Welcome to Cahaba Falls (Pilot) Part 2

The second half of the (special full-hour) pilot episode starts with lilting violins ⎯ tamed fiddles, you know, backwoods with books, signalling the move, the show’s move, that is, from the back-paths and woods of Cahaba Falls to its chillier, plaster-walled indoors.

We’re in a tall room of right angles ⎯ already you know we’re somewhere official, or at least an old room where someone official has carved out a place to be official, to make fear. People have been fired here, you think. Like I say, though, I don’t know you.

There’s a wide shot of a long oak table viewed from the side-middle, if you get me, the glossy wood reflecting the dozen or so people sitting stoop-shouldered around it. Our interest, though, the camera’s interest as it slowly creeps in, is the lunar, luminescent face of Janey Frizzo, who is lolling her head back and forth like you do when you’re seven and stuck in church.
We pull back and see a thirtysomething thin-lipped woman droning at the head of the table and she’s definitely the preacher in Janey’s church. She speaks in a condescending, middle-management cadence: “For too long now, we’ve been sloppy, you guys. We just haven’t held ourselves to the standards we know we can meet. The ones I feel not only as department chair but also as your friend, colleague, facilitator, and if need-be your champion,” and there’s a snort from somebody ⎯ everybody’s eyes dance around, but she goes on: “but, we must be accountable. Yes, accountable. To the greater college and to our students who,” and here Janey’s formerly luminous face looks like it itches, “let’s not forget, are why we’re here.” This last part just drips across the table.

The gruff-but-sensible-looking woman beside Janey leans over and not-quite-whispers, “Aren’t we all here for the two-fifty a week?” She sits back, hard. “Bitch.” And Janey smiles grandly but leans back, breathing through her mouth. The badass
beside her clearly reeks.

Sam ⎯ the “facilitator” ⎯ doesn’t hear this woman, or pretends not to, plows on. “Our lack of central standards has long troubled me.” Other people ⎯ teachers, we assume ⎯ shift in their seats and do eye-things to indicate noncommittal dissent to their neighbors.

Sam goes on about standards and tests and I won’t bore you with the officious dialogue; the director here is clearly trying to test our patience, and as a longtime fan of what they call auteur television I’m cool with that but I’ve got things to do so I’ll get to the good part: this woman stands up, this small fantastic-looking woman with choppy burnt-umber hair and a matching Harley-Davidson t-shirt and Edith Head glasses ⎯ you want her to be smoking like Tallulah Bankhead ⎯ grabs at the air like she’s snatching a foreign curse out of the ether. “This is bullshit,” she says in a gravel voice low and scratchy. She looks like an archival photo of some Weimar anarchist, but she’s not German, just scary. Her voice makes you wonder like you do when you’re talking to an Israeli (is that accent French? German?), wonder where this woman comes from, but I’ll go ahead and tell you it’s nowhere you know.

Janey’s head snaps up at the "bullshit" and she leans back and shoots a glance to this hot post-fratboy on the other side of Margaret. The guy’s widened his eyes and he grins at Janey and his amazing pecs are stretching a t-shirt from some obscure bar. He raises an eyebrow at Janey and she giggles behind her hand. The Edith Head anarchist yells, “Tests! You’re obsessed with scoring tests but care nothing of EDUCATION!” And she storms out muttering vague foreign curses and another teacher, a busty hippie-looking woman, calls out, “Abbey!” But the woman’s gone.

After a long painful vacuum, Sam says, “Yes,” all file-shuffling and red-faced. “Well. We’re all entitled to our opinions, aren’t we. What did Twain say? Um,” and she sits down and leaps back up and says, “Another time.”

And Janey giggles again but suppresses it she shoots delight-glances at the hottie again and she glows like a paper lantern, thrilled by the spectacle. She grins at him as if to say, “This place is FANTASTIC!” you know, that infectious influx of joy you feel when people start getting naked at a pool party. The guy grins back and the screen goes black. Look at me dropping rhymes.

