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“I Didn’t Know It Had a Point”

Reflections by Director Jay Craven

Jay Craven

I sat through the first-ever screening of Disappearances in mid-March at a painfully late 10:30pm show for the South By Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) at the Alamo Draft House Theater in Austin, Texas. The audience felt on edge, the late hour kept reviewers away, and the film print arrived at the last possible minute—late to the point that the SXSW programmers had threatened to play a funky old DVD version off our computer.

Fortunately, that did not happen—and the Disappearances film print was striking on the big screen. The look and sound of the film easily took over the room. Kris Kristofferson and his family attended the SXSW screening, as did principal actors Charlie McDermott and Gary Farmer. A number of crew members showed up along with a gaggle of my current and former Marlboro College students, two of them wearing cowboy hats.

The Alamo Draft House seats have a long wooden shelf in front of them that runs across the full row and serves as a table so people can order drinks and munch cheeseburgers and nachos during the movies. Waiters scurry like moles along the narrow corridors between rows, taking orders, refilling drinks, and cashing out food checks. It can be a little distracting if you’re not used to it.

Playwright/actor Sam Shepard came to Austin two days before we did, and he played the Alamo, too. In an interview, he told the Austin Statesman-American that he had expected to screen Don’t Come Knocking, his new Wim Wenders road movie collaboration, at the Paramount, Austin’s lavish art deco movie house. He compared the Draft House to a Chicago stockyard. He wasn’t pleased.

I sort of got into a groove with it. SXSW is an experience unto itself. And I appreciated the robust picture and sound.

That night, after the first screening, I didn’t sleep much. Maybe it was the effect of the 32 oz. Coca Cola I ordered to help me stay awake. But the audience questions and my own search for the film’s inner meanings kept my mind churning all night.


I’d initially been attracted to Howard Mosher’s tall tale for its mix of hair-raising adventure, laugh-out-loud humor, compelling emotional drama, and magical realist whimsy. Indeed, I’d loved films I’d seen that included magical realism--films like The Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier, based on the novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alfonso Arau’s award-winning Like Water for Chocolate. Also Spike Jonz’s Being John Malkovitch, Fellini’s 8 ½, Antonioni’s Blow Up, David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Victor Fleming’s Wizard of Oz, and Joan Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. In our overly literal world, it’s refreshing to consider what Cocteau believed--that every film should aspire to a dream state—as his frequently did. I was thrilled to take up this challenge.
I also saw the populist appeal of Mosher’s novel, given its whiskey-running narrative. This history and the imagination of this outlaw legacy is deeply rooted in the North Country—as much as any enterprise in the old west that triggered literally hundreds of movies about outlaws and the untamed frontier. So, I envisioned Disappearances as populist, magical realist North Country western. On an indie low budget and impossibly tight schedule.

Before I shot Disappearances, I wrote a “director’s statement” for grant proposals and our business plan. In it, I said, “Beyond its many surface pleasures, I also feel that Disappearances suggests a magnificent visual world and expresses potent and timely themes about a disappearing way of life on the rugged frontier, where the spectacular natural environment refuses to be tamed and an outlaw culture thrives in the margins. The story also explores a complex and powerful father-son relationship at the moment of profound emotional change. It’s a high-energy joyride through drought-stricken fields, glacial lakes, dense forests, and bootlegger digs, transporting a father and son on the adventure of their lives.”

This promotional prose worked to approximate what I imagined—but that night after the first screening, tossing and turning in my hotel bed, I started to see the actual film that I felt was emerging. I’d imagined or seen the picture more than a hundred times, during the scriptwriting, casting, shooting, editing, music scoring, sound and effects editing, audio mixing, and color timing processes. And I’d worked to shape the story and characters and express themes that resonated for me, during each stage. Still, I find it impossible to tease out my most developed thoughts about a picture’s meanings until the crucial final ingredient of the audience is finally added to the equation.

During the Austin Q & A session, I said that I saw Wild Bill’s coming-of-age journey at the center of the film—and that his father, Quebec Bill, and Aunt Cordelia each gave him what they felt he needed to complete this rite of passage. For Quebec Bill, who lived so much in the physical world and acts so instinctively, often without considering the potential consequences, his own personal qualities formed the basis of his gift to Wild Bill. Indeed, Quebec Bill’s eternal optimism is rare. Likewise, his sense of joy, wonder, possibility, and complete abandon, regardless of the odds.

