Ghost Town Under Ground

A message from Stella Jones

2006-04-12T20:29:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been getting all kinds of weirdness via email regarding finding our show on television, and all I can say is keep looking because it’s there. I watch GTUG every Tuesday night, and every Wednesday I start writing about it: it’s that good. And that good means it’s that easy to find, so keep looking.

My update of episode 3 is coming soon. It’s effed up.
Here's a preview, for those of you who missed ep 3: Yes, Sarah's disappeared, and what-the-fuckery ensues. Also, who is Eleanor (and Galen's) Mom? Will we see her? Doubtful.

Welcome to Cahaba Falls (Pilot) Part 2

2006-03-03T22:45:00.000-08:00

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.

Welcome To Cahaba Falls (Pilot) Part I

2006-02-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

Like all good Southern stories, our show starts with live oaks and Spanish moss trailing the ground and we slide through the trees to a narrow dirt road and down and down and the road ends, abruptly, in water, like a boat slip ⎯ and we move across the water with low hills around us and rising up out of the water is the belfry of a church, a stubby white Greek revival tower jutting up from the lake’s surface, improbably well-preserved, maybe twenty feet of tilted tower with several bells still hanging inside and tilting and chiming like it’s noon ⎯ and the music starts, a strange low woman’s voice and we move past the bell tower into the trees beyond, where it’s overgrown and misty, with that glare that comes when it’s just starting to get hot out.

The woman’s voice modulates down into something like a broken organ and the sound of tires on gravel as the trees dissolve into different trees, a red pickup truck coming down a wide road and in the cab sits a lumberjacky driver and beside him one of the hottest boys on television, like WB hot, and by the cracked window, her mouth open and sucking in air, hair stuck to her forehead, is Eleanor, who’s young and pretty but she's been given some clear "serious girl" markers, you know, unflattering frizzy hair (don't worry; her hair gets better) and a dominatrixy face, square-jawed and solemn with eyebrows that make her look skeptical or plucked to seem that way; either way you’re a little put off by her.

I’ll go ahead and tell you the hot boy in the middle's name is Galen. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t seen the whole first season already. That would get tedious. The first thing you notice about Galen is his mouth, under crazy sharp cheekbones this serpentine mouth that curls at the moment in disgust as he’s squeezed against the driver, a Grizzly Adams-looking man with a John Deere cap.

Galen looks terribly nervous or nauseous and they’re bouncing on bad shocks and then they come, the first words of Ghost Town Under Ground, even humbler than Twin Peaks’ “Gone fishin”: Grizzly the driver says, “Damn, ’s hot,” and it sounds like damsot and there’s a long pause where the Creek or Everwood would put some shitty song the Warner Brothers own, but GTUG gives us nervous silence, first-date-silence, then the gravel again and a low note pulsing on the organ.

We swing around so we’re seeing out the windshield but still in the truck cab, behind Grizzly, Galen, and Eleanor, and the street ahead of them is enormous, spread out and red dirt pounded down with gravel. There’s a couple of houses, back from the road, and even a half-trailer left to rot after being apparently snapped in two.

Galen’s squirming in his presumably ironic D.A.R.E. t-shirt. Eleanor, in her sensible v-neck, is now fully consumed by sweat ⎯ welcome to Alabama, right? There’s a long silence in the cab that seems to make everyone but Grizzly uneasy.

Eleanor squints out the window and says, “Blood Applied…” and Galen finishes: “Sins Forgiven Ministries.” And we swing around to see what they see, a squat blue house with a hand-painted sign with that gruesome name. As an Alabamian, I have to say I’ve seen way weirder and so what? Like my mother always said to people on television, “Hell yeah, we’re backwater! You’d hate it here! Stay in New Jersey!”

From the Blood Applied Ministry we move to the more mundane Baptist and Methodist “chapels” – you know, mini-churches for people like students or soldiers or prisoners ⎯ people who can’t afford to tithe the place afloat.

Galen is leaning into Eleanor, opening a V between himself and Grizzly. Eleanor is trying to ignore everything. She squints her eyes at some sign they’re passing: “Episcopal Baptist.”

“Weird,” says Galen.

Grizzly says, “Yeah, we gotta lotta churches here. The corner of Vine and 2nd has a different ⎯ whatcha call ⎯ domination on each corner: Baptist, Presbyterian, Church of God, and the Greek one.”

“Greeks in Alabama?”

Grizzly grins at Eleanor. “We got all kinds.”

She squints out the window again and we cut to her point-of-view: the Church of Christ’s sign with the changeable letters, spelling “GOOD WITHOUT GOD IS JUST ‘O.’” We hear Galen snicker.

Eleanor asks, “Many people arrive yet?”

“Few locals. You’re the first from the airport ⎯” and they yammer like this for a couple of minutes, I’ll spare you, and then Eleanor reads another church sign aloud: “Science of Mind, Reformed.” She purses her lips to the side, as she tends to do when confounded or pretending to be so ⎯ I think the actress picked up the tic from Joey Potter on the Creek. “What’s Science of Mind?”

