and make a scrunched-up laugh. He seemed to act out of some uncontrollable compulsion: sometimes he’d stop and huff around the restaurant with his hands in his pockets. He was short, wearing a camo baseball hat pulled low. Things already felt a little Lynchian, but he looked sort of like the small man from Twin Peaks who talks in reverse, or maybe like Hawaiian Andy Serkis—I say Hawaiian because he kept insisting he was from Hawaii, but then his wife, sitting on the couch next to him, would shake her head. I think I heard her mutter “You weren’t even born there.” She was older than him, with silver hair, and while he talked she would close her eyes and slowly massage her forehead. When she finally spoke, it was incredibly quiet, and across the room neither of us could tell what she was saying (the man had stomped off to check on their table, only to come back saying “bull crap” to no one).
Soon we were mercifully seated, but you can guess who ended up next to us. They sat on the same side of the booth: when M looked at me, they were situated on either side of my head. “Hey Tennessee!” he would say throughout dinner, and I would turn and wave, and I’d see the wife with her head in her hands. He talked the whole time, either to other nearby people or to no one. “Please stop,” we heard the wife say. “I feel like I’m going to cry.”
On the way back, we both admitted that the dinner had made us feel on edge. I think it was especially anxiety-inducing having been out there in the mountains, where things feel suffocated by the night. Even the light seems weaker—I felt it driving back to our Airbnb, the headlights briefly lunging ahead before hitting a wall of darkness.
Then, the next night, I heard a noise outside the bathroom. Our place was a yurt in the woods, and the bathroom was in a separate unit connected by a porch. We were near Yosemite, so of course my first thought was BEAR. The noise was a sort of slow scraping, heavy enough to rule out the squirrels. I stayed still for a while, listening, and when it stopped I opened the door and made a break for the yurt. I warned M about the noise, then for some reason grabbed a flashlight, as if I were to actually find a bear rummaging around in the gravel behind the bathroom, I could do something about it. I went back outside.
I was thinking of a few things as I crept around the corner of the bathroom. One: the documentary I watched last year, in which a man and his girlfriend get mauled by bears. Two: that the creepy guy had told us that he was also going to Yosemite, and the whole time we’d been inside the park that morning I’d been half expecting him to appear there in the woods with his exhausted wife—briefly I imagined I might find him behind the bathroom, his big eyes caught in my flashlight. Three: the diner scene in Mulholland Drive, where a man visits the place that has been in his nightmares. More specifically, he wants to know if there’s a bad man waiting for him behind a diner. And when he does turn that corner and the bad man is indeed there, it’s both the most obvious and terrifying thing in the world.
More recently, M and I watched My Best Friend’s Wedding and BOY do I have thoughts on this movie. I think it’s kind of a masterpiece. Basically, Julia Roberts is informed that her long-time bff (and one-time lover) is getting married in a matter of days. Upon hearing this, she realizes she is head over heels for this guy, and she needs to stop the wedding by any means necessary. Thing is, his fiancé is kind and charming, and she and the bff are madly in love (their relationship is a little crazy—there’s a weird age gap and he’s making her drop out of college to follow him around on his sports writing career). Julia Roberts is increasingly scheming and downright mean, and in time you realize that she’s the villain.
The movie works on so many levels and I could praise so much about it—the surprisingly stunning visuals, Julia Roberts’ performance, the way it just picks up rom-com tropes and plays with them before quickly tossing them out, the way it sort of want to be a tongue-in-cheek musical but never full commits, the unexpectedly frequent weirdness of it (opening credits musical number, someone sucking a ring off of a finger, surprising orchestral score). But what I love most is that halfway through the movie, they tell you how it’s going to end. Julia asks her other friend, who has been briefly posing as her fiancé, what will happen when she tells the bff that she loves him. Her friend says that he’s not going to choose her—that she’s going to lose.
And lose she does, in spectacular fashion. It’s not surprising, and why should it be? We were told exactly what was going to happen. I find this honesty from a movie immensely satisfying. It’s the reverse of every action movie that has a supposedly all-powerful villain who is beaten with relative ease, leaving you with a feeling of being lied to. And it’s not just the honesty, but the immense satisfaction and equal terror that comes with seeing a prediction come true. It’s like in Dune when Paul sees the atrocities that will happen as a result of his actions and he does them anyway, and then there come the atrocities. Or like in that Mulholland Drive diner scene, which plays out exactly how the man describes and yet scares the dreamer man so badly that he presumably dies. I guess that’s why I went around that corner in the night with my flashlight—out of a protective drive, sure, but also to see my imagined bear realized. I’d seen this film before.
I was spared; there was nothing but gravel around the corner. Good thing, too, because if I had indeed found a bear (or the creepy guy) I probably would have leapt out of my skin. I mean, I run into people coming out of my building’s elevator all the time, and yet I still jump a little whenever someone’s behind the door.
The next morning, a family of rotund wild turkeys came down the hill past our yurt. They were gobbling perfectly. I decided that it was one of them that was making that noise in the night. Otherwise, there would be no satisfaction—only an unfulfilled promise of terror.
Et Cetera
There has been an absurd amount of new music coming out this year! And so much more to come!! So far the Men I Trust album is my frontrunner. It’s wonderful. They have perfected the easy listening experience. M is ecstatic about the new Lucy Dacus album, and I’m on the fence about the new Japanese Breakfast. Very much looking forward to the Black Country, New Road return as well (you know me). Btw I just found out about Cameron Winter a couple months ago and ohhhh man did Heavy Metal have me in a headlock. So strange and often very moving.