The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

Model Airplanes

You don’t need a set of Pactra enamels, or airbrush equipment, or jewelers’ files; not forceps or a pin vise; you don’t need to know the variations in camouflage adopted by the F-5E Tiger II 527th Aggressor Squadron at Alconbury from 1976 through 1988, or know, indeed, anything at all about war or history or military hardware; you don’t need to harbor angry thoughts toward enemies abroad or at work. But a simple tube of glue, at the very least, might seem necessary for any appreciation of the plastic model-airplane kit. And some minimal grade-school exposure to glue, or “cement,” as the technical prefer to call it, is an important early step toward the attainment of later, simpler, unpolymerized pleasures. Certainly glue, especially during those long summer afternoons in the late sixties and early seventies, before oil of mustard was added to the recipe to discourage any direct attempts at mood alteration, was lovely stuff. When you tweaked off the dried wastrel from an earlier session and applied a gentle pressure to the Testor’s tube, a brand-new Steuben-grade art-blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machined metal tip, looking, with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled, vodkal interior purity, like a self-contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturization of the surrounding room, and the artist’s rendering on the Monogram box top, and the half-built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it; and as the smell of this pellucid solvent, suggestive of impossible Mach numbers and upper atmospheres and limitless congressional funding, drove away any incompatible carbon-based signals of hunger or human frailty, you felt as if your head had somehow gained admission to and submerged itself within that glowing globule of formalism and fine-motor skills. When you held a pair of halved components tightly together for ten minutes, glaring at them, willing the tiny, glue-dolloped pins to turn to toffee and join forever their complementary sockets, you weren’t worried by, you even welcomed, the bead that often reemerged along the seam as evidence of the static force of your grip, and you waved the subassembly around to speed its drying, in this way separately “flying” each wheel or pitot tube or stabilator, in order to extract its unique contribution to overall airworthiness, before you united it with the Spartan society of the fuselage. Glue was the jet fuel of 1:72 scale — inflammable, icy, dangerous. Its end wasn’t speed itself, but the appreciation of speed — an idea that needed to be pieced together slowly, over hours of chair-bound, stiff-necked application, until vibration and afterburners and the sense of being almost out of control all rotated and mapped themselves onto an alternative imaginary dimension, where they were represented by an out-of-focus desert of clean newsprint, by the weightless reflection of a watch crystal across a high wall, and by a large whitish thumbprint permanently imprinted on green plastic.

Yes, glue was good and helpful in its place, but we must now put it aside. For who has the kind of time it takes to build plastic models? Eight years ago, during a time of professional disappointment, I bought an MPC ’57 Chevy — A GREAT GASSER WITH A FLIP-UP FRONT END! read the box copy — with the idea that in putting it together I would pull myself together, since I was a ’57, too. The kit cost about as much as a paperback, and would have required roughly the same number of hours to finish, but it would have bypassed the verbal lobe completely, a promise not all paperbacks can truthfully make. Yet it sits before me now, emboxed, unbuilt. For some years I justified my failure on the grounds that I had never liked building model cars as much as building model airplanes (the discount drugstore had only had model cars for sale that impulsive afternoon) — but in the past several weeks I have bought Monogram’s USAF F-101B Voodoo and Soviet MiG-29 Fulcrum (both made in the USA), Revell’s F-15A Eagle and Israeli F-21 Kfir (both made in Japan), Revell’s Soviet Sukhoi-27 Flanker (made in Korea), Revell’s B-2 Stealth Advanced Technology Bomber (made in the USA), DML’s combined B-2 and F-117A Stealth kits (made in Hong Kong), Hasegawa’s Kfir C2 and F-14A Atlantic Fleet Squadrons and MiG-29 Fulcrum (all three made in Japan), AMT’s F-14A Tomcat (made in Italy), Lindberg’s X3 Stiletto (made in USA), and Testor’s Tomcat and MiG-29 (Italy and Japan, respectively), plus a few others—$211 worth of intercontinental plastic from three retail stores — and though I have very much enjoyed opening the boxes, though I have even made Canon copies that record exactly how each box’s contents looked when I first lifted its top, I have built none of these aircraft. But now at least I know why.

The reason is simply that, despite the compensating attractions of glue, the activity of model construction goes to its final rest in one’s memory as a long, gradual disappointment. You think deludedly that you want to own the finished thing, joined, puttied, painted, decaled, and set under glass in a diorama made of bits of hot-mounted sponge and distressed Kleenex. But what you really want is to own, say, the Monogram MiG-29 kit at the apex of its visual complexity, where it can stimulate every shock and strut of your craftsmanly ambition, before it has been harmed by the X-acto knife and pieces of things have been bonded in permanent darkness within other things; you want it to be yours when both lateral aspects of each three-dimensional component, numbered for quick reference, hang symmetrically and simultaneously available to the eye in an arrangement of rectilinear runners and fragile jointure as fully intricate and beautiful as the immense wrought-iron gates that protect the fabled treasures in the Armorer’s Chamber of the Kremlin.

Straight from the store, these kits are museums: Kremlins and Smithsonians of the exploded view, wherein you may fully and rapturously attend to a single airplane, which exists planarly, neatly espaliered, arranged not by aerodynamic or military function, but by the need for an orderly flow of hot plastic through the polished cloisters of the mold in which it was formed — the largest and tiniest pieces nearest the sprue, or point of injection, the middle-sized pieces farther away, where they will successfully fill with a lesser fluid impulse. Nothing is hidden on these architectures; all the complex curves of wings and tailpieces are there, but everything is “straightened up,” as a hotel maid rationalizes the top of a bedside table simply by reorienting the mess at right angles, throwing nothing away; one gazes and thinks less of air-to-air combat than of those alluring ads for closet organizers or for garment bags fitted with specialized pockets. A pilot, adroitly sliced in two, headless, awaits recomposition in one crowded narthex. The elegant landing gear, twice as impressive as the real thing, is on view in the south transept. Some of the pieces don’t even offer up their final disposition at first glance: the truth — that they are relatively unconvincing bits of cockpit decor, or segments of a petty canard — would only cause unhappiness were you actually to engage with the kit and prove its necessary unfaithfulness to the real fighter. “It’s real because it’s Revell” was the manufacturer’s tag in the years I was building them; but the realism, I now realize, delights most piercingly when it is taken on faith.