“And have they really reformed?” adds Galen, looking bored.

“No idea,” says Grizzly. “We got all kinds.”

“You don’t say,” Galen says.

After a minute of driving their patient driver says, “So where are y’all from?”

“Austin,” Eleanor says. “Texas.”

“And y’all got family here?”

Galen says “No,” just as Eleanor half-tilts her head and says, “Well,” and the other two look at her and she smiles, then settles into a serious look. “We are our family ⎯ my brother and me.” And Galen mutters, “That’s beautiful.”

The truck turns a corner and this road’s different, not glaring hot, but crowded with close oaks and there’s a gorgeous white antebellum house on the right, three storeys with tall arched windows – Italianate, as I learned from the net, and the truck pulls up and stops and Eleanor and Galen spring out fast and start pulling their stuff out of the back, Eleanor’s forming a Vuitton tower on the curb, Galen’s a pile of duffel and garbage bags, and Grizzly pulls off without even saying goodbye, which is ominous or at least what the Chinese call Inauspicious.

They both stand there looking up at the house. “I can’t believe,” says Galen, “they put us in slave quarters.”

“It’s in the brochure, Galen. They’re proud here.”

“Proud of slave quarters. Beautiful. Have I thanked you, Eleanor, for bringing us to Alabama?”

She looks at him. “You know exactly what brought us here.”

But GTUG doesn’t insult you by explaining this yet. It’s subtext.

Eleanor is still looking at him and her face is tight, or tighter. “Don’t throw stones. That’s all I’m saying.”
Galen looks at her through his bangs. “What the eff do you mean?”

She pulls a luggage strap onto her shoulder and picks up the two heaviest trunks by their handles. “Curse like a man, Galen. You sound like a pussy.”

She starts up the sidewalk. He’s pouting by his stuff, whereas you or I would be kicking her ass. Finally she tosses back, “You know, it’s probably haunted!” and Galen grabs his shit with that juvenile-delinquent grin that tells us he’s either used to her insults or he’s retarded, either way who cares, he gorgeous, as they say.

They’re both dragging their luggage up the walk and we’re behind them in some kind of weird ultra-wide-angle lens thing so the grass stretches endless green to the left and the right and the Spanish moss hovers all spectral at the edges of the frame.

They walk up the wide wood stairs to the sound of crickets wheezing like a phone off the hook and a low beat comes in, synthesized but soulful beats that grow more intense and we ⎯ the camera, you and I ⎯ rush past them and across the wood porch and the black double-doors swing open like magic but really they’re just postmodern and the crickets morph into violins and the beat gets deeper so you feel it in your teeth and suddenly we drop, we stomach-surging plummet through the porch and many many feet of earth below until we stop ⎯ lurch ⎯ in a flickering, water-dripping brickwork tunnel, arched and spooky like the Paris catacombs and we drift down the tunnel silent, just a low wind-wooshing noise for what seems like miles, like eons, but it’s not, it’s convoluted – you’ll see – and after miles and eons we stop at the foot, at the red hem of a red robe and we pan, as they say, up the red robe and come to the incredibly old white-bearded face looking up into a flickering, then growing to full-on radiating, scintillating light, lights, from behind us as we now gaze down into the old man’s upturned face and he looks ⎯ the first word I wanna say is beatific but that’s such a cliché, so abused by slam-poet-trash that I’ll just say saintly ⎯ and we’re gazing down into the old man’s ⎯ screw it, his name’s Bee ⎯ into Bee’s upturned face and he looks like a prophet on fire with tears rolling down his cheeks into the beard and he says one word to the light above him, it’s “Shit.” And the screen slams black, just the stark white logo: GHOST TOWN UNDER GROUND.

After the credits and subsequent endless commercials, we start back with a close-up of a round face with a red goatee and thick glasses and you can see just the frayed collar of a tie-dyed t-shirt ⎯ in case you’re worried, there’s very little “jam” music on GTUG ⎯ and in spite of the ominous hint of granola you like him ⎯ it’s the smile, crooked and kinda pitiable.

When he starts talking, the first thing you notice is how he spits when he talks with that cheek-flapping thing Donald Duck does. “Hey,” he squawks, “I’m Louis, welcome to Cahaba Falls and Barton House!” His disposition is halfway between stewardess ⎯ not flight attendant but full-on PanAm stewardess ⎯ and a volunteer at the freak-out tent.

“Y’all are lucky to’ve been placed here,” he says. “Somebody likes you. Barton House is prime real estate.” He smiles huge.

Eleanor and Galen are sitting on a blue fraying camel-back sofa and Galen has his head, those brown eyes hooded, lolling on the camel’s hump and Eleanor is poised, eyes bright. She has sweat stains under her arms. She says, “Um, no, we just applied for whatever’s available.”

Louis looks bewildered, or maybe hurt. He pushes up his Bruce Villanch glasses and looks at the open manila folder on his lap. “So!” He looks up and smiles at them, overcompensating for something, or maybe I’m rear-projecting. Watching and describing, like, year-old episodes, I feel a little weird, you know, knowing more than the characters do, like Sylvia Browne must feel when she’s dealing with mortals.