Opening credits. Very moving. You should always watch them; it's like the backwards-counting the hypnotist does to take you under. The slow dreamy images, the Emmylou Harris song, it all takes you into Cahaba Falls.

After the credits we get a dusky shot of Tina and the two girls sitting on a low mound, yellowed grass and scattered piles of bricks, the tree line behind them perfectly still. Katie is fingering her all-too-ironic rosary and Sarah is picking at her fingernails.
Sarah tilts her head. “Yeah, but is there a difference between them? Or is it just a marketing thing? I don’t mind, I just want to know.”

Tina narrows her eyes and says ⎯ presumably for our benefit ⎯ “A qualitative difference, you mean, between fancy and extra-fancy ketchups.” She waits for a reply.

“Yes. I mean, some packets are labeled one, some the other.”

“Well, yes, Sarah, the extra-fancy is so labeled because it’s GM ⎯ you know, genetically modified,” and Tina seems like a bitch here but Sarah’s dumb, which is irresistible.

The camera swings behind them so we’re behind the girls as they sit on the mound, silhouetted against the brightness of the pre-dusk radiance and the line of SUVs parked along the winding road up to Cocheron Hall, the enormous dorm, and dozens of good-looking ⎯ like, WB hot ⎯ are dashing in and out of the Hall and the SUVs and unloading, making tortured goodbye conversations with parents that are mercifully muted for us and Tina says, “It’s like the line of station wagons at the beginning of White Noise.”

The other girls look at her and they ⎯ and we ⎯ think she’s pretty pretentious but then she adds, “Didn’t y’all read it? It was assigned for Freshman Seminar.”

Katie asks, “There were assignments? For the summer?” but Sarah jumps in, leaning behind Tina to say to Katie, “That reminds me, roomie,” over-pronouncing roomie ironically, you know, affectionately, “I have this Sharper Image white noise thing. I’m totally addicted to the Ocean Waves setting but I can fall asleep to any of them, except Babbling Brook, cause on that one you can hear each individual drop of water and it totally makes you have to pee like, all night.” She stops suddenly like she knows she shouldn’t talk.

But the outburst has made the other girls like her more. We’ve switched to a front view and Katie says, “I’m sure Ocean Waves are fine,” and you know her kindness and tolerance are the show’s way of letting you know that she’s not goth in a scary way.
We shift again, and there’s an ambulance with no siren or lights trying to make its way against the current of SUVs, having to drive two wheels on the grass, the parents apparently too busy unloading egg crates and tiny fans to move. Katie says, “Ambulance with no sirens, leaving campus. Must be that body you found.”

And she looks over at Tina with that shit ⎯ sorry look like you do when you done fucked up, as my brother would say, and

Tina says, “Yeah. Wonder who she was.”

We’re facing them now and it’s getting darker, like sped-up TV time, and the mossy trees behind the girls start to move just a little, in the finally-dusk breezes that come in late summer, and the moss-mist shifts in a gray and white chorus and you’re waiting for them to step out and narrate or something and you can tell that this dusky time is the time that counts in Cahaba Falls. The dark music ⎯ once again some strings that hang like the moss ⎯ builds and twists and the girls staring off seem suddenly dense with some kind of tangible anxiety that Sarah finally breaks by saying, “Yeah, me too ⎯ I mean, wonder who she was.”

Tina looks drunk. “She was ⎯ ” a long pause – “A woman in a black dress. With sandals. Black, smart-lady sandals. Her face was bloody.”

The other girls are sure shut up by this. Once again, how can you follow someone who just found a corpse? And they sit there for a long time and the light dims and reddens as the sun sets and the earth seems to burn back up and Sarah says, “Did you see that longhair in our dorm? Daniel? I think he’s on our floor. Usually I hate hippies but this boy was FINE.” And she says it like you’re supposed to say it, like FAHN.

Tina grimaces.

The sunset, or gloaming if I may this once, seems for the first time a little threatening. But don’t trust me on that; I know the future.

That’s a joke.