The box, then, is the basilica of the unbuilt. You never quite rid yourself of the illusion that you will want to get to work on it as soon as you find a suitable chunk of time. Meanwhile you are content to wander these galleries of imaginary hobbyistic space with the indefinitely postponed intention of deacquisitioning their contents and leaving their mounts as raw and wanting as stems plucked free of after-dinner grapes. The kit is informationally richer than the completed plane. Yet richer still is the mold from which the kit limply falls, pushed out from the hand-finished, water-cooled steel cavities by a forest of long ejector pins. From this vantage, the model kit becomes the middle term, the precious domestic intermediary between the technology of injection molding and the technology of air defense. And if the injection-molding presses, the sophisticated Van Dorns or the older Cincinnati Milacrons at the Revell/Monogram factory in Morton Grove, Illinois — machines the size of locomotives, capable of animating a few hot cupfuls of viscous gray plastic into palmate arrangements of engine cowlings and smooth leading edges and external “stores” (that is, bombs and missiles), all overgrown with a fioritura of rivet heads, every half minute or so — if these massive presses had cockpits, the model enthusiast would perhaps more appropriately recline here, enthroned in the pacific din of high-volume toy manufacturing, rather than in the Kfir’s or Voodoo’s or Tomcat’s ejector seat. Fighter planes are fussy and expensive to maintain, but with oil and minimal tinkering, injection-molding machines will, in the words of Dan Burden, Revell/Monogram’s plant manager, “just run forever.” The aim of the Pratt & Whitney jet engine is to generate thrust with a spinning turbine; the aim of the Van Dorn is to move plastic along a rotating horizontal screw and force it to submit to prearranged detail with a minimum of flashing. The outcome of the Pratt & Whitney is turbulent exhaust and scattered applause at air shows; the outcome of the dutiful tonnage of the Cincinnati Milacron is a better preadolescent brain. (Hasegawa, the high-end Japanese manufacturer, includes, in a kit entirely devoted to U.S. guided bombs and rocket launchers, this educational word to parents: “It is reported that building plastic-model kits improves a child’s capability in understanding and in patience. Moving fingers helps his brain grow faster.”) The aerobatic F-15A Eagle can exceed the speed of sound in a vertical climb (at least that’s what Revell’s instruction sheet claims); the arobotic Cincinnati Milacron sits immovably anchored to a rubber shock-pad in a hangar full of its hulking, squirting confreres, slowly depreciating, ministered to by taciturn women who, but for their safety glasses, might have been milkmaids in another life. The plastic model you buy at the store is poised between these two rival poles of might, military-industrial and civilian-industrial. Its alliances are unsettled; the cozy homage it pays to lethal force is part of its attraction.

And now, with this mention of homage, we arrive, full of hushed deference, before the large blue box that holds the Stealth B-2 Bomber. Revell’s version ($12.99 at Toys R Us) is molded, quite properly, in black plastic, and comes shrouded in a clear sack with a prominent warning in French and English about the danger of suffocation. The full-scale Stealth is beautiful from a distance, although in a worrisomely Transylvanian sort of way. It is reportedly the result of astounding advances in computer-aided design and manufacturing processes. But unfortunately its continuous curves and unmitigated blackness do not seem to make for a satisfying scale model. Perhaps this is because the real Stealth, so completely the result of composite-molding machinery, itself too closely approximates the fluent, impressionable greatness of molded styrene. It is a model, and therefore a model of it can’t show off the extraordinary talent plastic has for the mimicry of other materials and textures. The kit-makers can’t be held responsible for the fact that the B-2 is so maddeningly smooth, that its featurelessness soaks up the eager radar of the visual sense and sends little back. The Cold War has moved from the upper atmosphere of spy photography to the wind tunnel, and aerodynamic drag has effectively replaced the Soviet Union as the infinitely resourceful enemy. But drag, unwelcome though it is to the airplane designer, is everything to the plastic-model enthusiast, because drag means rivets, knobs, holes, wires, hinges, visible missiles, sensors, gun blisters — all those encrustations that inspire study, and make imitation (in all-time best-selling models like the Monogram Mustang P-51 fighter) difficult enough to be worthwhile. And this consideration, oddly enough, may constitute a compelling argument against the B-2 program: the Bomber may represent an act of industrial will more impressive than anything since the Second World War; it may indeed harbor genius and patents and spin-off potential in every undulant inch; but it doesn’t at this moment look as if it will ever fill the demanding hobbyist with delight when he opens the box. And the fulfillment of that single recreational requirement, after all, given the inevitable shift away from vengeance and toward ornament that is history’s principal sequel, is the B-2’s only long-term reason for being.

But if, on the other hand, Revell/Monogram were to offer a 1:48 model of the automated tape-lamination machine that Northrop designed to manufacture the composite materials that are molded into its plane, I would sit up very quickly. There is a kit I would buy and build. And now a regressive vision rises up before me — a vision of a whole Revell/Monogram “Factory Floor” series, marketed along the lines of the “Yeager Super Fighters” series, with Eli Whitney giving the thumbs-up sign on the box in place of the craggy test pilot: authentic scale replicas of great production-lines from new and mature industries around the world. The masterpiece of this urgently needed set of kits, the one that would exact an unprecedented level of artistry from the talented mold-makers in Morton Grove — who follow, incidentally, a set of milestones similar to major wedding anniversaries, from paper drawings, through overscale basswood forms (carved and sanded with Ruskinian care and thrown out once their shape has been captured in epoxy), to the final jubilee of steel molds, engraved and polished by adepts in Windsor, Canada, or in Hong Kong (where the machinists, according to one mold-layout engineer I talked to, have an especially “soft touch” with airplane likenesses) — the final masterpiece of the series would have to be a superbly detailed, vintage 1979 Cincinnati Milacron injection press, complete with warning decals, rotating screw, and a fully removable mold block ready to produce two MiG-29s a minute around the clock. When production of the toy commenced, and the real twelve-ton machine began to sigh and kick onto its conveyor belt a model of itself — in this way manufacturing not another unbuilt airplane but the unbuilt tool responsible for all unbuilt airplanes — we would be witnesses to one of the greatest moments in the Age of Plastic. And by inciting later generations of avid modelers to acknowledge the intellectual satisfactions of factory engineering early enough for any potential zealotry in that direction to take permanent hold, we might also find that in passing we had done something small but helpful toward reversing the industrial collapse of the United States.