“You’re our first brother-sister roommates,” Louis continues. “They just started allowing co-ed rooming a few years ago. It’s the honor dorm, you know.” They’re blank like they don’t. Louis tries a different tack. “Brother and sister ⎯ y’all aren’t like those Attic's Flowers kids, are you?”

He looks like he’s joking but Eleanor and Galen just look uncomfortable. There’s a tense silence and a long-shot of the room, its old chairs and rosy wallpaper and red drapes and so on, and it’s the kind of uncomfortably long quiet moment that makes GTUG so different from other nighttime shows.

Finally Eleanor breaks the tableau by looking around all faux interested and says, “This place seems interesting.”

Louis is oblivious to the strained nature of her comment. “Oh you don’t know the half of it!” he spits. “Of course, first it was a squat little ole slave house, and then it was built into something bigger after the Shakers moved here in – ”

“1901,” Eleanor finishes.

Louis raises an eyebrow. “Dig Ms. Homework,” he says.

Galen summons the strength to ask, “Aren’t the Shakers the furniture people?” This lets us know he’s not stupid, I suppose.

“Very good,” Louis says, really letting that very make its way up and down Galen’s body. “They were also into architecture and celibacy. That’s why there aren’t many Shakers.” He smiles at Galen a little less lasciviously. “The celibacy, I mean, not the architecture. Although I’m sure architecture is very difficult too. Never tried.”

Eleanor giggles and Galen is sitting up straighter.

“Of course,” says Louis, “All this was before the Theosophists.”

Eleanor frowns. “I didn’t read about them.”

“Of course you didn’t,” says Louis. Obviously a little more of the subtext. “But they’re the ones who founded CFC in the late twenties.”

“I thought,” says Eleanor, “that Cahaba Falls was an Episcopal college.”

“Eventually,” says Louis, “after the Theosophists went the way of the Shakers. But it was always Episcopal, even in the beginning, on paper.”

They all sit there, Louis done with his speech, Galen apparently out of snarky comments. Finally Louis stands with some obvious effort and says, “Let me show y’all to y’all’s rooms.”

He leaves, now brisk, and Galen lags of course and mumbles, “Can you conjugate y’all?” And on cue Louis calls back, “Can y’all handle y’all’s bags by y’allselves?” and even Eleanor laughs, so you know she’s not a total bitch.

Galen says, after a moment of them gathering their stuff, “Dad would never want us living like this, having to share a room.”

“Dad’s living worse.”

“Well, our mother, then.”

Eleanor starts to say something but closes her mouth. She follows him out of the room.

After that introduction of our main pair to Cahaba Falls College, we see another Barton House dorm room – the tall Gothic windows and oak floors, and a stocky young redhead folding panties and placing them in a drawer, her face in the mirror looking like she’s trying not to think about suicide. And then the other girl starts talking and instantly you know it’s homicide this redheaded girl is suppressing. She’s a little pasty, but not bad for a redhead. She’s normal-girl, by TV standards.
The other girl, though – the camera has swung – is blonde and perfect and trust me, you hate her and she says “Tina, I hope you can start over here.” And she smiles like an alley dog right before it lunges, you know, perfect white teeth bared. “I mean, you’re here now,” the girl continues, “and the rooms are – adequate, and Mom’s not here.”

Tina turns to her. “You’re the one mother hates, Di.”

And Di looks a little like road rage feels, all trapped in a face, but she pulls it together to say, “Fine. Whatever. I mean, Tina, make a goddamn effort. These people don’t know what you’re really like.” She sighs dramatically and adds a nasty little “yet.”

Tina just stands there and stares out the window. Neither girl says anything for a minute and you can hear the house creaking as someone walks by outside the door. Finally Tina says, "All right. Look." she drags her suitcase off the bed and over to the closet. "I'll finish unloading here and we'll go around together later. Okay?" This is all much more generous than I would be, but whatever. People are always nicer on tv than they should be; it drives me crazy, all the second chances people are given just so producers can keep a cast together.

Di picks up her denim banana purse. "Fine," she says, pronouncing it like a north Alabama girl would, halfway between fahn and phone. She slides out a lighter and a pack of Capris. announces she’s going outside “to breathe a little.” When the door has slammed, Tina lies down on her blank mattress and you think ⎯ fear ⎯ that this is going to be some weepy scene or worse, some self-indulgent singalong á la Magnolia. But you’re safe.

A second, then snare drums and a kick ass song kicks in and Tina springs up so that we know she’s what they call a SPUNKY GAL like the Creek’s Joey Potter on uppers, maybe. Tina unrolls a poster and pins it above her bed ⎯ against the faded white plaster – a poster of The Arcade Fire (a lame product placement but I like the band) and she pops in a CD ⎯ many things are unpacked, a stereo, a milk crate stuffed with lurid sci-fi paperbacks, and the music continues, not a song by The Arcade Fire.