In the next shot Eleanor is sitting on the Barton House porch in a rocking chair in the half-light of the same spooky sunset and she’s scribbling in her journal like a good college girl and then this boy walks out on the porch and you know I have to take just a moment to say that this is the kind of boy who makes you fall in love with nighttime television again, with his supernatural good looks, his blow-dried 70s porn star hair and to tell you the truth, he looks a lot like the hot guy Janey was making eyes at in the meeting ⎯ it makes me wonder whether that’s intentional, like all the doubles on Twin Peaks. Or maybe the casting director just has a yen for things like ginormous pecs. I just don’t know.

Anyway, Eleanor sees this boy, this hot boy who looks just a little bit too old to be at college and she’s clearly helpless, our sharp-tongued heroine incapable of speech before this stud with shorts and calves and I won’t go on. The only-on-TV boy sits down on the top step and he’s wearing a Pixies t-shirt but once again, television’s genius is that you never know whether something like a t-shirt is supposed to signify something important about a character or maybe it was just some costume department PA’s last-minute choice for something capital-H “Hip” to slap on a college student. The boy sits down, as I said, and he looks off in the distance even though the close trees make the sunset more atmospheric than a thing to look at, so probably he’s just blurring his eyes.

Finally, without turning around to face Eleanor in her chair, the dreamy guy says, “Hey,” and Eleanor says, “Hey,” and he says, “I’m Brandon,” and they both sit there for a second before Eleanor remembers to jump in with her name.

He says, “You’re new here,” and he says it like a statement, which is really hot but kind of annoying, such confident charisma. Borders on bravado.

But after Eleanor says that Yes, she is new, Brandon turns around and we get a close-up and he’s smiling, warm, all comfortably-yellowed but perfect teeth, and he says, “You’re Eleanor, right? I heard about you.”

Eleanor’s face twists sour, as it tends to do. She looks like she’s about to tell him to mind his own effing business but Brandon reads the look and says, “Louis is an old friend. Our RA? He told me about you – said you were worth talking to.”

After she visibly relaxes Brandon adds, “Also, your brother’s hot, apparently.”

Eleanor laughs. “People say that. Then he speaks.”

“And you’re living with him?”

"Odd, I know,” she says, heading him off at the pass. “But we’re not all gross like Chang and Eng or Donny and Marie. It just worked out this way. Our father threw him out, and then went to jail, and,” and she stops talking midsentence the way television characters do when they realize they’ve said too much and don’t want to ruin future plot twists, where you or I would just keep talking and make asses of ourselves.

They sit for a moment before Brandon says, “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”

They sit there and the crickets are not only loud but beautifully syncopated, enervating, so enervating that Brandon pushes a little further, asks, “What about your mom?” Now, as we’ll see, there’s a reason for his question but for now it seems pretty tacky, I mean, me, I always assume people are orphans until they tell me otherwise. You never want to assume a parent and then get that crestfallen look. But Brandon has a craving for exposition and Eleanor is cool with him, just sighs and says, “She disappeared ages ago. Galen and I were raised by hired help.”

I guess she says this because “raised by nannies” is such TV shorthand for rich that it’s a cliché. Brandon finally turns completely around, spins really, into crossed-legged informality and he asks, “Wanna go for a walk?”

And she says, “Yes,” way too quickly to be cool. He doesn’t seem to mind.

They both get up and the crickets give way to guitars and drums, that jangly music that makes you long for road trips, mix tapes, stupid flings, and Brandon and Eleanor walk around Barton House and after the porch ends the high white wall and arched windows – some already curtained or mini-blinded by students, but most still big tall empties. This otherwise unadorned side of Barton, the side that looks institutional, prompts Eleanor to say, “Deja vu.”