Quebec Bill also imparts to his son the full-blooded experience of the vanishing frontier and the spectacular natural world “that no one can ever take away from you.” Quebec Bill introduces his son to the magic of that world, as he marvels at its splendor and asks Wild Bill to retrieve and help revive the frozen trout. Anyone who has interacted with this natural world, as Quebec Bill has, on the farms or in the wilds of northern New England understand this power and magic. It is different from Cordelia’s—but it surely endures in Wild Bill’s memory of his father.

In Quebec Bill’s physical world, the needs for risk-taking and the uncompromising demands for survival prevail. Quebec Bill’s ethos is born of American individualism and the impulse for adventure. As we see when he levels his shotgun at the machine gun-toting outlaw tracking the stolen whiskey, Quebec Bill also embraces the American frontier ethos of shoot now, ask questions later. That’s why Disappearances feels to me like a Western—albeit one that critically examines some of its own tenets. Because in Quebec Bill’s strengths lie his weaknesses.

In contrast to what he gets from his father, Wild Bill receives something quite different from Cordelia. She is steeped in the metaphysical—the spiritual, magical, and mystical; the rich and often mysterious cultural worlds articulated by Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, and the Greek and Latin writers; and the historical links to both family and calamitous world and local events. Living isolated in rural northern Vermont during the turn of the Century, this is the historical and intensely cultural universe she inhabits and it’s from here that she affects Wild Bill.

Quebec Bill’s unconventional impulse for dominance in the physical world is counterbalanced by Cordelia’s equally irregular instincts for intuition, imagination, instinct, recitation, and vision. She accesses insight into an unseen world, including the natural world where magic resides, as we see in Cordelia’s woods scene and through her connection to the snow owl.

Quebec Bill acts. Cordelia looks and sees.

But to what end does Cordelia’s magic perform? For one, she’s able to dispatch Carcajou, as a result of her conjuring and looking beyond what is visible. This is more than Quebec Bill can accomplish, steeped in his raw, tangible world.

Beyond this, the film’s magic and mystery function in ways that are hopefully individual to each viewer based on his or her own insight and experience. We’re all linked to our own unconscious, surely, especially in our dreams. And in other surprising ways. Truly, how much of daily experience is simply focused on material reality. And how much is informed by our vision, imagination and unconscious? And by the cultural and historical influences that act upon us?

The film shows that both Quebec Bill and Cordelia have experienced loss, especially through the disappearance of their father, William Shakespeare Goodman. Cordelia reflects on Goodman’s disappearance through her ruminations and extrasensory perceptions that bubble up to the surface. Quebec Bill recalls the thirty-year search across the entire continent for his runaway father. Does Cordelia sense Carcajou/William Goodman’s presence when, early in the film, she stares straight at the snow owl and declares, “You’re back?” Or when, afterward, she expresses to Wild Bill a premonition of death and, shortly after, urges Wild Bill to accompany his father to “at last, learn his birthright?” When she raises the specter of Wild Bill’s grandfather, William Shakespeare Goodman, does she sense his imminent return?

Does Quebec Bill ever suspect it? If he does, he chooses to deal with the old outlaw differently than Cordelia. Bill sees a solution through physical confrontation, whereas Cordelia works to conjure and dispatch him through mystical means.

During Disappearances’ whiskey running adventure, Wild Bill ultimately rejects both Quebec Bill’s best-laid plans and Cordelia’s counsel. He insists on a course of his own. He also experiences loss during the trip—through his killing of a man and the disappearance of his father and aunt. These experiences seem somehow necessary to the catharsis that accompanies the culmination of his journey of growth. Wild Bill earns what he finally achieves. He faces a formidable challenge, turns directly into it, and works it through, finally making sense of his own experience. Finally, he also acts and looks and sees.

At the end of the story Wild Bill is profoundly changed. He stands at the edge of the world, looking off into the spectacular hills and valleys, simultaneously possessing substantially more--and less--than he did when he started. Wild Bill carries with him gifts for life from the eccentric Cordelia and his flawed but vital father. Again, Cordelia poses to Wild Bill this possibility, early in the film, when she proposes that, “maybe at last you’ll learn your birthright.” He does.