Until this great day comes, however, we must be content to collect the airplane kits themselves, shaking them tentatively, making copies of their contents in the box, tactfully inspecting their rougher undersides, browsing their multilingual directions, and then piling them somewhere safe, unglued.

(1989)

The Projector

The finest moment in The Blob (1958) occurs in a smalltown movie theater, during a showing of something called Daughter of Horror. While the pre-McLuhanite projectionist reads his hardcover book, the Blob — a giant protean douche-bag — begins to urge its heat-seeking toxic viscosity through ten tiny slits in an air vent. Past the turning movie reel, we watch the doomed projectionist glance out the viewport at the screen, preparing for a “changeover”—an uninterrupted switch from the running projector, whose twenty-minute reel is almost over, to the second, idle one, which is all threaded and ready to roll. He senses something at his back; he turns; he gives the flume of coalesced protoplasm a level look — then it gets him. Now unattended, the first projector plays past the cue for the changeover and runs out of film. The disgruntled audience looks around and spots the Blob (in an image that must have inspired the development of the Play-Doh Fun Factory) extruding itself in triumph from all four of the little windows — two projector ports and two viewports — in the theater’s rear wall.

Chuck Russell’s remake of The Blob (1988) brings every detail, or almost every detail, of the first film neatly up to date. The movie-within-a-movie is now entitled Garden Tool Massacre. “Isn’t it awfully late to be trimming the hedges?” a camp counselor mutters while making out with his girlfriend, having noticed a masked stranger at work on the shrubbery after dark. “Wait a minute,” he then says, suspicions aroused. “Hockey season ended months ago.” Cut to the booth, where “Hobbs,” the bored projectionist (whose life will indeed prove to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”), his head again seen past a turning reel of film, reads a magazine and fiddles left-handedly with a yo-yo. The second-generation Blob, far peppier and more enterprising than its forebear, pukes its way briskly up the air-conditioning duct and plasters the unhappy Hobbs to the ceiling. Moments later, the manager, looking up, discovers his colleague, a Ralph Steadman grimace on his face, half consumed in an agony of Handi-Wrap and dyed cornstarch, the yo-yo still rising and falling from his twitching finger.

Why the addition of the yo-yo? the student of film technology may wonder. Is it merely a gratuitous prop, or does it tell us something? I suspect that the yo-yo is a reference to the classical principle of the movie reel, which repeatedly rewinds and relinquishes its length of film. The reason Mr. Russell had the iconography of the movie reel very much on his mind in shooting this scene, I think, is that, despite all his diligent updating of cultural references, and despite the elaborate verisimilitude of the movie’s gruesomeness, he was not quite able to bring himself to reveal to us the reality of modern theatrical-movie projection. For the terrifying reality is that film is no longer projected from reels.

Film is projected from platters. The platter system (Fig. 1), first invented by a German projectionist, Willie Burth, and perfected by Norelco, in the Netherlands, about twenty years ago, works this way: The film arrives from the distributor on five or six reels in an octagonal steel suitcase. The projectionist splices the film from these reels together, winding it in one big spiral onto one of (typically) three horizontal circular steel disks, each roughly four feet in diameter. When the projectionist wants to set up a show, he pulls the beginning of the film from the middle of the platter, threads it through the platter’s central “brain” (its lumpily massed rollers look somewhat cerebral), thence around a few guide rollers screwed into the wall or the ceiling, and loads it into the sprockets of the projector. After it passes through the “gate” (where it is actually projected), the film usually travels through the sound head (where a light reads the optical soundtrack), loops around several more guide rollers, and ends up being wound in another huge spiral on one of the other horizontal platters. Because the film leaves from the middle of the platter, instead of the outside, rewinding between shows, reel by reel, is no longer necessary. And each theater needs only one projector per screen, rather than the traditional tag-team alternating two.

Fig. 1. On the top platter (1) film unfurls from the inside out, and winds up on the middle platter (2). The lowest platter (3) is a spare, used for a second feature. The canted console (4), containing the xenon lamphouse and sound equipment, aims the image from the projector (5) through the glass projector port (6), and onto the screen. In the soundhead (7), a solar cell interprets the soundtrack. The projectionist keeps an eye on image quality through the viewport (8).

There are a few revival houses in Los Angeles and New York that continue to show films on two projectors from reels, but the vast majority of the country’s theaters — art houses and mall-plexes alike — currently employ the platter system, and have for the past decade. Yet of the projector-movies from this period that I have seen (movies that include a moment or two in a contemporary projection booth, I mean), not one — not Chuck Russell’s Blob or Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984: gremlins invade theater and play Reel 4 of Snow White), or Night of the Comet (1984: couple spend night in steel-firewalled projection booth and escape being turned into red dust or killer maniacs by comet), not Susan Seidelman’s wonderful Desperately Seeking Susan (1985: we’ll get to this one later) or Gas, Food, Lodging (1992: girl falls for Chicano projectionist) — dares give us a glimpse of a turning platter. I was sure, having read a description (in Carol J. Clover’s thoughtful book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film) of a despicable Italian zombie movie called Demons (1985), that, because its action — fountains of pus and helicopter-blade disembowelings — is set within a fully automated and (of course) transcendently evil movie theater, with an unmanned projection booth, and because the second-largest manufacturer of movie projectors in the world happens to be Milan’s Cinemeccanica, that at least here, in this admittedly unsavory setting, we would be shown something approaching the technical truth about movie projection. But no: although the demonic equipment blinks with a few more lights than usual, it is fitted with the familiar pairs of reels up front.