The camera leaves Brandon and Eleanor as they walk down the path behind Barton House and it rises ⎯ we rise ⎯ up that north windowed wall to the attic, its tiny round eye-window (it has one on each side, I’ll just go ahead and tell you) and through the window, into the room of Barton House’s fey RA Louis, and the room is all velours and faux Mapplethorpe posters, “erotic” framed photos of men’s clavicles and calves and whatnot – I’m not a doctor – and a [SPOILER!] Shaker desk, a roll-top which Louis opens, and he slides out the writing surface, which is covered in silk swatches and tea lights and strange little statues of tiny deities in weird positions, and Louis reaches down and opens a drawer and pulls out a tall black candle, then two more, and sets them in a triangle and lights them with a long stick of Nag Champa (the blue-and-red box every stoner recognizes) and the music swells, really thigh-clenching rock-and-roll with no voices, and Louis, the three candles lit, bows to the altar, cause that’s clearly what this it, and we watch his lips move as the flames from those black candles and those tea lights that are too close to the silk for my comfort, not that I was that comfortable to begin with once I saw a fat Wiccan in the pilot episode of this show but bear with me, gentle non-viewer ⎯ anyway, the flames start to rise as the music rises, strings and organs and drums in crescendo and driving like the E-Street band when they’re building to their money-shot power chord and Louis is bowing and the flames are now at least a foot high and then the screen, of course, goes black.



And instantly we’re in another shrouded and statue-crowded space, a courtyard with a couple of cement tables ⎯ you know, the round kind with the three curved benches ⎯ with coffee cans overflowing with sand and cigarette butts.

The sun is setting here too but in a place like this, dusk’s not mysterious, just the trigger for different kinds of desperation. The camera settles into the Zodiac Stables set, and the stalls, crammed with statues, lamps, and other broken appliances instead of horses, frame the open middle, all torn-down demolition chic, the courtyard (where horses were once groomed or shoed, I guess) is town-dance cute, with high roofless beams (GTUGBB member DramaQn points out the Zodiac set’s apparent “homage to Trevor Nunn’s Oklahoma revival” in the “opened-up barnyard aesthetic” – I say fine) that make it clear this Zodiac Stables is heavier on the stables than the zodiac. But that’s another story for another episode.

At one of these round tables, our round-faced teacher Janey is red-faced and half-drunk, Rolling Rock in front of her (love the product placements), and beside her sits a distracted bobbed-blonde with a cigarette dangling from her mouth and a lit lighter about six inches away from its tip ⎯ she takes forever to bring the two together at last and she pulls in the smoke, gives a look of pure bliss and satisfaction, exhales. She looks relaxed for a second but then drops the lighter, lets the cigarette dangle as she scratches her arm fiendishly.

“Rash?” asks Janey.

“Dope sick,” says the blonde with a grin, her vowels long and lazy, a true Alabama accent.

“Jenny Lee...”

“Don’t give me any shit. It’s just time to switch meds. Back to Xanax again.”

Janey smiles. “God’s own palindrome.”

Jenny Lee sighs, but contentedly. “If I could just stop bouncing between those goddam x’s.”

They sit and grin and Janey sucks down her Rolling Rock but Jenny Lee’s absently stirring something short and milky-brown with cherries – I guess not hitting the liquor too hard, not with the pills. She says, “So how was the old gang? Did Margaret show?”

“Oh God, yes,” says Janey. “Stank like bathtub gin.”

“Bathtub gin?” Jenny Lee takes a sip. “They still drink that, you say?”

“I was feelin a little Zelda just then.” She adds absently, “You know, she burned to death, Zelda Fitzgerald.”

“That’s sweet,” says Jenny Lee, eye-rolling and arm-scratching.

Janey takes the last swig off her bottle, and Jenny Lee waves her hand at the waitress, who nods and leaves. “So,” Janey says,
“Paul’s back, and looks good.”

“Oh yeah?”

The waitress, in a Def Leppard t-shirt and apron, returns with another Rolling Rock for Janey. “You want anything?” she asks Jenny Lee.

“Thanks, hon, naw.”

“You got it, boss,” the waitress says as she leaves. And Janey says, “I can’t believe you own this place now.” And you’re like I get it! She owns it! She’s the boss! Pilots can really suck.

“Well,” Janey adds, “be glad you left the department.”

