Mary nurses her wounds in prayer and, like Hunham, in drink. Curtis was a casualty of Vietnam, and of more besides. “Barton boys don’t go to Vietnam,” Hunham says. “Except for Curtis Lamb,” Angus observes. “Except for Curtis Lamb,” Hunham concurs, trying to get Angus to read between the lines, to notice how the deck is stacked. Hunham lectures about the ancient world but is more guarded with his own history; he parrots Latin maxims and institutional creeds but has grown weary of the “glazed, uncomprehending expressions” of his well-heeled students. He is a man quietly enduring life but scarcely living it.
In Payne’s work, such endurance can seem akin to circling a drain. Dissolves add a somnambulant dimension to a montage of Angus wandering through Barton’s dim passages at night. Sights dreamily commingle: gulps of sacramental wine, plumes of smoke, a photo of Curtis. Just outside is the repose of the snow-blanketed campus. But too much repose can wear us down. One dissolve slips away from Angus while he sits with his confused father. The next shot returns to him some time later, his expression forlorn — another dissolve that is less about a chronological leap than a fine emotional increment, and Angus’s sense of the past as an anchor pulling him into an abyss.
Hunham nudges him toward another conception of time, one that echoes the hold-and-relinquish duality of the dissolve. We must study the past, he says, but we need not be ensnared by it. “You can do this,” he tells his protégé, tearfully shaking his hand. In a climactic scene, Mary, too, invites Angus’s hand into hers, making literal a connection that was previously entrusted to form: a dissolve from Angus, shaving in front of a mirror, to Mary, standing alone before her own reflection.
This
cruise collection
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