Tina pulls out and opens one of those rice-paper lamps all dorm rooms have, you know, the kind they sell in kits for six dollars. She plugs it in, having had no problem fitting the paper over the wire thing, which drove me nuts. But when she plugs it in, bam! The room has ambience and you realize the dorm room is enormous and the song fades into low drums, lazy loping guitars and some guy singing in near falsetto and Tina spreads a frayed quilt on the mattress and falls, sorta slow-mo but not so slow-mo as to be pretentious, onto the bed. She lies there with eyes closing in a slow slide.

Snap cut to Eleanor standing next do the door, flicking a switch on and off and glaring up at the nonresponsive ceiling fan. Galen has already collapsed on his bare mattress, borne up by piles of clothes and CDs. Eleanor looks ready to erupt. “Galen, are you going to move?”

“Too hot,” mutters Galen.

“There’s good-looking new students, everywhere ⎯ ”

Galen groans. “We’re in Alabama. They all have South-mouth.”

She raises her plucked eyebrow.

“You know, that shrunken lower jaw thing like whosit ⎯ banjo boy. Can’t take it.”

Eleanor looks up through her bangs. “Whatever,” she says. “Just make an effort.”

“Do you have a Vicodin?”

She sighs. “Not anymore. I’m down to my last Ativan.”

“Attagirl?” Galen is perky now. “I’ll take it.”

“Yeah,” Eleanor says as she grabs her bag and heads to the door, wiping her sweaty forehead with her sleeve. “I’m gonna move to the sticks and give you my last tranquilizer.” She smiles and leaves like a good teen heroine but with dark hair like a villain, down to the porch.

Outside it’s sticky heat ⎯ you can feel it through the TV ⎯ and Eleanor stands there for a minute, fanning her v-neck. She languidly descends the creaking steps and the camera tracks her. She walks lightly across the street, into the vacant lot facing Barton House, and it’s a beautiful wide shot with minor-key mandolin music reminding us this is a classy, true Alabama. Where was Deliverance filmed? I think Georgia. Anyway, GTUG, and Cahaba Falls, is mandolin, not banjo. The difference is huge, to anyone who knows bluegrass.

Eleanor walks through the lot ⎯ mounds and bricks, scraggly yellow flowers ⎯ and into the woods beyond, pushing through the hanging mist-moss and vines like an actress pushing her way to the stage. The mandolins are now girded with cellos that thrum like giant wings beating, and Eleanor stumbles onto a wider path that winds through ultra-green brush and kudzu and she looks down, back and forth as she walks the path and the ground is sunken in places with two or three low – like, six inch – cement squares, monuments. Eleanor doesn’t know yet it’s the [SPOILER!] Negro Cemetery (that’s what the show and the town call it, not me) – to Eleanor, it’s just a creepy mysterious swampy place.

Still something tells her to walk carefully – you can tell in her worried brow and high light steps and the music now sounds, all ghostly and moody like cellos underwater – I don’t know music – and her Birkenstock clogs drag along the vines and brush clogging the path and you can see she’s creeped out when she sees one monument whose inscription’s still legible: “ISAIAH” and you can see it when it hits her where she is, the awful, awful history, because she looks like she just swallowed a live, agitated goldfish, her chest heaves once and she blinks.

After a minute she walks to another line of oaks, again pulls aside the moss to emerge in an open field with scatterings of bricks and low broken walls and standing at the edge, his face in the sun, is the strange looking old man from the teaser and maybe it’s the red robe or cartoonishly pointed beard, like Walt Whitman joined the Polyphonic Spree, but by the freezing of her face, Eleanor’s freaked.

The man smiles and says, “Hello, Eleanor. I’m Bee.” And of course the screen goes black.

Dramatic fade-in on the redhead from earlier, Tina, standing in front of a huge round window ⎯ like, 10 feet across, and Tina’s on a balcony that spans its center ⎯ and we’re in the unbelievable grand hall of Barton House, and your first feeling is Jesus, it’s like the loft in Friends ⎯ you know, way too grand, too TV ⎯ but bear with it.

Tina starts walking down the half-spiral Tara-like stairs to the lobby, where a gorgeous long-haired boy is twisting out of his mother’s grip and the mother says she’ll miss him and so on as she leaves ⎯ Tina stands in the corner’s shadows, clearly scared of his hotness and all this has taken like a minute. As the mother leaves she says “Be good, Daniel.” Something in her voice, some need, tells you she means it. She walks out, heels clacking.

Daniel turns to Tina and he’s wearing a Joy Division t-shirt and he smiles, says, “Ugh. Parents, you know?” And it’s a lame line but you can see Tina loves him, his longish blondish girlish hair, his perfect lips and waist and hips, it’s enough to make you quit your religion. He says, “I’m Daniel,” and Tina says “Right ⎯ your mom said.” And Daniel blushes. It’s adorable.

They stand there for a long minute and we can see Tina going crazy trying to think of something to say. She even opens and closes her mouth and it’s one of those times when your stomach clenches for the person on screen and finally Tina says, “Joy Division, huh?” And then winces at herself.