These lapses of realism probably have more to do with iconographic inertia than with any sort of conspiracy or coverup on the part of movie people. It isn’t that “they” don’t want us to know that the friendly century-old reel of celluloid, the reel that has fueled a million puns and that more than any other image means movies to us, has been superseded by a separate triple-tiered mechanism that, while full of visual interest, and quite beautiful in its indolent, wedding-cake-on-display sort of way, is less intuitively comprehensible than its predecessor. Hollywood producers don’t care whether we are aware that the platter system reduced the participatory role of the projectionist and helped make the multiplex theater financially attractive. (The eighteen-screen Cineplex Odeon in Los Angeles, for example, requires only two projectionists at any one time, and the twenty-six-screen complex in Brussels is comfortably tended by eight.) Nor do they care whether or not we know that platter hardware is, according to some critics, rougher on a movie print than reel-to-reel projection was.

“The platter is death to film,” Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak, the senior curator of films at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, told me. A print now must twist a hundred and eighty degrees on its axis as it completes the large open-air loop that leads from the feed platter through the projector to the takeup platter; this subjects it, Horak says, to a kind of helical stress that film stock has not previously had to withstand. He has been finding “strange stretch marks that aren’t vertical, as you might expect, but horizontal” on platter-fed films. And the platter system, he says, allows for unattended operation: if a hardy chunk of filth gets caught in the gate of the projector, it can scratch the film for hundreds of feet unremedied. Horak also mentions the lost-frame problem: every time a projectionist “builds” a feature on a platter, he must cut the leaders off each component reel and splice the ends in place; then, when the film is “broken down” at the end of its run, those splices are cut and the leaders reattached for shipping. In the process, each reel loses at least a frame of film. The more theaters a film visits, the shorter it gets.

Dick Twichell — a wise and careful projectionist at a twelve-screen Loew’s Theatre complex in greater Rochester, not far from Horak’s archival collection — admits that ambient dirt can cause serious trouble now. “Static electricity becomes more of a problem, because the film is out in the open air and attracts dust,” he says. The guide rollers, often made of plastic rather than metal, contribute to, rather than dissipate, static. And when a plex theater does something called “interlocking”—the simultaneous running of a single print through two or even three separate projectors, aimed at different screens — the film can travel hundreds of feet over guide rollers, paying out along the ceiling and returning low, inches from the floor, drawing dust along the way.

On the other hand, Twichell disagrees that the round trip to and from a platter physically overstresses a print. “If that were true, the splices would come apart, and they almost never do,” he says. In fact, Twichell, like many in the film industry, is of the opinion that platter hardware is far gentler on prints than reels were. A takeup reel had a primitive clutch: it pulled the film forcibly off the teeth of the projector’s lower sprocket, wearing out its perforations: a print would last perhaps three hundred runs, certainly no more than seven hundred, before becoming flimsy and easily torn. Now, on platters, a print can run almost indefinitely without sustaining that sort of mechanical damage. (There is a platter disaster known as a “brain-wrap,” but it is relatively rare.) Disney routinely gets ten or twenty thousand showings from a single print in its theme parks; often the dyes in the emulsion fade before the film succumbs.

Constant rewinding, which platters eliminate, was itself a major source of harm. “Fully nine-tenths of the damage to film comes from the process known as ‘pulling down’ in rewinding,” says the 1912 Motion Picture Handbook. The rainmarks, as they are called, that distance us from an old Buster Keaton picture, say, were probably made while it was being rewound, not while it was being cranked through the projector. Projectionists were traditionally tinkerers, techies, taciturn isolates with dirty fingernails; of necessity they worked (and still do work, some of them) surrounded by grease pots, oilcans, dirty rags, swapped-out components, and (before xenon bulbs came in, in the sixties) by the stubs of spent carbons from the carbon-arc lamps, each of which lasted no more than half an hour. Chuck McCann, who plausibly plays the hefty, chain-smoking hero of a 1970 film called The Projectionist (which is a sort of remake of the 1924 Buster Keaton movie Sherlock, Junior: the one about a projectionist who, dozing off on a stool by one of his machines, dreams that he has entered the film that he is showing), gets angry at Rodney Dangerfield (the manager) and slams a reel of film onto the rewinder, cranking hard and maintaining tension by resting his palm on the reel. The more brute film handling — rewinding, threading, splicing — that the typical projectionist was forced to do, the more beat-up the film became.

The Projectionist is filled with fun snippets from old movies, as is Cinema Paradiso (1989), a horribly sentimental Italian creation that is nonetheless accurate in portraying the local projectionist, rather than any director or studio head, as the person with the final cut. Cinema Paradiso’s previewing priest rings a bell anytime people kiss onscreen, and the projectionist dutifully marks the moment in the reel with a strip of paper so that he can remove the kiss later. In truth, though, projectionists, at least in the United States, were more likely to be furtive editors and clip-collectors on their own (as the creators of The Projectionist seemingly were) than on behalf of local censors: they would simply cut out a few feet, or a frame or two, of an image or a sequence they liked. Commonly, they collected “favorite movie stars, and especially scenes or shots that had pieces of female anatomy in them,” Horak told me; the Eastman House now owns some of these collections. One projectionist told me that if you cut two frames from a scene where a camera is dollied sidewise, and you then view these frames through a stereoscope, you can simulate 3-D. After years in the projection business, this man has lost all interest in watching movies, and he has canceled HBO and Cinemax, but he continues to accumulate 3-D frames. He cuts them out, he hastened to say, only if they appear in a trailer, or at the front or back of a reel, where frames are meant to be lost anyway. Other projectionists may be less ethical. It could well be that hands-off platter automation helps projectionists resist the powerful temptation to keep souvenirs from the films that pass through their theaters.

Even with automation, though, there is a fair amount of under-the-hood maintenance connected with tending a projector. Early in The Inner Circle (1991), Tom Hulce, who plays Stalin’s projectionist, plucks something from his shirt pocket.