Cordelia and Quebec Bill are vastly different. Quebec Bill’s experiments, like the funky rainmaker that prompts the lightning strike on the family’s barn, are sheer “lunacy” to Cordelia. Still, she knows that Wild Bill must accompany his father on Quebec Bill’s whiskey running trip. Quebec Bill and Cordelia differ but they each give what they can to Wild Bill—to a future of which they will not be a part, except through their legacy to him and the next generation. Through them, Wild Bill will have an expanded means to understand much of what he experiences in life. Quebec Bill and Cordelia’s spirits will endure with him. He may not choose their paths but his experience of life will be enlarged. At the end of the picture, he walks into a future and into a changed world that may not have much room for people like Quebec Bill and Cordelia. Or for a family’s peculiar history and the ancient French Canadian myths like the mysterious and frightful tale of the loup garou. But at least Wild Bill gets to fully experience them.

Carcajou, of course, is cursed. All of this is lost on him. He, too, transmits to Wild Bill a part of his birthright, but Carcajou practices no such generosity to the boy and leaves no legacy to his next generation, having “run away over whiskey” and orphaned Quebec Bill and Cordelia nearly fifty years back. I grew up with a father “who ran away over whiskey” when I was six. Like Carcajou, my father disappeared and I never saw him again. That’s all another story, and it certainly took on magical and mysterious dimensions, as I sought to invoke some notion of his existence. I found resonance in Disappearances’ notion of the father who could have been anyone and anywhere. And of Quebec Bill’s quest to find him. And of the absence of emotional connection, even when Carcajou does materialize.

Cordelia mentions Carcajou’s curse to Wild Bill when she appears to him in the woods. She warns Wild Bill that “hell is empty, all the demons are here.” And Cordelia goes a step further, offering to let Wild Bill in on an essential secret---that Caracjou won’t die, adding that “he doesn’t know who he is—part skunk, part wolf.” She then tells her nephew Wild Bill that she “knows how to break his curse.”

Wild Bill doesn’t want to know all this—he tells Cordelia not to tell him another word. He doesn’t want the knowledge of whatever Cordelia’s offering and he doesn’t want the responsibility for getting rid of Carcajou, whom he believes is already dead, by Rat’s shotgun on the lake. Wild Bill has killed one man and that was enough. Too much is happening—and he’s not ready for this information—until the end of the picture.

Cordelia hints that Carcajou’s curse can be understood through the myth of the “loup garou,” a fixture of French Canadian folklore that she mentions to Wild Bill in the woods scene. The mythical and ill-fated loup garou does indeed share the characteristics we see in Carcajou. He is himself preyed upon at some point, initiating the curse. He then becomes a vicious predator who can’t die and doesn’t age (as we see when he’s finally released from the curse). The loup garou’s not especially happy but he can’t tell anyone of his curse, lest even worse befall him. He persists along this destructive course until the day or night when someone “looks him in the eye, calls him by his name, and spills his blood.” Then he is finally knows who he is. He is released from the spell and, at last, he can age and die. But even his rescuer/killer can never tell the details of the curse, lest she or he also fall victim to it.

Cordelia finally unlocks this curse. She confronts Carcajou by name and spills his blood. Carcajou denies that he is Quebec Bill and Cordelia’s lost father, William Goodman. He tells her, “I ain’t Goodman. He’s dead. I killed him myself.” But, of course, he must lie, even if Cordelia is right. He doesn’t know who he is.

Cordelia doesn’t buy Carcajou’s denial. And maybe it doesn’t even matter if Carcajou is telling the truth or not. Either way, she finds justification. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she says. And she shoots him. By doing so, she releases Carcajou and also puts to rest the uncertainty and torment with which she and Quebec Bill have endured in their separate ways.

By drawing on myth and instinct and looking into the unseen world, Cordelia accomplishes what Quebec Bill could not achieve in his navigation of the physical world. She identifies Carcajou, at least to her satisfaction. And she dispatches him once and for all. In doing so, she, like Carcajou, also becomes free. And perhaps Quebec Bill finally achieves solace, too. To me, Quebec Bill’s expression as he watches Carcajou exposed and killed suggests a boy having a weighty secret revealed. It’s the “end of an era” that occurs so often in Howard Frank Mosher’s work.

We debated about whether to spell out the curse of the loup garou more literally in the film—and, in fact, after initial screenings we added the line about Cordelia knowing “how to break his curse.” But any character in the film who fully discloses the nature of Carcajou‘s spell would violate the myth’s rules of engagement, and invite the risk that they, too, would then be cursed. Ironically, when Wild Bill refuses, in the woods, to hear Cordelia fully detail the myth, he may be saving her.