Daniel seems perplexed. Then he looks down at his shirt and says, “Yeah. They’re great.”

“Love will tear us apart,” Tina says.

He tilts his head at her.

“It’s a song,” she says. “Their song. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’”

He nods and grins that stupid Deadshow-lot grin that makes you want to slap then French-kiss him. “Right,” he says.
“Forgot. For a second I thought you were ⎯ ”

“Crazy?”

More smiling and nodding. And then Di Warner, the Di Warner, you should already be thinking, emerges in the front door, framed by brilliant sunlight and the crazy bright green outside ⎯ and Di says, “Hello,” and it sounds like she’s telling a love story. A sick Southern gothic Truman Capote love story where Di’s really a man. But she’s not. “I’m Di.” This is clearly Di’s gift, introducing herself.

You know there’s heartbreak ahead; there’s a close shot of Tina’s thin face ⎯ in the intense backlight with her red hair she looks like a pre-Raphaelite goddess, or maybe like her head is on fire.

Di’s chatting up Daniel, you know, bullshit about living in the same house and ooh! It’s a slavequarters! Wasn’t there a cult? I love your sideburns! And so on, you know, exposition that would wear me out but we’re still tight on Tina and she is beyond rage, and you can tell this is a long twisted pattern, this man-stealing sister ⎯ you can see it in Tina’s Medea eyes.

She stalks down the stairs and outside and we hear the brand-fucking-new lovebirds say stupid things and Tina’s on the porch, resolute and frozen like a statue of a tired general.

After a long minute ⎯ really I could consider this a scene break, but don’t want to be tedious ⎯ Tina walks down the front stairs heavy-footed to let us know she’s dejected. As she walks the path to the street she’s muttering near-curses (it’s expanded cable, but still not HBO) like vile bitch and the underscored strings and ah-ah choral music eases us from Barton House to the street, conspicuously empty and photographed wide angle so it seems like you can almost see the curve of the earth.

The shrouded oaks at the periphery rise and crowd the sky and make the high bright sky-strip brighter by contrast. Tina walks, her dragging sneakers keeping the beat for the dark strings. As she walks the sky is shot through occasionally by blackbirds, crows, the birds of haunting. Tina twists or unkinks her back as she walks ⎯ we’re behind her ⎯ and she keeps looking up and birds and trees and the scene’s gone aimless till a voice says “Hey” and the music fades a little, Tina turns and a girl is standing in the middle of the road with long brown hair and peasant dress, you know, the Ted Bundy victim look, and Tina says “Yeah?” and the hippie girl says, “You dropped this.” She holds out a small book ⎯ leather bound and all embossed, Bible-looking, and Tina says “No, I mean it’s not mine” and the girl says “Ah” like she knows something, then, “I’m Martha. I just saw this in the road.”

Tina looks around. Either she’s skeptical or I am. She says “Tina. I’m new.”

Martha smiles a hippie smile, you know, but without that smug thing they do like they know you don’t recycle. She says, “Me too. Live here?”

“Yeah,” and so on, I’ll spare you. Mostly it’s just Tina looking pained as she asks polite questions ⎯ you can tell that she sucks at small talk ⎯ and Bundy girl Martha giggles in this high voice behind her hand like a plain-faced geisha but stoned and you can’t see her teeth. Her unnerving sparkle-giggle feels dubbed-over, like clumsy kung-fu-dubbed.

Finally they stop getting-to-know-you’s and an awkward silence leads to Tina saying “Wanna come for a walk?” and Martha is by her side fast so you think she was kind of prepared for the question, or again, I’m rear-projecting. I’ll stop. Martha’s tucked the little leather book into a fold of her dress.

The girls walk and the music starts back, a slow rising song by The Arcade Fire (finally, a tie-in to the poster) with piano and a woman’s voice ahhing. Once again the trees and crows are creepy and ahead on the empty block is a yellow wood sign that says “Pershing Mansion And W” and then the sign is broken off and the girls go naturally where the broken end points with its splinters.

The path is close, like Goodman Brown going to meet the devil close, and the two girls are almost handing hands, arms brushing but not really touching [SPOILER ALERT! They’re not lesbians] and the song starts to get intense, the woman’s voice with some kind of strings and a piano plinking out simple arpeggios, but the drums drive it higher and higher and the vines catch at the girls like hands trying to stop them and finally they come to a clearing, a round clearing and there in the center a low round brick wall, a well, artesian, you know, the kind that’s always full and bubbling from the center, and the girls slowly walk around the clearing, dragging their feet to the drums and swooping strings, again, building, now something like tympani rumbling and as the girls walk around we see on the ground feet then a splayed black skirt, a dress, a woman in a black dress with blood obscuring her face and dirt embedded in her wild hair and dress and the music hits this ecstatic crescendo of weird soprano and strings and drums and Tina screams. And the screen goes black.