“What’s that you’re poking in the projector?” asks the alarmed K.G.B. official.

“Toothbrush,” Hulce says. “Very convenient for cleaning. I always carry one with me.” The K.G.B. man studies it, sniffs it. “The old projectionist never had anything like that,” he says, impressed.

Recently, after the last show of the night of The Remains of the Day, I watched Stephan Shelley, senior projectionist at the Grand Lake Theatre, in Oakland, California, clean the vitals of one of his eight projectors with a pale-blue Colgate toothbrush. (“A clean, used toothbrush is ideal,” advises the user’s manual for the current Century MSC-TA 35-mm. projector with self-turning lens turret.) Shelley greases the rods and gears of his Century projectors every morning; he uses rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips on the equipment daily as well; and he keeps a vigilant eye on the level of the oil bath in the all-important intermittent movement. (Seventy-millimeter film, he says, which has a magnetic rather than an optical soundtrack, leaves a projector especially dirty, because ferrous particles from the magnetic strip come off in the machine.) Fully cross-trained, he also fixes popcorn poppers when they break. There are occasional reports of projectionists less knowledgeable than Shelley who, having run out of projector oil, resort in desperation to pouring popcorn butter in the machines to keep them from freezing up. This practice voids the warranty, however.

Besides platters, the other notable recent development in projectorware is the aforementioned xenon bulb, a two-thousand-watt, foot-long, thousand-dollar item that illuminates a film by sending eighty amperes of direct current through a quartz envelope containing ten atmospheres of excitable xenon. It makes a B-movie sort of zap when it comes on. Through a tiny green portal in the lamphouse, you can peer in on it and watch it radiating away, cooled by indefatigable fans. It, too, caused a flutter of dissent when first introduced: charged xenon was said to produce a noticeably harsher, bluer light than the glowing carbon tips of the arc lamp did. Also, bulbs occasionally “fail violently” (i.e., explode), damaging the focusing mirror in the lamphouse. But the arc lamp gave off toxic fumes, and it was moody: movies were especially luminous on windy days, when the exhaust chimneys drew better and the carbons consequently burned brighter. Objections to xenon have pretty much died down; the only legitimate gripe the moviegoer can make now is that when a bulb fails, even nonviolently (this usually happens after about two thousand hours of service), it takes a while to alert someone in the theater and get the projector stopped, and, since platters can’t be reversed, the audience will miss the stretch of the movie that ran with sound and no picture.

We now know more of the projector’s earliest history, thanks to Christopher Rawlence’s recent book The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures. It was the movie projector, not the movie camera, that gave early visionaries trouble, since the projector must hold each frame still longer, and must snap to the next frame faster, than a camera does when it exposes film. The original invention, defined as an affair of toothed sprockets that engage with a flexible perforated band carrying sequential images, probably ought to be attributed to Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1841–1890?), a ceramicist and enameler who worked in Leeds. Le Prince filed the relevant patent in 1886 but disappeared several years later, days before he was to leave for the United States with a crated demo model of his epochal “deliverer.” That Thomas Edison’s lawyers had him killed, Rawlence suggests, is unclear.

Edison, tireless and shrewd in his appropriation of other people’s work, unsurprisingly claimed sole authorship of the “Vitascope,” but he and his projector-development team had done little more than slap the Wizard’s name on a machine actually built by Thomas Armat, a Washington inventor, which incorporated principles conceived by Le Prince. Armat’s historic hand was working the crank when, on April 23, 1896, the screen at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, on West Thirty-fourth Street, wowed journalists with the “Perfect Reproduction of Noted Feminine Figures and Their Every Movement.”

Early projectionists in the wake of Armat were inventors and repairmen, but they were also performers, interpreting the emotional tone of a film by varying the film speed. “The really high-class operator, who produces high-class work on the screen, must and will vary his speed to suit the subject being projected,” F. H. Richardson’s 1912 textbook advised. For example:

[A]s a rule solemn scenes will be improved if the machine turns slowly. Take, for instance … the Pathé Passion Play; probably the Bible patriarchs in real life actually moved as fast as anyone else. They may have, upon occasion, even run. Nevertheless rapid action does not suit our preconceived notions of such things. I have often seen the Pathé Passion Play run at such enormous speed that the characters were jumping around the screen like a lot of school boys. Such an exhibition was disgusting to the audience and offensive to those of deeply religious inclination and who revere those characters.

Even after the electric motor eased the physical labor of the projectionist, silent film studios often furnished cue sheets along with their prints, which itemized the changes in speed that, like tempo markings on a piano score, were an important part of the experience of films such as The Birth of a Nation. One of the reasons silent movies can seem so ridiculous now (in addition to the fact that some of them are ridiculous, of course) is that they are frequently presented at the fixed, twenty-four-frames-per-second rate adopted for equipment in the late 1920s, in conjunction with the optical soundtrack (the ear can’t tolerate changes in speed the way the eye can), rather than at variable rates more in the vicinity of sixteen frames a second, as was conventional until then.

But despite these momentous changes — the stabilization of film speed; sound; Technicolor; the replacement of nitrate-based film with fire-retardant acetate; xenon bulbs; platterization — the really remarkable thing about the evolution of the projector over the past century is how similar in motive essentials a 1994 Simplex machine is to the original Armat/Le Prince design. Film still moves on sprockets with sixteen teeth, and the crucial “intermittent” sprocket — the one that actually stops and starts the film — is still powered, as it was at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, by a lovely piece of precision machinery called the Geneva movement, which was first developed by Swiss watchmakers to prevent springs from being overwound. The Geneva movement has two main pieces: a Maltese cross (or star, or starwheel) and a more pedestrian cam, both of which splash around half submerged in oil. The pin on the steadily turning cam slips into the slot in the Maltese cross and forces it to rotate a quarter of a turn and then stop dead, immobilized by the cam’s circular edge. When the star is stopped, a single immobile image floods the theater screen for a few hundredths of a second; when it turns, the film advances under cover of shuttered darkness. The moviegoer’s brain, hoodwinked by this succession of still lives, obligingly infers motion.