“Brood of vipers?”

“Still.”

“Well,” says Jenny Lee, lighting one off the other again, unnecessarily, “there’s always room for you here.”

“I’d make a great beer wench,” says Janey, and she giggles again.

“You bet.” Jenny Lee sits and smokes for a minute. The juke box is playing something generic.

Janey drinks again and says, “It’s bad, Jenny. Worse than when Jack ran the place.”

“Ugh.”

“Well,” says Janey, “it’s no wonder Margaret’s drunk all the time.”

“You know why that caged bird drinks.”

Janey laughs her helium laugh and says, “You’re not allowed to quote Maya Angelou.”

Jenny Lee looks thoughtful through the smoke. “I’m pretty sure I can quote her,” she says. “I just can’t say I get her. That’s like…” She trails off.

“Like having a Sweet Honey in the Rock ringtone.”

Jenny Lee throws a matchbook at her. "It was pretty."

Janey titters. "Pretty lame."

They drink and smoke, respectively, till Janey starts that slow bubbling giggle again and says, “Christ, though ⎯ Abbey Northanger was there.”

Jenny Lee brightens. “Abbey?”

“She stormed out of the meeting because Tribble ⎯ you remember Sam, the passive-aggressive one who tried to French you at the Halloween party.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Well now she’s chair. And she wants to test our students. Get this: she designs the essay test, and she grades it, and her grade overrides ours. It’s bullshit. That was Abbey’s word.”

“God bless her,” says Jenny. “Who says academics can’t be fun?”

“Flannery O’Connor. She said ‘The theories are worse than the furies.’”

Jenny takes a long drink. “Well, she would.”


“So how long have you been at Cahaba Falls?” asks Eleanor as she and Brandon walk down a dense, vine-choked path, really a tunnel through kudzu.

“Well,” starts Brandon as he reaches behind to take Eleanor’s hand ⎯ it’s getting darker and darker ⎯ and pulls her through the Spanish moss. “I’ve been here a week, probably, at Barton House, I mean. But I’ve been here before.”

“As a student?”

“No ⎯ just ⎯ traveling.”

And they come to a clearing ⎯ they’ve moved in a direction vaguely toward but past the cemetery and Brandon says, “Wait’ll you see this.”

Their hands let go as the trees part and there’s little more light, a spectral light on a weird half-house ⎯ the ruins of a house, really, like a tornado ripped half to leave a cross-section with exposed rooms sinking into one another, loose boards and bricks everywhere and a grand half-spiral staircase still winding up to a second-floor balcony that hangs in pieces. Kudzu and cat’s briar strangles what’s left of the walls and beams of the house, which Brandon says is “the Bell House ⎯ destroyed, or halfway, by some weird storm in the 1930s. It was haunted even before that, though, according to the histories…”

“Yeah,” says Eleanor, eyes sparkling. “The Bell murder.”

Brandon looks at her approvingly. “Also known as the Bell Resurrection.”

Here Eleanor really does raise an eyebrow, mightily. “Resurrection?”

“Sure.” He’s trying to get her excited.

She gives in to his history foreplay, says, “OK, tell me.”

“Well – you know about the Bell Murder, when Martha was allegedly killed by her husband.”

“She was allegedly killed?”

“Allegedly by her husband. He was found not guilty.” He’s swatting gnats as he talks. “By that time, though, Martha’d been buried in her family plot, not the Bell plot. Her clan, the Hunters – ”

“Nice name.”

“Right? Anyway, they were convinced Bell had done it, but once the court cleared Bell they had to get justice on their own.”

“Get justice? I question your objectivity.”

“That’s fine,” Brandon says. “It all ended in a shootout right here in front of the house. People were hiding behind their curtains up and down the street and by the end of it the Bells were all dead.” He points up at a second-floor window-hole with shards of glass sticking out of its edges. “Jack Bell was killed looking out of that window ⎯ his daughter was up peeking around him when she got shot in the face.”

Eleanor whistles as she looks around. “Fantastic.”