You know how when you watch TV shows without commercials, like on DVD or a tape when you can fast-forward through them, sometimes the show comes back from black screen to a different situation, or sometimes to the same characters in the same spot, suspended, and without commercials the jump ⎯ in this case, from Tina’s screaming to black screen and zipped ads and then brief black and Tina’s screaming again ⎯ feels weird, like she stopped to take a breath while we weren’t watching, then resumed screaming. It’s an odd, artificial moment.

So Tina’s standing and finishes her scream, now she’s staring, tilting her head with a vacant expression and after a minute ⎯ no music ⎯ she looks around and that girl Martha is gone but the book ⎯ the little confirmation-Bible-looking leather book ⎯ is in the dirt. Tina picks it up and walks dreamlike, slow, back down the path and the music kicks in, strange backwoods ⎯ what they call “roots” ⎯ music, some ancient white man croaking about Jesus. Tina’s slipped the book in her pocket without looking at it, she’s still in shock but you know, it’s the kind of thing only somebody on TV would do, not look at the thing.

She walks for a long time, first the path then the real road, till she comes to a building with a yellow laminated sign naming it the Security Center but the house is an old one, with a front porch and uniformed guard on a porch swing ⎯ it’s the pilot, so you know, they feel the need to remind us again and again that we’re in Alabama.

The music is all you can hear as Tina sleepwalk-trudges the path to the guard, who’s standing now and visibly concerned as Tina ⎯ muted to us ⎯ points off towards the well and the guard runs inside, to call somebody, I guess, and Tina stands there for a sec before turning, staggering off towards Barton House and the music sounds like exhaustion too, the roots mellowed into low drums and mandolin, fragile sounding, pretty. All of this ⎯ the walk, the melancholic country music, Tina’s muted shock ⎯ lasts a much longer time than it took me to tell it.

The low thrumming fades through from Tina’s dirty face ⎯ when did she get dirty, anyway? ⎯ to Eleanor’s skeptical face and then, our view expanding, her dowdy dress as she stands in the vacant lot, low crumbling brick walls around her, the tracings of a house or something rolling into swells of green mounds and clusters of kudzu. The crickets are doing their thing and the music has ended before you realize it. Just the crickets and the bearded prophet-looking man in the red robe and Eleanor says, “How do you know my name?” and then her faces starts to relax in an I’m-just-being-silly kind of way. “I mean hi. Yes. And how do you know my name?”

He stands there, considering the question. After a long minute he says faux-grandiosely, you know, I mean ironically, “I hear all,” and Eleanor scowls. He adds hastily, “I’m a professor here.”

He gets no reaction. He starts to cross towards her, saying, “Sorry to be rude. It’s a pleasure, really.”

Eleanor’s quiet for a second and says, “All that in the paper ⎯ it’s my Dad, you know. Not me.”

“I know.”

He holds out his hand and she shakes it but you can tell his grip lasts a half-second too long for Eleanor, who pulls her hand away and says, “What is this place?”

Bee looks around. “It’s the statehouse. Used to be. A long time ago.”

They stand there. Again, a long silence where a lesser network would insert some top-forty crap. GTUG is silent except for the insects and Bee is staring at Eleanor like he’s just run into the Blessed Virgin Mary (hereafter BVM) at the Piggly Wiggly (hereafter The Pig). You’re starting to realize this guy’s not your usual spirit guide type like Santa or Walt Whitman. Finally Bee says “I teach here. Have, forever. I think you’ll love it.”

“Based on?” Eleanor asks, and it seems a little needlessly rude.

Bee just smiles and stands there. More awkward silence. A chirping electronic sound startles both of them ⎯ it takes a sec for you to realize it’s a ringtone rendition of “Ode to Joy” ⎯ and Bee reaches into the folds of his robe, pulls out a cute little flip-phone. As he opens it he says to Eleanor, “Everybody loves it here. It’s hard to leave.”

Bee’s attention is on the phone and Eleanor mutters, “Hard to leave a college town?” and she’s rolling her eyes, which, to be honest with you, is laying it on a little thick. We get it, you’re a bitch.

Bee listens to the phone for a minute and then snaps it shut, says to Eleanor, “You’d be surprised.”

And then he bows ⎯ strangely courtly ⎯ and spins, dashes off down a path, robes billowing behind him, as they do. Eleanor stands there and watches him. She gathers her hair onto her head and fans the back of her neck.

The next shot is of Galen’s shoes, the soles, to let us know he’s still immobile. The camera pans up over his jeans and t-shirt with an inch of delicious skin in between ⎯ and finally Galen’s angular face, all sharp and exquisite in the sunlight ⎯ dramatic windows, remember ⎯ and Galen’s eyes are closed and his fluttering eyelids show us he’s dreaming ⎯ for a second you worry, “Is this the kind of show with dream sequences?” but [SPOILER!] no.

His lids snap open as the door slams and Eleanor has burst into the room, all invigorated by her adventures around Cahaba Falls. Then she sees the prostrate Galen and her eyes narrow and it’s zero-to-killer in a second and she says, “This is how you start over? Lying around?”