“You know what a Maltese cross is?” an itinerant projector-repairman with questionable toilet habits asks an incompetent projectionist near the end of Wim Wenders’ mammoth film-fleuve, Kings of the Road. The projectionist takes a guess: Some kind of drink? The repairman shakes his head sadly and tries to explain it to him. “Without this little thing, there’d be no film industry!” he says. The projectionist is unimpressed, and (because Kings of the Road is a semi-comprehensible art movie) he casually inhales the flame from a cigarette lighter to close out the scene. But the workings of the true star system, though they may take a moment to grasp (Fig. 2), repay meditation: seldom has a mechanism so simple, so unexpectedly heraldic, persisted without modification at the center of a ruthless business that has otherwise undergone continuous technical, artistic, and financial upheavals.

The Simplex projector, which many hold to be the finest, is built in Omaha by a company called Ballantyne, which also makes theatrical spotlights and high-tech chicken cookers. The Maltese cross within the Simplex projector, however, is manufactured in Glendale Heights, Illinois, the work of a privately held company called La Vezzi Precision Incorporated, run by fifty-one-year-old Al La Vezzi. Al La Vezzi’s grandfather, Edward La Vezzi, got his start, during the First World War, by milling the worn teeth off projector sprockets and sweating new brass ones on. Now, in a sort of benevolent monopoly, La Vezzi’s company makes sprockets and intermittent movements for Simplex, Century, and Ballantyne projectors (all three brands are co-owned, and based in Omaha), and also for several companies in Europe and Asia, and for Christie projectors made in Cypress, California. For Christie, La Vezzi developed a sealed, belt-driven intermittent movement, called the Ultramittent, that never needs oiling. La Vezzi Precision is also responsible for the legendary VKF sprocket — the Very Kind to Film sprocket, that is — whose teeth are smoothed in meaningful ways by computer-controlled four-axis machining centers. The manufacture of the VKF sprocket is a “no-brainer,” however, according to Mr. La Vezzi, compared to making the Maltese cross, where serious flaws are measured in millionths of an inch. “The slot of a star has to be perfect,” he says, pronouncing “perfect” with inspiring plosiveness.

Will there always be intermittent sprockets, and the projectors they serve, at work in the world? Will later generations of movie watchers know how similar a projector sounds to an idling VW Beetle? Will they, when viewing that superb early scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, realize that, though Chaplin is ostensibly dragged down into the bowels of a huge “Electro Steel Corp.” machine, he is really miming a piece of flexible film and threading himself through the sprockets of a movie projector? I’ve watched quite a few projector-movies recently (including one that I haven’t been able to splice in anywhere here, called The Smallest Show on Earth, in which Peter Sellers plays an old projectionist who disrupts a Western when he gets drunk in the booth), but I watched every one of them on videotape. I paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, played, and paused again so much in studying the last scene of Desperately Seeking Susan, for instance (Aidan Quinn kisses Rosanna Arquette against a Simplex projector playing a sci-fi movie about mutant attackers — Rosanna’s back arrests the winged chariot of the movie reel and the film frame melts on the screen), that the black plastic housing of the rented video gave off an unusually strong and pleasing smell of miniature VCR servomotors and hot printed-circuit boards when I at last, having subjected the lovers’ frame-melting embrace to a level of scrutiny it was never meant to bear, ejected it.

Fig. 2. The cam turns (1) until the pin engages the Maltese cross (2), giving it a quarter turn and pulling the film down one frame (3). At (4), the pin releases the cross.

But that single 35-mm. rectangle of color film contains, it is estimated, the equivalent of forty megabytes of digital information: forty megabytes, the contents of an entire small hard disk, in every frame of a movie. Even if one assumes all sorts of clever data compression, it is difficult to imagine digital storage systems matching the Van Eyckian resolution of the chemical grains on a strip of 35- or 70-mm. movie film anytime soon. Projectors, and the durably whirling Maltese crosses inside them, may still be around when, in another thirty years, a third, magnificently reimagined Blob oozes into the projection area of the local eight-plex and begins stirring up trouble. And by then, perhaps, horror-film makers will be brave enough to show us a few platters.

(1994)

Clip Art

Professional men can’t wear much in the way of jewelry. The gemless wedding band, the watch, the belt buckle, the key chain — possibly the quietly costly blue-enameled pen in a shirt pocket — are among the few sanctioned outlets for the male self-embellishing urge. Occasionally permissible are the shirt stud, the cufflink, and the nautical brass blazer button. Bas-relief suspender clasps, various forms of tie and collar tackle, and chunky nonmarital fingerware are allowable on men who make a living by commission. The demotion of smoke has eliminated the ornate cigarette lighter. Neck and wrist chains are inadvisable. Metalwork for the male nostril, tongue, ear, or foreskin is an option only in outlying areas.

But fingernail and toenail clippers — the unworn but elegant accessories to all men’s fashion, since no man has ever looked presentable with long nails (long being anything over three-sixteenths of an inch) — continue to glitter legitimately in an otherwise unpolished age. Like fancy pens and pocket watches, these palmable curios have a function — that of severing corneous shrapnel from key areas of the human form with a bracing abruptness, a can-do metallic snap, that leaves their user with the illusion that he is progressively, clip by hardened-steel clip, gaining control of his shambling life. They offer some of the satisfactions of working out on exercise machines without the sweat and gym shorts; some of the pleasures of knuckle manipulation without the worry of arthritic deformity; some of the rewards of cracking a nut without having to eat it. You may crouch over the wastebasket while you operate, but there is happily no assurance that anything clipped will end up there; for just as certain insects will hop or fly off so fast that they seem not to displace themselves physically but simply to disappear on the spot, so the clipper chip vanishes at the very instant the jaws meet and chime, propelled toward a windowsill or on some other untraceable tangent, never to trouble anyone again unless a bare foot happens to rediscover it.