He looks at her with a raised eyebrow and for a second I wonder if he’s making fun of her brows but he finally laughs a little, to let her know he gets her, I guess.

They stand there for a minute, enjoying the historical creep-out, and then low and slowly there’s music, dim, from the trees beyond the house, out past the woods, and the camera follows Brandon and Eleanor to the treeline and it’s an accordion playing. Not a geeky accordion noise, but mournful gypsy music, and we get closer to and through, into, the trees and moss and we see down the hill a group of people standing all Polanski'd out in dark red Satanic-looking robes ⎯ academic, we rationalize, since Bee and several other professors in the backgrounds of scenes have been dashing around in overdramatic bright robes ⎯ and we see Bee, and Susan Forrest, whose DKNY pantsuit is covered in a matching dark robe and beside her are other older women and bearded men and Abbey Northanger, her dyed hair shimmering in the firelight of, like, 10,000 candles on a rock pile, an altar, I guess, and you’re expecting to start hearing Ruth Gordon chanting or blabbing about tannis root but instead the robed people, probably a dozen or so, start singing “Blue Moon” and they sound pretty good ⎯ they probably double as a faculty chorus ⎯ with the accordion humming along ⎯ “You left me standing alone ⎯ ”

And the camera is facing Brandon and Eleanor and it pans down so we see Brandon take Eleanor’s hand and Eleanor murmurs, “Weird.”

And slam to black. And commercials. Mute them.




It’s the last act, as they say, of the pilot, and it opens after ⎯ sorry to harp on this, but ⎯ an exorbitant number of commercials letting you know who the network thinks is watching ⎯ iPods, other shows with big-lipped teen girls in swimsuits, a Tampax ad in which a crazed woman actually approaches other women in a grocery store and pesters them about foul-smelling pads, I swear to God. Anyway, it opens on the shot from earlier ⎯ again, time’s gone wonky ⎯ of the three girls: apparently Christian-youth Sarah, goth Katie, and normal redhead Tina, sitting on the mound and watching the sunset. And a group of people pass by in like three-fourths motion, once again to guitar-organ trip-hop synth-pop, I think. And one boy hangs back and the group goes on out of frame but this boy ⎯ a little punk kid in an army jacket and striped socks and a long flaccid toboggan that lets out shocks of hot-pink hair ⎯ stays back and he’s in slo-mo as he pulls out a cigarette pack like a classic rebel, like James Dean or Judd Nelson, and his lower lip is pierced and he removes a cigarette and lights it and walks towards the girls and Katie says quietly, “Oh my god. My favorite look ⎯ built like a band-aid, all thin and wispy but thicker at the middle ⎯” here she raises and lowers her eyebrows, attempting lasciviousness but achieving Groucho ⎯ “you know, wide street-kid hips.”

Sarah looks grossed out by Katie but intrigued by the punky kid.

And the boy comes up and drags off his cigarette and says, “Hey,” and lifts his chin and his eyebrows like he’s just delivered a soliloquy, and it’s clear pretty fast that he’s either stupid or stoned or both, in any case you don’t care and neither do the girls who call back, “Hey,” like they’re saying Hosannah.

And this boy, this beautiful boy, this sexually ambiguous Jordan Catalano, stands there by them for a long period of nothing except the music we hear. Finally he says, “I’m Gabe. “Y’all wanna get high?” And the three girls light up like pageant finalists, all hope and hunger, even Sarah, who you know can’t have ever gotten high but is clearly into whatever her new best friends want to do.


From that group assembling for their off-to-get-high walk, there’s a quick switch to a shot of Barton House’s empty foyer, no music except for a low hum like a box fan on a wood floor. The camera glides up the wide curving staircase to the second floor balcony, still just the stomach-rumbling hum and around the balcony, which circumscribes, I guess you’d say, the atrium that is the grand foyer. And the camera moves around to a shot of a cute boy with gigantic brown eyes sitting in the hallway, reading some falling apart paperback by the dim light of the half-broken chandelier. And we can hear grunting, moaning, annoying sex noises from inside the door beside the boy and the noises finally force the boy and to snap shut his paperback (a pause here shows he’s reading The Portable Nietzsche, as if) and stalk off past us ⎯ I was worried for a second that the camera might be a character here, like at the beginning of Halloween when you’re inside that cute kid’s mask. But the camera swoops past the boy to the closed door and we hear Daniel’s voice say, “Awwww,” like he’s letting go of something, you know. And you hear Di whoop a rebel yell, and the front door slams in the distance.