“You’re the one who wanted to start over.” He pulls a plastic bag over his head ⎯ not like in an asphyxia way, just a bag of stuff that he pulls over to block out his sister. “I’m fine the way I am ⎯ our counselor said so.”

“Steve was full of shit.”

“Dad picked him.”

Eleanor sits and sighs. “Well, there’s lots of things Dad picked that sucked.”

“Like accountants and lawyers,” Galen says between bags of stuff. “I’ll come out when I’m ready.”

Eleanor waves her hands in TV exasperation but I swear to god this heavy-handed shit is almost behind us: “Jesus, Galen, it’s a nice place. There’s nice people ⎯ for the most part ⎯ and you’ll like the history.” Clearly Eleanor, not entirely evil, is softening him up. “This place is bloody.”

Galen sits up, left eyebrow arched. “Bloody?”

“If you’d read the book I gave you,” Eleanor says, “You’d know. Treachery. Prison. Massacre. Graverobbing.”

“You’re trying to arouse your own brother. That’s sick.”

She ignores him. “It’s true,” she says. “Ever since Cahaba Falls was the capital. The history’s fascinating.”

“History is never fascinating.”

“You like true crime ⎯ that’s just history.”

“Ann Rule is infinitely more lurid than history.”

“True crime is just history’s dirty little sister. The only difference between the two is that with history, the victims’ families are all dead.”

Galen looks at her in that way people call askance. “So if a murder victim’s children die too, eventually, it’s okay to mock them?”

Eleanor pulls a paperback from the satchel at her feet. She tosses it onto Galen’s bed. “It’s never okay to mock the dead. Just ⎯ enjoy the stories. But you’ve gotta wait till the grandchildren are dead, too,” she says, “Just in case.”

“Maybe great-grandchildren too, in the South,” Galen says. “They’re all bred so a kid could’ve dated his grandmother, you
know, when they were around the same age.”

“Whatever, perv. The point is we’re surrounded by bloodshed. Enjoy it.”

The camera pulls back from the lounging Galen and the finally relaxing Eleanor and then through the wall and we see Louis, decked out in a violet caftan and leaning doorward in a tense eavesdropping pose. And apparently we’ve slipped back a few seconds in time/space, too, because we hear Eleanor say “bloodshed” again and Louis’s face darkens as the hallway around him darkens too.

Next thing, Tina’s staggering home from body-finding into Barton House like Carrie White coming home from prom, sans blood. She looks slow around the grand foyer – the inexplicable circle window, curving staircase, beams that rise like flying buttresses ⎯ swear to god ⎯ and stands to the tune of some dude who moans like Nina Simone and she walks up the stairs to her second floor room and opens the door and DAMN if her sister isn’t on her back on the bed, sucking and bumping against that dreamy Daniel. Already. They’re fully dressed, still, but they might as well not be.

Tina doesn’t even register surprise.

Daniel’s hair is sweaty-stuck to the back of his neck and his t-shirt is clinging to that tight waist and Di’s face pokes up over Daniel’s shoulder and she half-smiles, smirks really the way the president does at the end of each sentence, you know, smarmy and Tina turns and walks out, moaning music following her and swelling.

Tina walks heavy-slow up the half-spiraling stairs to the third floor, aimless, and walks past an open door ⎯ the music has slid into a distressingly catchy song by the Scissor Sisters ⎯ and we can barely hear two girls talking. Tina pauses, listens, and drifts in the room, obviously bored and desperate from wanting to kill her sister – what’s fratricide for girls, like sororocide? And the two girls look up at her with friendly open faces, a gothy looking girl on a red velvet spread and across from her a preppy but equally TV-pretty girl on a pink bedspread with dust ruffle. Apparently bedding is symbolic on GTUG.

"I think it's awesome," the blonde says. "My sister went to Auburn and hers was like a prison-cell but with Crabtee and Evelyn everywhere, like that hid the cinderblocks and I was like 'Get an apartment!' but she couldn't afford it and my cousin Lindsey spent her Auburn time in a trailer which was nice but a trailer? I mean..."

Gothy girl swings her wide eyes over to Tina, who's standing in the doorway like a conversational messiah. Blonde girl notices her too and lights up, almost screams (the sound is like a bird call meets an airhorn) "Hey, you!"

Tina looks a little bit concerned but goes in anyway and sits in a wooden chair. “I’m Tina. From Montgomery.”

“Katie,” says Gothy, and the blonde says, “Sarah.”

Tina says, “So you guys know each other already?” and I should interject that a real girl from Montgomery would say y’all, not you guys, but you know, it’s also a typically Southern thing to hide your accent and your y’alls and fixins till you get to know a person ⎯ most Yankees still hear a y’all and assume you’re a moron. Then again, if I was writing a Southern show I’d probably use my y’alls sparingly – y’alls are like smoking, on TV, I mean if you showed average smokers smoking in an hour-long television show, all the smoking would seem disgusting. You ever see a TV character with an oral fixation, like the Gilmore or Golden Girls, with their coffee and cheesecake, respectively, obsessions? Ten minutes of them gabbing about it and you want to throw up. Or I do. My point is, y’all is used carefully, and if there’s too many Southernisms you can rest assured it’s TV signaling to you that this person might as well be one of the Darlins come down into Mayberry to stir up trouble.