The market for clippers is apparently unsaturable. This year, millions of men will buy one, as they have for decades, despite the fact that these maintenance tools almost never wear out and are entirely unnecessary. You can cut your nails just fine with a decent pair of scissors, assuming a rudimentary ambidextrousness; in fact, from one point of view a scissor cut is less labor-intensive than clipping, since, despite the helpful curvature of the clipper jaws, it often takes three angled snips to approximate the arc of a given fingernail. (The cut facets thus formed are surprisingly sharp the first time you scratch an itch, but they wear away in a day.) Clippers sell steadily because, like clippings, they disappear (in the backs of drawers, in glove compartments) and must be replaced, and because they are beautiful and cheap. A big clear drum of ninety-nine-cent Trim-brand clippers sitting near the drugstore’s cash register like a bucket of freshly netted minnows is an almost irresistible sight. They are the ideal weight and smoothness; they exploit the resiliency of their material both to maintain their assembly without rattling and to hold their business edges apart. They appear to have aerodynamic virtues. And, once bought, they can alter their profile in a single puzzle-solving flip-and-pivot of the lever arm, without excessive play or roughness or torn rotator cuffs, from minnow shape to grasshopper shape and back again. They were our first toy Transformers: metallic dual-phase origamis that seem triumphantly Japanese and yet happen to be, in their perfected form, a product of the small town of Derby, in southern Connecticut, near the Sikorsky helicopter plant.

In the forties, the W. E. Bassett Company made “washers” for the rubber heel pieces on men’s shoes (these stopped nails from piercing through to the foot area) and artillery components for the Army. After the war, William E. Bassett, founder, retooled his equipment in Derby, and devoted himself to the production of a superior jaw-style nail clipper, the Trim clipper. The jawed design had been around since the nineteenth century, but Bassett was its Bernini. He added, for example, two thoughtful nibs near the base of the tiny (and, in the experience of some, unused) nail file that together keep the lever arm aligned in its closed position; and he replaced the unsatisfactory pinned rivet with the brilliant notched rivet. (The Chinese still use pinned rivets in their mediocre but cute baby-nail clipper, manufactured for Even-flo.) The stylish thumb-swerve in the Trim’s lever (patent pending) was Bassett’s idea, too.

According to William’s brother Henry (who died, as the chairman of the board, in May of 1994, at the age of eighty-four), the best fingernail clipper Bassett ever made was the Croydon model of the late forties. It was stamped with a clipper-ship emblem and was promoted in Esquire for the jewelry-store trade. (It flopped — a case of overqualification.) But William Bassett’s sons William C. Bassett, now the president and treasurer, and Dave Bassett, now the company’s manufacturing engineering manager, continue the work of innovation and cost-manicuring. Despite some exciting recent work by the Koreans, who manufacture all Revlon’s more expensive but not quite so well-finished clippers, along with the Gem line, the Trim clipper by Bassett continues its reign as the best on the planet. (Clippers are chrome-plated after being assembled. The finished Revlon clippers frequently betray their undercoating in those areas where one part obscured another in the electrolyte solution; Trim clippers, designed to minimize this shadowing, almost never do.)

In fact, all Bassett’s grooming aids — from emery boards to tweezers — earn high marks among power users. This past August, for example, Jerry Lewis’s secretary called the company directly to order a dozen five-inch triple-cut Trim nail files (with accompanying blue vinyl protective sheaths), because Mr. Lewis couldn’t obtain them locally. “The tweezer is a very fussy item,” Dave Bassett said recently; each Bassett tweezer tip (its inner edge ground “to help grab that hair”) is inspected manually, under a magnifier. The company makes nail clippers plated in gold as well as in chrome; its Heirloom line offers gift sets like the Saddlebag, which includes scissors, a bottle opener, and folding nail files, along with an anchor pair of clippers. This Christmas, Bassett will be selling the Holiday Family Manicure Kit, with a fingernail clipper and a toenail clipper, two wooden cuticle pokers, some emery boards, and a pair of tweezers, displayed against a background of falling snow and rising reindeer. (What better way to spend Christmas morning with one’s loved ones?) For Dr. Scholl’s, Bassett has created an extraordinary matte-black and gold-plated piece of toenail-cleaving insanity that would not be out of place dangling from the rearview mirror of a new forty-valve 3.5-liter Ferrari 355.

It won’t do to labor the parallels between caring for a fingernail and manufacturing a fingernail clipper. Making a clipper is considerably more complex. Still, it is striking how reminiscent of human clippings are the spurned little pieces of scrap metal exiting from the side of the deafening Minster stamping press. Once cut (from rolls of Midwestern steel, at an impact force of roughly fifteen tons), the clipper “blanks” must be cleaned of oil, spot-welded, racked, hardened for two hours in a massive furnace, then oil-quenched, cleaned again, tempered in a second furnace to limber them up a little, and finally revolved in huge barrels with sixty thousand of their fellows for several days in a slurry of metal slugs, abrasives, and lime, to smooth away unhandy burrs. Vibrating bowls dither the components into sequential position, preparing them for a definitive riveting, which is accompanied by a Fred Astaire-like volley of air-cylinder taps and flourishes. Each clipper gets a sharpened cutting edge; a digital image system checks the finished edges for truth. Eyelets, shot in at the caudal end, affix the nail files; then the entire splayed clipper, racked on hooks, proceeds through the plating sequence — ten minutes in a warm nickel bath, a minute or two of chrome. A nimble piece of pneumatics straightens the akimbo file and closes the lever. At last the basic Bassett fingernail clipper is ready for action. You can determine the year your clipper was made by referring to the inside of the lever arm.

Nail care has been weighing on my thoughts recently, I confess, because the great Stephen King, in an introduction to his recent short-story collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, describes one of my books as a “meaningless little fingernail paring.” Are we to infer from “paring” that the Bard of Bangor doesn’t possess or know how to operate a Trim (or a Gem, or a Revlon, or even a La Cross) clipper of his own? Does he envision himself as the heir of Joyce’s artist-hero, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who was “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”? Does he still whittle? (Bassett’s sales are “really taking off” in Ireland right now, according to Barbara Shannon, the company’s marketing manager; it seems that the Irish are through with Joyce’s manual methods and insist on taking, with Trim’s help, the shortcut to artistry.) Or is Mr. King rather implying that someone like me disdainfully pares and fiddles while he, market-wise progressivist, hacks on with the latest technology?