Even after killing Carcajou, Cordelia does not and cannot explain it.

In magical realism there is a parallel axiom—not to explain.

During rehearsal, Kris Kristofferson reacted instinctively against the long explanation required, which I had included in an earlier draft of the script. And he was right. The film’s story would come to a stop as we explained everything about the curse. It would contradict the terms of the curse and serve as an obvious set up. And the story would then pivot toward this new plot explanation, taking away from the crucial and still-developing Quebec Bill/Wild Bill relationship.

I decided that what we offer in the film is sufficient—to provide viewers with a glimpse into Cordelia’s magical world of predictions and malevolent supernatural phenomena. She explains that Caracjou is cursed—and we see it. We see that he can’t be killed and that he has strange features, like the gnarled hand. We may wonder what’s up when Carcajou’s eyes tear up upon seeing Wild Bill’s last name, “Bonhomme,” written in his school book copy of Paradise Lost. Does he see a family connection in that moment?

Of course, we also see Carcajou’s curse broken, during the film’s flashback into the woods, when Cordelia finally looks him in the eye, calls him by his name, and spills his blood. He ages, finally, and dies. Cordelia knew what was required, as she said earlier.

Some scratch their heads at all this, so I took comfort when, after an Enosburg screening, I asked a five year-old boy how he liked the film.

“Cordelia’s a witch,” he said, as his astonished parents looked on. “Not a bad one, but she sees things other people can’t see. That’s why she knew how to get rid of Carcajou.”

Similarly, at a recent screening to high school students, at the Governor’s Institute for the Arts, a teenager asked, Why does Carcajou die the fourth time he’s killed but not before?”

“Because he’s cursed,” several students responded simultaneously.

“And Cordelia knew how to break the curse,” said another. “She called his name.”

“Terrific,” I said. “You guys get the twenty dollar prize.” Then I thought to myself how people I’ve known, who’ve died, remain very much alive, although in different ways. They move in and out of my thoughts and dreams and daydreams—for better or worse. Sometimes they haunt me. Is there something of a ghost story at work in Disappearances?

Again, when Cordelia sees the snow owl and says, “You’re back,” does she sense the return of the person and/or spirit of Carcajou/William Goodman? A woman at the South Hero screening speculated even further. “Is it Carcajou,” she asked, “that Cordelia obliquely references when she tells Wild Bill, “I loved a man once. A fine brave soldier whom I killed on the Common before I ever saw his face.” Could it be that some spiritual, magical, literal, ironic, and/or metaphorical truth is being expressed here? And that Carcajou’s strange curse and disappearance and inability to die a natural death could also be linked to his having been a soldier? More on that later.

I recently saw Connor McPherson’s compelling new play, Shining City, with its hints of the supernatural in everyday life. It lingers with me and I made some connections to Disappearances. In the play, we’re presented with images seen and not seen. The main character John’s meetings with his deceased wife Mari are similar to his interactions with the play’s other characters who, like him, suffer chronic disconnectedness and miscommunication.

In Shining City, John describes how he sought to fill the void of disconnectedness before Mari's death. "You go searching," says John, thinking out loud. "…not searching, I wasn't going anywhere searching for anything, but I think I was always slightly waiting, you know?" This theme of disconnectedness resonates in modern life—and the play provides an opportunity for audiences to make use of the character psychologies to explore personal meanings.

So, too, in Disappearances, where the theme of loss joins one of disconnectedness (in various of the characters and relationships). Like my own futile searching for a lost father, Quebec Bill’s search, after a time, also becomes a kind of “slightly waiting.” His soliloquy at night around the campfire shows how the ghost of his abandoning father remains, fifty years later—and it exists outside of literal and physical reality. Quebec Bill’s father has become a creature of dreams and nightmares and delusional outbursts.

Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum’s new book, Ghost Hunters provides further context for this idea of a ghost story. Blum details how a number of celebrated 19th century intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winning scientist Charles Richet, pursued and affirmed notions of contact with the dead. This notion remained current even into the 20th Century, especially in a remote rural place like northern Vermont. And even the experts concluded, after 25 years of study, that the Creator had simply “intended this department of nature to remain baffling.” Might Carcajou be a medium for William Shakespeare Goodman, as much as his physical embodiment? Possibly.