Another quick shot to Tina leading the two girls and dreamboat through the Capitol Ruins, some classical-looking wall remains and broken columns, lit intermittently by moonlight and a flashlight shakily held by Tina, obviously the only one sensible enough to have brought a flashlight.

In the middle of the ruins Gabe says, “I like here,” hitting the here, and the three girls sit, obedient as Manson’s gals. Shows where sharp hip-bones will get you. Gabe sits more slowly and takes Tina’s flashlight ⎯ I mean, she offers it up to him.

He places the flashlight on its end so it shines straight up and illuminates just a sliver of everything. Their faces are hard to distinguish from one another. Gabe pulls out a joint so scraggly and bent-up that you almost feel sorry for Gabe, or the show, depending.

He lights it, takes in and out an amazing amount of smoke, passes it to Tina and says, “Like I said, I’m Gabe,” clearly wanting their names, you know. His lip-ring flashes as the joint flares ⎯ Tina clearly knows her way around a joint, bent-up or not ⎯ and she holds it in forever, sitting up straighter, till the smoke trails out of her mouth and nose all sexy and French because clearly our heroine has hit that point in an shitty day where you just don’t care anymore.

With smoke in her voice Tina says her name and the two girls look at her like Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty ⎯ and Tina passes the joint to Katie, who says her name and takes a respectable hit and passes it to Sarah ⎯ we’re in the middle of the circle following the joint a la That 70s Show but we can see the joint and this will not become a “bit” on the show, I swear.

Sarah takes it and looks at it, says, “I don’t know how to do this.” Cute, right?

Gabe laughs this cooler-than-thou laugh that kind of turns you off and on at the same time and Tina reaches over, ignoring him, and takes the joint, says, “Here, let me show you.” She drags the smoke in deep. “Breathe it into your diaphragm.” And you worry for a second about the obligatory stupid-girl diaphragm joke but it doesn’t come and you sigh in relief as Sarah takes a tentative hit.



A quick cut and we’re back at Eleanor and Brandon, who are standing in the same spot watching the group of singing robed people (and one robed accordionist), who each (except the accordionist) pick up a bowl-shaped candle-holder and begin to move in not-quite single file towards the river below and we can start to hear the water rushing and humming and Eleanor and Brandon watch them for a minute, then glance at each other and begin to follow.

It’s a long scene, this walk down the bank through the vines and moss. The river soon takes over the screen and the music is barely discernible from the rushing water and the moss is languidly swinging in and out of frame and the robed people stand in a line beside the bank and at first it’s still the indistinct, the music that builds as Bee crouches, places his flickering candle in the eddy of water at the bank and this one woman, long brown hair and dark robe, starts sing this sweet familiar-sounding song and the others join in with perfect (almost rehearsed!) harmony, something-something “Oh Mothers let’s go down – Come on down – Don’t you wanna come down – Oh Mothers let’s go down – down to the river to pray – ”

And Eleanor whispers, “I know this song.”

And Brandon says, “Everybody does. It was in that Coen brothers movie ⎯ the one about the South.”

“Oh right. You couldn’t go into a record store in Birmingham without hearing that soundtrack.”

“Ugh.”

And all the while these robed people are singing this exquisite cascading mournful song and their candles are floating easy in the swirling river water and a slow pan up the procession line shows a couple of them with tears on cheeks, but before it can get too horribly sentimental we’re back at Brandon and Eleanor, and Eleanor’s eyebrow is arched again and she looks a little like you look when your boyfriend’s singing suckily. Brandon looks more concerned, all serious and handsome and flickering distant lights make the two seem spooked, even with Eleanor’s eyebrow skepticism and ⎯ might I add ⎯ the lingering stench of such a cool cult singing such a lame song.