If so, I can assure Mr. King that I, too, clip — not as often as I should, perhaps, but with genuine enthusiasm. When I want a really authentic experience, I sometimes use a toenail clipper on my fingernails, shuddering with the thrill of fulcrumed power; and then, for my toes, I step on up to Revlon’s veterinary-gauge Nipper, a parrot-beaked personal-pruning weapon that, despite its chrome plate, looks as if it should be stored in the toolshed. A dense, semiopaque shard cut by this nineteen-dollar piece of spring-loaded Brazilian craftsmanship recently rose from what was left of my ravished toenail and traveled across the room, landing in a box of tax records, where it remains.

We can say with some certainty (and sadness) that Nabokov did not use nail clippers. That is, John Shade, Pale Fire’s poet, did not:

The little scissors I am holding are

A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

I stand before the window and I pare

My fingernails.…

The cutting of a fingernail is important in Nabokov: it may constitute for him the act of self-liberation from annotative servitude, since he is demonstrably aware of the traditional scholarly use of the nail’s edge as a marginal place-inscriber. In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Tatiana learns about Onegin’s mind by studying his library, and she notices (in Nabokov’s translation) that

Many pages preserved

the trenchant mark of fingernails.

Nabokov’s commentary to these lines mentions Sheridan’s The Rivals (dismissing it in passing, with his usual harshness, as a “singularly inept comedy”), in which someone “cherishes her nails for the convenience of making marginal notes.” Nabokov adds, puzzlingly, “The art is a lost one today.” Hardly so: even with a closely clipped and manly thumbnail, the reader can and very often does, today, in America, score a visible double line to mark an interesting passage, if it appears in a book that he is prevented for one reason or another from defacing. In those midnight moments of the misplaced pencil, too, a nail impression is a less destructive and more spatially precise aid to memory than a turned-down corner. Moreover, the pressure of the reader’s nail, deformed by its momentary trenchancy, against the tender hyponychial tissues it protects, creates a transient thumbwide pleasure that is, or can be, more than literary.

But the most troubling feature of Stephen King’s assessment of my alleged “nail paring” of a novel is his apparent belief that a bookish toe- or fingernail scrap can be justifiably brushed off as meaningless. Last September, Allen Ginsberg sold a bag of his beard hair to Stanford. Surely Mr. King ought to be saving for the ages whatever gnarled relics he clips or pares? And the Master Spellbinder, of all people, should be able to detect the secret terrors, the moans of the severed but unquiet soul, that reside in these disjecta. Think of the fearful Norse ship of the apocalypse, Naglfar, made of dead men’s nails, which will break loose from its moorings during the Monstrous Winter, when the Wolf has swallowed the Sun—“a warning,” in Brian Branston’s retelling, “that if a man dies with his nails unshorn he is adding greatly to the materials for Naglfar (a thing both gods and men would be slow to do).” Gertrude Jobes’s mythological dictionary cites a related Finno-Ugric tradition in which the Evil One collects any Sunday nail parings and “with them builds the boat for transporting the dead.” Lithuanian folklore contends (per Stith Thompson) that “from the parings of man’s nails devils make little caps for themselves.” I didn’t have a chance to ask any of the employees at the factory in Derby, Connecticut, many of whom are first- or second-generation Polish, whether they had heard similar tales.

Lest someone unknowingly aid the devils in their hattery (would a fingernail hat resemble a miniature wicker knick-knack basket, one wonders, or would the snippets be sewn or glued on, like sequins?), the Bassett Company, in 1990, launched the Easy Hold clipper. The Easy Hold line features an unusual pair of either-handed cuticle scissors, with forefinger-rests that aid fine work (U.S. Design Patent No. 331,867); a foam emery-board holder; and an enhanced tweezer that makes the removal of other people’s splinters even more of a wicked joy than it always has been. But the new nail clippers go further: in addition to a considerate plastic thumb element, they include a housing for the jaw that catches nearly every snippet the moment it is clipped.

Eric Rommerdale, the head of laboratory technology at the University of Mississippi School of Dentistry, in Jackson, is the principal figure behind the development of all the Easy Hold grooming products. Mr. Rommerdale, fifty-two, a white-mustached ex-Navy man, is no stranger to inventive self-care, having in his off-hours developed Sunbeam’s triple-brush, hands-free toothbrushing system (now sold by DKI Inc.) and the mouth-stick-activated urine-bag release valve, both for the wheelchair set. His big fingernail moment came in November of 1987, in a Stop-n-Go, while he was watching a man in his seventies with “hands the size of baseball mitts” trying to clip his nails. Three times the clipper fell to the floor. Out of polymer resin (often used in dental work) Rommerdale built a pair of add-on clipper grips and tried to interest Revlon in them. Revlon said no, unequivocally. But in 1988 William Bassett the younger listened to a pitch by Rommerdale in the lobby of the Bridgeport Hilton, liked what he heard, and asked the inventor to rethink the graspability of the entire manicure line. The University of Mississippi Medical Center then evaluated and refined the prototypes (under a grant from the Bassett Company), videotaping and surveying a group of talkative elderly beta-testers.

Although Rommerdale’s original rounded design gained, in its final, blister-packed form, a few unwelcome projections and some squared-off edges that call out for smoothing (“We could have done a better job on that,” William Bassett admits), it is nonetheless heartening to find that the stylistic history of the clipper — one of the great bureau-top products of the century — is not over. This coming January, all plastic Easy Hold fittings, at present colored a battleship-gray, will turn teal-green, after extensive mall-site interviewing. Eric Rommerdale, using his patent royalties, recently expanded his backyard workshop, and he is currently developing safer tools for meat cutters and a jar opener for the disabled. It looks as if there will still be time for us to clip our nails closely and carefully, as if nothing else mattered, before the coming of the Monstrous Winter, when Naglfar will set sail.

(1994)