Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
his hands on his heart, the blood leaking out his chest, his eyes gazing at the ground with that look that those paintings show Columbus and Cortez and those conquistadors have in their eyes when they about to kiss the ground of the land that they just discover and conquer and claim in the name of Isabella the Queen of Spain. But this fella’s eyes is not an ocean of arrogance; they don’t have in them the greed, or bombast; in them is the piety, the awe, the pity, as if just as he was discovering the land, discovering life, he had to leave it. I applauded him. There was the death I would have died.
The man dying so magnificently, the author of that extravagant and magnificent dying, was Sonnyboy. Inspired, I fling out my arms too in the beautiful movements of the dance of my childhood and begin the exquisite choreography of my dying.
“Cut!” the director says. Cut it. Because the director don’t like how we dying at all. He doesn’t like it. And even the fellars there, the same fellars, my countrymen, who go through a boyhood like my own, and who should know, who must know the conventions of the shooting game, the same very fellars looking at me and Sonnyboy, as if we commit some kinda crime. The quality of our dying is an embarrassment to them. We dying too slow. We wasting too much of the Whitepeople time.
“Too extravagant,” Errol says. “Too colorful!”
“Rookie,” Claude says.
As if they have some superior notion of how a man who is shot is supposed to die, all of them start to laugh that heh heh heh laugh by which the less courageous of us were subdued.
“What you expect from a calypsonian?”
I spoke to them. I said, “Gentlemen, I want you to know that this is the last moment of my life. This is the last moment. This is not my dying. This is my last living moment.”
But no. The director don’t want it so.
“No?”
“Sir,” I ask him. “Sir? You think it is fair to ask somebody to die just so, to fall and crumble just so without leaving
at his dying some memorable gesture? You think it right
in a situation where all that you have been given to do, where the total span and compass of the work you are employed to perform is to die, to do it, to die so . . . so unremarkably?”
But he swing his head and toss his mane. Budget. Shooting schedule. Time constraints. He believes that that kind of dying, that expression of meaning belongs to the stars. He has stars to do that, he tell me.
“But,” I pointed out to him, “I do not see the stars getting killed.” Something that we in this part of the world have been familiar with over a lifetime of watching movies: Star-boys don’t die. They are the ones that endure. And even at the end if one dies; if perchance, according to my friend Bispat, quoting what he remembered of his Shakespeare, if perchance one should be killed, you know him, he doesn’t need his death, you have seen him live his life. I am the one dying. I need my death to live.
“And, sir,” I said.
“Call me Max,” he says.
“Call him Max,” the Trinidadian natives echo, jubilant as if they just get a holiday.
“Max,” I said, the word like a weight on my tongue, “Max, I feel misled. Here I am a native, robbed of my life and now of my dying. Remember,” I continued, “that after this death I have no further part in the picture . . . unless you need me to die again. I know is your picture. I know I am not the star-boy. But, even so, you can’t rob me of that . . . of that . . .”
“Honor?” Errol challenged, his voice gurgling with sarcasm, his cheeks bunching, his teeth showing.
“Not honor. Right. No matter what your plot, we are human who would each like to leave our individual mark, our human signature, on our efforts and it is as human we must die.”
“Hear! Hear!” cried Wilbert and Claude in unison. “Hear, hear!”
“You talking, boy!”
Yes, I was talking now, I was speaking. In full flight, I had a voice now, I was on the floor:
“And if it is your pleasure, if, according to your script, according to your script-writer, if is your pleasure that I must get shot . . . if I get shoot . . . if you shoot me, indiscriminately and casually, letting me die so obscurely that people watching this picture can’t even see me in the background in the bush toting the loads for your expedition on my head . . . if you say I must die, at least allow me the space to die how I want to die.”
But he wouldn’t budge. And the Trinidadian fellars, my countrymen, not giving me no support.
I tried to talk to them, “Listen, fellars,” I say, “Stanley, Errol, Claude, Ralph, Davindra, Errol, is like you don’t know who you are? You are among the best actors in the world. You have, at least, earned your dying. Don’t let this joker treat us so.”
“It is just a movie,” Errol say. And as if to point us away from the pathos, the pain in the statement, he say it again, this time with half a laugh to give us the direction we should take: “It is just a movie.” And you had to listen past the chuckle in his laughter to the subtle agony bubbling in his voice, the sadness, the grief, the truth, the tears of a capped-down rage: “Is just a movie.”
“Let us get together,” I plead, “and live the last moment of this life with some dignity. He can’t fire everybody.”
“It is just a movie,” they answer in chorus, something between the corrective sternness of a parent and the mindless recitation of children on a school stage.
“Max is the director. He is the boss,” they chorus.
“Max is the boss,” Errol says with that double and triple meaning.
“And you?” I ask. “Who are you?”
“We?”
“I?”
“Me?” And I could hear the metallic ring of the me, like a note struck on a steelpan: Mee-ee?
“I just putting in a day work.”
“I can’t sing calypso, like you.”
“And I certainly not a badjohn. Like your revolutionary pardner Sonnyboy.”
Now they were ridiculing me. “Heh heh heh,” they laughed.
“Worry with Sonnyboy,” they said snidely. “Sonnyboy just doing this for kicks.”
“For the excitement.”
“For sport.”
“Sonnyboy just showing off.”
“You getting pay to die how the director say to die.”
Now they were vexed with me. And more vigilant about the man’s business than their own.
“Just dead and get on with it before you muddy the water for everybody else.”
“If you want to die in style, make your own picture.”
“Yes. Star in it. You and your pardner Sonnyboy.”
“Heh heh heh,” Errol say again and the others laugh: “Heh heh heh.”
“Yes. Is just a movie. You don’t need to make style.”
“Style? Style? Style? You want to deny me style? Errol, I am dying and you want to deny me style?”
“What he so serious about?” they ask.
“What else do I have but style?”
“Yes, what you so serious about?”
“No, no, no, fellars, what else but style?” I found myself screaming. Then I caught myself. Yes, what was I so serious about? What the hell! I mean, I didn’t want to appear to be superior to them, to embarrass them. They were my pardners. I wanted to be one of them, one with the crowd. And