Predilections Mark Singer The New Yorker — February 2, 1989 Among the nonfiction movies that Errol Morris has at one time or another been eager to make but has temporarily abandoned for lack of investor enthusiasm are "Ablaze!" (or "Fire from Heaven"), an examination of the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion; "Whatever Happened to Einstein's Brain?" (portions of the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex are thought to be in the possession of a doctor in North Carolina, other parts are floating around here and there); "Road," the story of one man's attempt to build across northern Minnesota an interstate highway that no one else wanted; "Insanity Inside Out," based on the book of the same tide, by Kenneth Donaldson, a man who, in his forties, was wrongly committed by his parents to a mental hospital and got stuck there for fifteen years; "Weirdo," about the breeding of a giant chicken; "The Wizard of Wendover," about Robert K. Golka and his laser-induced fireball experiments in Utah; and a perusal of Yap, a South Pacific island where stone money is the traditional currency. Some months ago, Morris attended a meeting with executives of Home Box Office, his primary motive being, as they say in the movie business, to pitch an idea — in that case, the one involving Einstein's brain. The meeting did not go particularly well. An HBO person at one point said admonishingly, "You know, your movies are ironic. Our viewers just don't like irony." Groping for a more tactful evasion, another HBO person said, "We're already doing a transplant movie." "But wait a second, Morris replied. "This brain hasn't been transplanted — yet." Unapologetically, Morris draws his films fresh from the substance of the real world, where irony has a way of running riot. Describing his work, he goes to some lengths to avoid using the term "documentary" ("the 'D' word," he will say, in a pinch), but he has not yet coined an alternative label that a Hollywood publicist might use to characterize a generic Errol Morris movie. During the past twelve years, he has directed and released three films: "Gates of Heaven," about two pet cemeteries in Northern California; "Vernon, Florida," a series of interviews with several residents of a swamp town in Florida; and "The Thin Blue Line," which arrived in theatres around the Page 1 of 34 | Predilections.doc country last summer and fall, and which Morris has described, not immodestly, as "the first murder mystery that actually solves a murder." An Errol Morris movie features real people talking uninterrupted, mainly about literal objects or events, only occasionally about feelings or ideas: trafficking in entertaining truths as well as in equally entertaining transparent prevarications; free- associating, it often seems, as if the camera were a psychotherapist whose expensive time it would be a pity to squander on silence. Near the midpoint of "Gates of Heaven," which was completed in 1978, a woman with a pinched mouth whose age might be anywhere from seventy to eighty-five sits in a chair before an open doorway. She is never identified, but, it happens, her name is Florence Rasmussen. In a manner that alternates between passive and bold, accented by facial expressions that range from beatific to sinister, Florence Rasmussen soliloquizes elegiacally: "I'm raised on a farm, we had chickens and pigs and cows and sheep and everything. But down here I've been lost. Now they've taken them all away from here up to that — What's the name of that place? Up above here a little ways? That town? Commences with a 'B.' Blue. It's — Blue Hill Cemetery, I think the name of it is. Not too far, I guess, about maybe twenty miles from here. A little town there, a little place. You know where it's at. But I was really surprised when I heard they were getting rid of the cemetery over here. Gonna put in buildings or something over there. Ah well, I know people been very good to me, you know. Well, they see my condition, I guess, must of felt sorry for me. But it's real, my condition is. It's not put on. That's for sure! Boy, if I could only walk. If I could only get out. Drive my car. I'd get another car. Ya... and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He's got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don't know. These kids — the more you do for them... He' s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old... I don't see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn't pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars. Pretty good! His boss knows it. Well, he's not working for that outfit now. He's changed. He's gone back on his old job — hauling sand. No, not hauling sand; he's working in the office. That's right. He took over the office job. His boss told me that on the phone. But, you know, he should help me more. He's all I got. He's the one who brought me up here. And then put me here by myself among strangers. It's terrible, you stop and think of it. I've been without so much, when I first come up here. Ya. It's what half of my trouble is from — him not being home with me. Didn't cost him nothing to stay here. Every time he need money, he'd always come, 'Mom, can I have this? Can I have that?' But he never pays back. Too good, too easy — that's what everybody tells me. I quit now. I quit. Now he's got the office job, I'm going after him. I'm going after him good, too — if I have to go in... in a different way. He's going to pay that money. He's got the office job now. And he makes good money anyway. And he has no kids. He Page 2 of 34 | Predilections.doc has not married. Never get married, he says. He was married once — they're divorced. Well, she tried to take him for the kid, but she didn't. They went to court. It was somebody else's kid. She was nothing but a tramp in the first place. I told him that. He wouldn't listen to me. I says, 'I know what she is.' I said, 'Richard, please, listen to me.' He wouldn't listen. He knew all, he knew everything. Big shot! But he soon found out. Now that's all over with. I've been through so much I don't know how I'm staying alive. Really, for my age... if you're young, it's different. But I've always said I'm never going to grow old. I've always had that, and the people that I tell how old I am, they don't believe me, because people my age as a rule don't get around like I do." With an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information: I have roots with the earth; I'm lost in this world. People have been very good to me; I'm all alone, surrounded by strangers, my own flesh and blood treats me badly. I have a health problem that's real; I protest too much. I'd like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son — O.K., he's not my son, he's my grandson — a new car; well, I didn't pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back. His boss — Hold on, he has a different boss. He hauls sand for a living; nope, he's got that office job now. He's not the marrying kind; he was married once. He has no children; he's been involved in a paternity suit. I'll never grow old; I'm so old people can't believe it. Even though I can't walk, people my age as a rule don't get around like I do. "Gates of Heaven" gives an account of a pet cemetery that fails and one that succeeds; Mrs. Rasmussen refers to each in only a glancing manner. The first day that Morris set out as a bona- fide film director with an actual film crew was the day the residents of the failed pet cemetery were being exhumed, so that they could be transferred to the other cemetery. The cinematographer Morris had engaged to shoot "Gates of Heaven" he fired that same day — a consequence of serious philosophical differences that culminated in a physical struggle for the camera. ("It's mine!" "No, it's mine!") Day Two, Morris met Florence Rasmussen, and she became the first person with whom he ever filmed an interview. The footage from that interview didn't make it into the final cut, however, because the replacement camera operator, a woman, felt compelled to engage the interviewee in a dialogue. When Mrs. Rasmussen mused "Well, here today, gone tomorrow. Right?" the camerawoman said "No. Wrong." Morris couldn't decide which made him angrier — that the camerawoman had interfered with the interview or that her notions about death and the hereafter were so misguided.