Sitting on a bullet, thinking of power

 

So, I'm reading Zadie Smith's novel, On Beauty and its depressing me severely. Not in my everyday life, mind, but as I'm reading. I feel a certain sense of closeness with Kiki. She's one of the characters in the book, and although her mind is strictly analytical and she is middle aged, and a mother of three, I find myself identifying with her more than I should. Her frantic missteps in speech, her uneasiness with her identity as a black woman married to a white man and all that. And then there is the most important part, the fact that her husband of some twenty odd years cheated on her. To my knowledge, nobody that I have dated has actively cheated on me, and in most cases, I wouldn't have cared if they did. I guess before I never invested all that much into romantic relationships. I never set out looking for love, lets say, so, if I found it, it was surprising and new. The relationship I consider the most important in my life, aside from the one I'm in now, was my relationship with Ed. It unlocked my full capacity for loving, taking care of someone, and such. Everyone knows by now that I thought it was going to go a long way, and pretty much collapsed like a dead star for me. I was really angry for a while, and figured I had gotten over it when that anger went away and I stopped thinking about Ed everyday. I stopped missing him, and he just became another person. Lately, while reading this novel, I've been put more in touch with my feelings about the way things went. Whether its wrong or untrue, I don't know, I feel like he betrayed me at a certain point. I feel the closest I've ever felt to being betrayed by someone I loved. In my mind, the anger didn't come from our breakup, or how our relationship ended, it came from the fact that he was getting involved with his room mate when I was still in love with him. My feelings were on pause, and I don't know where his were. I probably never will because I don't know, I sort of can't muster up the nerve to ask all the questions I'd like to know the answers to. I want to know if he had been in love with Amber the whole time we were dating, and only didn't do anything about it because they were so far away, so, in moving in with her, he was fulfilling this epic romantic dream he'd had since the feelings they may or may not have developed. I want to know if I was just a consolation prize. I suppose I'm reading too far into the space between the lines here. I guess these feelings are probably not some epic karmic bitchslap to teach me the lesson that if you fake it, it will come back to haunt you, and you'll see how it feels to be the one with their heart broken.

I also feel a certain amount of guilt, thinking about this while being in love with Caleb, and knowing without a doubt that he is the one for me. Don't mistake my intentions here. I know that Ed was never the perfect fit for me, for some reason, we fell in love, and I can't figure why. I share something very different with Caleb. As close to perfection as one can come without the wax wings melting. Its no mystery why we're together. I don't doubt his feelings, and I don't stumble blindly through mine.

Alright, so last night, I sat down with my dad (retired NYC police officer, with 20 years on the force) and watched the Cloverfield/Slusho trailer frame by frame more or less.

I had checked out screen caps from 1_18_08 on my own first and established a couple of things. First of all, I could tell from the explosion and the fact that the Statue of Liberty's head landed on 401 Broadway, Rob's apartment building is supposed to be located in lower Manhattan.



From this image, I see that the left side (the buildings directly in the path of the explosion) resemble the buildings near City Hall. The building on the left appears to be the Municipal Building located at 1 Centre Street. The building on the right appears to be the Woolworth Building located at 233 Broadway. I don't recognize the larger buildings on the far left and right, but I plan to visit all the locations and photograph them to make sure that this is a plausible skyline.

Now, the bits I put together with my dad are the following:

My dad established that this is where some creative editing took place. The area in the foreground appears to be Long Island City, where Silver Cup Studios is located. From there, you can see some parts of mid-town Manhattan. Long Island City is across the river, which explains why the skyline in the background looks very far away and is lit up and the foreground appears to be very dark and lifeless. The area where Silver Cup Studios is located is mostly made up of homes and factories, which tend to go dark at a certain hour. Any New Yorker can tell you, the city never sleeps. The only time I've ever seen it that dark was during the blackout a couple of years ago. The creative editing bit comes in towards the middle part of the frame. As far as we both know, the buildings that make up the area near City Hall are too low to the ground to be visible from as far as Long Island City. They are also way farther downtown. All three of Silver Cup's locations are across the river facing midtown.

One of the other significant parts of the trailer that people keep pointing out is the fact that the temperature seems significantly higher than it should be for January in NYC.

Now, I'm not sure if the date of the release is significant to the film, as we really don't have anything aside from the time stamp on some photos, but I can tell you with some certainty that the trailer was most likely filmed in March. When all the party guests are assembled on the roof, for a split second you can see a glowing white building and then slightly to the right and just as briefly you see a glowing green building (they appear about halfway through the trailer, when three of the characters are standing together. The Empire State building is to the right of the woman and the black guy). These buildings appear to be the Empire State building and the Chrysler building, both are visible from Long Island City. The Empire State building is glowing green, which means that it was most likely filmed during March. The last time I recall the lights being green (all three tiers) was for St. Patrick's day. Also, the buildings on the far left and right of the explosion seem to be buildings in midtown that were left in the shots because they are visible from the Long Island City location, and add to the realism of the skyline.

Beyond that, the street level scenes in the trailer don't look at all like NYC streets. Not dirty enough, weird choices in lighting, blanked out shop windows and things like that. But I'm sure we can agree that those scenes were most likely filmed on a lot or inside a studio. The 401 Broadway sign and building look very real, though. I'm assuming they cut live shots of the city in with the studio shots to make everything appear more real. I plan on going out this week and photographing as many locations from the trailer as I possibly can.

I also have a bit of speculation as far as the projected path of the Parasite. We know that Rob lives on or near 401 Broadway because we see the sign and the building that resembles the real location in NYC. We also have the Statue of Liberty's head bouncing down the street, which leads me to believe that the Parasite surfaces near Liberty Island. I suppose then the Parasite would make landfall at Battery Park, and continue down Broadway till it reached City Hall/the Municipal Building/Woolworth Building where it gets seen by the folks at the party.  The one thing that bothers me about the whole thing is how the head of the Statue of Liberty could make it so far. It looks to be thrown, but from where?  Just looking at google maps kind of blows the idea that its thrown from Liberty Island out of the water. You can easily see that its a couple of miles away.