Cordelia grapples with her ghosts by looking beyond what is visible--and conjuring them. And she’s intimate with the imagined worlds of Milton, Emerson, Shakespeare, and the Greeks, where images of ghosts and even patricide and incest abound. Indeed, Cordelia’s voices sometimes seem as if they’re coming from another world. And, indeed, her closing comments are taken from Emerson: “Mine and yours. Mine, not yours. Earth endures.”

Doesn’t Quebec Bill’s lifelong search for his father parallel our own (often impossible) quests that occupy our imaginations, unsettled emotions, or subconscious lives? Again, I think of the almost childlike expression on Quebec Bill’s face after Cordelia confronts Carcajou. It suggests to me that his quest is resolved. It’s finally all right. A spell is lifted.

Some people have wondered about Caracjou’s changing costumes, especially his successive Union and Confederate officer’s uniforms from the U.S. Civil War. In Mosher’s novel, Carcajou wears a Union officer’s uniform as he maneuvers a cannon into position above the lake. We nearly mobilized an authentic Civil War cannon for the scene, but that’s another story—and perhaps a clue into one of the elements we could not translate from the novel into the film.

But I was taken with Howard’s Mosher’s Civil War imagery and I saw that Carcajou was old enough to have served in that terrible human conflagration, during which Vermonters suffered and died in numbers, per capita, that exceeded any other state. Judging from how he ages after Cordelia breaks his curse, William Goodman would have been in his late teens or early twenties when the Civil War broke out. It’s very likely he would have served.

I want to return to my observation, prompted by the comment by the South Hero woman I mentioned earlier. Cordelia tells Wild Bill, “I loved a man once, William. A fine brave soldier whom I killed on the Common, before I ever saw his face.” Wild Bill isn’t sure what to make of Cordelia’s enigmatic disclosure. But this element in Mosher’s story, which I developed a bit further, was prompted by my understanding of that devastating war between fellow countrymen that remains in many ways unresolved and steeped in our culture even today.

Did Caracjou fight in the Civil War? Could that be where he picked up his curse? Didn’t everyone who survived carry something terrible away from those battlefields?

According to Civil War researcher Kris Hirst, recent studies based on data in the U.S. National Archives indicate that 43% of Civil War veterans experienced mental health problems throughout their lives. The nature of Civil War combat caused very specific dysfunctions. “Each of the Civil War companies was made up of men from regional neighborhoods and thus included family members and friends,” Hirst writes. “Men also readily identified with enemy, who were, after all, fellow countrymen and sometimes represented family members and acquaintances. Finally, close-quarters conflict, including hand-to-hand combat without trenches or other barriers was a common field tactic.” Likewise, point blank shootings of men lined up ten or twenty yards from each other. Killings in this kind of brutal warfare reached levels exceeding 25,000 men per day in places like Gettysburg and Antietam.

While the resulting mental illness and trauma were recognized as “irritable heart” syndrome, there was little or no treatment for the maladies men brought away from this war. Many simply wore it as an inescapable curse and lived with drugs, alcohol, or varying degrees of violence, madness, and mental illness for the rest of their lives. Many studies indicate that these illnesses only intensified with age.

Might his Civil War experience be why Carcajou/William Goodman abandoned his family, preyed on others, and fled back to his ancestors’ homeland in Canada? Might his alternating Union and Confederate uniforms be linked to his disdain for officers on both sides? Or might it be linked to what Hirst’s study found—that many Civil War soldiers felt a kinship to the enemy? And might this also contribute to Cordelia’s comment that “I loved a man once, William, a fine brave soldier, whom I killed…before I ever saw his face.”

Finally, could William Goodman/Carcajou’s curse only be lifted through death? And did he perhaps even perish in the war or its tortured aftermath – but refuse to truly die in the tormented memories of his loved ones—only to return as a ghost that requires some final resolution? And, repeating my earlier notion, might Carcajou have actually been a medium for the departed William Goodman, perhaps after having killed him during a smuggling skirmish? These ideas continue to circulate for me—even as they interact with mythic notions of the loup garou.

Several months before Disappearances production I started work on a documentary film about the human impact of combat on WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq war veterans. And I researched similar consequences from the Civil War, and used that war’s soldiers’ letters and quotes in the documentary. There’s no question that for many, the challenge of the post-war equaled that of combat. For some, there would be no relief from the war’s curse until death. For other, the challenge was to look straight into their lingering pain, and to find voice and meaning and vulnerability—to call it by its name.