They back away, the music swelling with offscreen mandolins and the screen slides black.



The kids are sitting at the ruins all silent and the three girls huddled together, Gabe sitting up on a column’s stump, silhouetted against the moon-bright sky. Hot.

The music is drifting up from the river. Katie breaks the silence. “They sang this song at a Pagan ritual I went to in Atlanta.”

“Yeah?” says Tina, clearly uneasy.

Katie nods. “It’s when I stopped believing in anything.”

Now they’re all creeped out. Katie snaps out of it and half-smiles, says, “That came out darker than I meant it. I went to this thing with this boy I liked and some famous witch was visiting from California and led this big spiral dance ⎯ you know, where you shimmy around holding hands and looking into everybody else’s eyes, which is awkward, and then everybody gets exhausted. There was also all this stuff about raising a cone of some sort.”

“A cone?”

“Of energy, I think. Anyway, they raised the cone and then everyone collapsed and then they sang that song ⎯” pointing at the air, towards the music ⎯ “from that movie, the one about Georgia.”

“O Brother, Where Art Thou,” says Sarah. “I think it was Mississippi.”

“Okay,” says Katie. “Then everybody went home, feeling like we’d done something to change the world. We’d prayed for world peace, of course.”

“Prayed?” asks Sarah.

“Or made. I don’t know.”

“So do you think you made a difference?” asks Tina.

“All I know is that we did it ust a few days before September 11, 2001.”

They all sit there for a second. Sarah says, “So that didn’t work.”

“Nope.”

They sit there and we wait for something to happen. It doesn’t.

Finally Katie speaks: “So where’d you find the body?”

“Body?” asks Gabe eagerly. His lip-ring shines in the moonlight.




From the dark Cahaba ruins we fade to the riverbank shimmering with candles. Bee is bending over and his beard almost touches the water. You can hear Abbey Northanger talking indistinctly. A couple of other voices sing “Arriverderci Roma” with the accordion. We pull back suddenly from the bank and flow backward downriver like the camera’s on a raft, faster around the bend and backward still down through rapids. We come to a widening in the river, a place where the water slows and we pull up into the sky and look down at the river and can now see in the moonlight the dead woman from earlier, a water-blackened robe wound around her and her arms crossed and tied to her chest with winding dark ribbon.




The floating body fades into the half-sunk belfry from earlier, and its bells are motionless in the windless August night, and GTUG goes so far as to give us a fish flipping out of the water under the moon. They were probably put in during post-production ⎯ the fish and the moon.

There’s no music at all for once, and we fly across the lake and through the trees, swooping behind Gabe and the girls walking down the path, Sarah’s flashlight cutting back and forth in front of them.

“Right up here, I think,” says Tina, and you can barely hear Gabe mutter, “Awesome.”

They come to the Pershing Well, what’s left of it, its low brick perimeter ringed by a larger boundary of yellow police tape, all officials having come and gone, and Gabe lifts the tape for the girls. They all approach the well and peer down ⎯ from their point of view we can see the well’s dark water looks bottomless, the moon artfully glimmering in its surface. Tina starts explaining where she found the body but we stay fixed on the water for a minute and the music rises with guitars beating hard and we pull back to the kids and the moonlit clearing, moss silver behind them and Sarah’s flashlight tracing the path of Tina’s story. Tina says something ⎯ again, we can’t hear their words ⎯ that makes the other girls laugh, and Sarah pitches backward when she laughs, stumbles and then falls back into the well, and these artesian wells are really shallow, with water piped up from under, but Sarah falls and keeps falling, sinks underwater and the water surges as if boiling but no bubbles or steam, just water brimming and then flooding the clearing, dark and swirling around their feet, and before Tina or Gabe or Katie can scream the music crescendoes and the screen goes black.