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Monologues for the Ghosts monologues written for the film by Alissa Bennett Do not quote monologues with crediting author Alissa Bennett KOETHER: HYPNOTIST MONOLOGUE: Conjuring a ghost is a "Reversal"- it's the lifting of an eclipse to expose something that has always been. I am not creating the ghost. The ghost was always with you. It's a reflection that passes quickly over glass with no evidence of an original ever having existed. A reflection in a mirror that nothing stands in front of - a mirror-image that exists without the burden of the body. I leave pieces of myself behind, secret messages to strangers or people who have forgotten me just to remind them, just so they don't forget that I'm still around and I'm still real. That's how it goes with ghosts too- they come around to remind you how lonely it is when no one remembers you anymore- they're writing their names on the wall to remember themselves to you, only the wall isn't in the bathroom or in a hotel or at the beach. That wall is kind of a secret hidden deep inside your heart. They want the room to remember- they want the room to always know that it used to be theirs. I want to know the thing you never told anyone. I want to know the thing you never told anyone and I want that to be a secret between you and me, the thing we share, the part of us that becomes the eclipse. I want you to feel how time collapses down to nothing, how distance telescopes and then expands. I want you to remember that there are parts of yourself you have never met, experiences residing deep in your body that will never correlate with the memories you keep. These psychic corridors are, and have always been, the province of the ghost. SPENCER MONOLOGUE 1: Lately, I keep my eyes open, I make sure that they're open all the time so that I don't slip, so that I don't try to drift back to those old places where I always knew I could find you. I watch the numbers rise and fall across the board and chart fiscal motion, red and green lines that somehow project themselves onto reality, and I'm aware that I'm watching someone else's future cresting a slope and slipping back down, a rock and recovery that will last forever and ever and ever. Endless. I keep my eyes open all the time now because once they're closed, in that unendurable lucidity that contaminates sleep with life, I only see you, as though you never left, as though you have always been waiting for me to find you again. "Don't leave me," you say with your eyes. "Please don't leave me." When I sleep I see you suspended in celluloid, a slow moving black and white film that brings you to me in fragments, small disembodied landscapes that rush in and out of focus. I watch a hand that surely belongs to me reach into the frame to touch you and fail; you laugh until the projection stumbles, catches, unwinds into darkness. It is always then that I realize, right at that moment I know that you're gone and you're never coming back. "You never had me," I hear you say when I finally wake. " you never had me," and it's an echo that ricochets, something untouchable that you have left behind for me to find and then lose again and again. Investments, mutual funds, time horizons, dividends; I fill my eyes with the potentiality of other people's futures while i allow my own to disappear behind you. There is no calculated risk left for me; I am gambling now, high risk means nothing to me anymore. SPENCER MONOLOGUE 2: In clinical hypnosis, there is a little known technique used to induce an experience called the Material Recollection the Material Recollection occurs during a state of deep induction. It allows a patient to literally call forth a past event, to repeat a lost length of time, to revisit those things and people lost to absence, death. This is what I have been doing to you. I have to bring you back because there is something that I need to tell you, something that I didn't say to you when you were here. I need you to know that this was always your fault, I need you to know that you did this to yourself; I'm sure you'll understand. I want to hear you say that you miss me - I want to hear you say "I'm sorry". Say it to me. "I'm sorry". And I will wait for you to come just close enough. I will let you come just close enough so that you can feel it when I leave. CLAIRES MONOLOGUE: Yesterday in your room, I breathed across your window and wrote my name in the steam. One day, when the conditions are right, when it's cold enough and you think that you have come close to forgetting me, my name will appear in the glass and it will remind you again that I am gone and that I'm never coming back. I will return to you in these small ways for a very long time, and the farther away from me that you think you are, the closer I'll get. I will become a disconnected phone number, a dead end, a returned letter without a forwarding address. I'll disappear in every place you can think to try to find me and show up everywhere you want to erase me from. This is how to make a perfect ghost. For now, I will wait here with you, I will wait and I will watch and I will listen to all of the words that you kept secret, and I won't leave until I know that my reflection is in your eyes in some semi-permanent kind of way. "You are getting tired," you will hear me say when it's dark and you're alone. "Close your eyes; you are falling back, you are so relaxed. You are dreaming," and in this dream I will touch your hair and look into your eyes like I do in all of your best memories. "Do you love me yet?" I will ask when you have finally sunk to the bottom and your breathing has slowed, and you will retrace your steps to try to find the moment when everything slid off course, the day when you said something wrong, the second when you maybe didn't love me enough to make me want to stay. If I were really there with you, I would try to reassure you, I would tell you that you should stop blaming yourself. I would say that it was time to wake up, to open your eyes and leave me behind until the next time because you hadn't done anything to make me go. I would invent a gesture that told you the truth, one gesture that would clear things up and explain that you hadn't lost anything because I never loved you in the first place. Not the real me, anyway. |
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