I don’t offer these as definitive explanations, since I’ve structured the film to remain open and fluid in its meanings. But these thoughts of war and its effects were working through my mind, prompted by Howard Mosher’s images. I allowed them to find subtextual expression in Carcacjou’s costume and character. I sometimes think of European filmmakers like French New Wave master Claude Chabrol whose psychological thrillers often include references to the French wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Chabrol sees cultural and character strains that continue to resonate, years later. He includes these visual and cultural clues, without literal embellishment, because he sees how the complex and troubled past can help reveal character and inform the present.

I like to see my job as posing rather than answering questions. If I’m successful, the audience can find their own meanings for the film, in its mainstream or in its margins. I’m reminded of what Cordelia says, during the classroom scene, when she asks Wild Bill “the point” of a passage from Paradise Lost. Wild Bill comes up dry. “I didn’t know it had a point,” he says.

“Everything has a point,” she replies. “You just need to know how to look for it.”

Like Wild Bill and Cordelia in the classroom, I sometimes feel like I’m parsing an epic poem as I explore the various layers in Mosher’s story and its film adaptation. And I’ve been intrigued by audience members who have done the same and found their own insights into characters’ psychologies and possible themes and allegories related to the disappearing natural world, alcoholism, gender, politics, history, climate change, and more. I think there are many ways to approach the story.

I’ve spent the past six years looking for the “points” in “Disappearances.” I’m still searching. And I don’t claim to have any objective truth about this rich and evocative story. That night in Austin, I found and followed a few leads. And I’ve pursued many more since then. The experience of finally having audiences to share the experience prompted these thoughts. At a recent event in Waitsfield, an audience member asked whether Cordelia was real or an apparition. “It could go either way,” I said. “I feel that she’s real but has the power to inject herself into Wild Bill’s thoughts, as we see during the trip. Or the kid experiences her so vividly that he can conjure her. I’m sure we all conjure people in our waking and sleeping life. But because Cordelia’s interaction in the film is almost exclusively with the kid, you could see her as a spirit that appears only to him, too.”

Another man asked what the snow owl means. I asked him and others to tell me what they think. Immediately, people spoke up. “The owl’s a messenger,” said one. “A witness,” said another. “It’s Carcajou making his presence known,” said a woman in the back of the theater.

Others offered their thoughts. “A sign of passage or transition.” “Extinction.” Death.” A fellow in the second row said, “It’s just a snow owl. But they’re extremely rare here, coming down from the far north only very occasionally—and then leaving after mud season. That might be a sign in itself.”

Another person asked whether the film’s ending was “real.”

“Real?” I asked. “The scene where Carcajou is hit by Wild Bill’s ferocious throw of the ax? Then is up and walking around a moment later, only to be felled and aged and disappeared a moment after that? I guess it depends on what you consider to be real.”

“I mean, was it a flashback or a fantasy?” the person continued.

“That’s up to you,” I said. “I think it plays either way.” I was pleased to hear so many fertile thoughts. “All of these ideas work,” I said.

Another viewer rose after a screening in Essex, Vermont, “I’d bet that every person in this audience has a different interpretation of the film,” she said.

In finding a life for this story on film, I needed to orchestrate and sustain a dance between the narrative’s magical and realistic physical elements, so that neither one overwhelms the other. This is essential to keep them both in play—but it does invite some questions that audience members probably have to answer for themselves.

Like Wild Bill and Cordelia in the classroom, I sometimes feel like I’m parsing an epic poem as I explore the various layers in Mosher’s story and its film adaptation. I’ve been intrigued by audience members who have done the same and found their own insights into characters’ psychologies. Some posit themes and allegories related to the disappearing natural world, alcoholism, gender, contemporary politics, history, climate change, and more. I think there are many ways to approach the story.

I’ve spent the past six years looking for the “points” in “Disappearances.” I’m still searching. And I don’t claim to have any objective truth about this rich and evocative story. That night in Austin, I found and followed a few leads. And I’ve pursued many more since then. The experience of finally having audiences to share the experience prompted these thoughts.

I’ve tried to leave story elements like these open, as Howard Mosher did. This open-endedness is central to the story. After all, Cordelia tells us early on, “Disappearances and extinctions are matters of human perception. Illusion and reality are interchangeable.”

Future screenings will continue to open doors, I’m sure. Please pursue whatever you see to your own conclusions. I hope that the film remains “open” enough for you to do so. And rich enough to stimulate your imagination and prompt you to trust your own instincts.

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