Anyway, Katie says, “Nope,” answering Tina’s question ⎯ I promise never to put so much space between a question and answer again ⎯ as she fiddles with her prayer-bead bracelet, I know: yawn, and she adds, “Sarah’s local,” a little gratuitously, I think. “I’m not from around here.” She says this as if she’s saying I’m an astronaut.

Already you hate this girl, not to force my opinions upon you, but her eyeliner and safety pins and Plath-sized chip on the shoulder, it all spells murder victim to the hopeful viewer. Hang on.

To all this Tina just says, “Ah,” not going for the bait by asking where in fact Katie is from. We love Tina for this.

Nobody says anything for a minute, just getting-to-know-you agonizing seconds of staring at the floor while distant generic college-rock drifts in from the hall, too muffled and implacable to considered featured music, you know, like the “tonight’s episode featured music by…” moments that come at the ends of all of today’s shows. 90210 would never have with a plug for Brian Austin Green’s turntablism.

Finally Sarah asks Tina, “So, you new too?” and Tina nods and Sarah says hurriedly ⎯ what you might call manically amiably ⎯ “Me too! It’s weird here. So far I’ve heard crazy things about haunted houses and Civil War prisons and I think it all sounds awesome!” And you worry she’s all Christian-youth-ministry because she uses the word awesome.

Tina says, “Yeah. I mean, I found a body today.” Immediately she looks appalled that she said it aloud.

The other girls look at her like she’s just announced she blew Johnny Depp. Tina’s still puzzling over why she said it. Of course, you and I know that the strange dictates of plot advancement depend on moments of inexplicable blurting. We know it, we accept it. Sarah, however, is no longer feeling awesome ⎯ she looks even more pallid, and her mouth is open melodramatically wide. Katie looks a little horny, and Tina’s gradually brightening face indicates that at least she’s pleased at attention from someone besides a sociopathic sister. Plus, who wouldn’t want to be The One Who Found The Body, once the actual grisly and, I would imagine, foul-smelling finding had been done?

Back at the statehouse ruins now, we see Eleanor watching Bee slip away into the trees and the leaves and moss all shudder behind him and the resident cello starts in low and Eleanor stands for just a minute before ⎯ and we can see resolution flash across her face in true TV-heroine fashion ⎯ she follows him into the dark woods.

She walks gingerly like she’s afraid of landmines. The path is winding and the cellos now have a low drumbeat under them and she finally comes to another clearing. She stands there stock still, light across her face distinguishing her from the night-looking mass of trees and moss behind her.

Then we see what she sees but we can’t hear anything ⎯ I guess the music swelling is supposed to heighten the drama and obscure what transpires; I love television. Standing in the clearing, Bee is waving his arms and talking ⎯ again, muffled by cellos or whatever ⎯ to my favorite character actress Amy Aquino ⎯ of course, here she’s just a strange woman in a DKNY pantsuit, weird in the middle of the woods, and she’s talking with her hands, her dark frizzy hair frizzier with humidity, her face looking disturbed and confused like she’s arguing with a diagnosis.

And Eleanor lurks there behind an enormous oak and she’s listening but casting her eyes about ⎯ more trees, mosquitoes, strange yellow flowers scraggling among gnarly tree roots ⎯ and the music lowers so we can hear just snatches of this apparent fight, and Bee says, “Susan, that’s all I can tell you. It’s all they told me.” And thank god for TV, right, because if he hadn’t called her by her name to her face it would’ve taken forever for Amy Aquino to become Susan Forrest. Well, just Susan so far, but who cares anymore.

Susan says, “I don’t understand.” Such a TV thing to say. “I mean, it’s been years. Decades. Right?”

“Well,” Bee booms in his television patriarch voice, “decades or not, Patty’s turned up.”

And of course Eleanor steps on an effing twig or something because god forbid we should find out too much at once, and Bee’s bony hand shoots out of the folds of his robe and he grasps Susan’s arm, stands there listening for a second. Then he guides her, somehow without footsteps, we can hear only Eleanor’s heavy breathing.

Then a low organ grinding starts and then slides into minor-key chords with snares and the music seems to propel Eleanor into the clearing and through it to the woods, more woods in dim light and the spectro-moss and Eleanor stumbles over the rocky path to another opening, another clearing and real, direct sunlight falling on a white house ⎯ two storeys plus an attic with one of those weird evil-eye windows – and high rectangular windows (this house is Greek Revival, I’ve been told) and the house looks antebellum like Barton but broken down and spooky like if Aleister Crowley had a house in the Outer Banks, and Eleanor sees ⎯ we see ⎯ a flash of red at the right of the house and she follows it past windows that you can now see are shattered, dark, empty.

The music is insistent while Eleanor follows Bee and Susan and your heart ⎯ mine, I guess ⎯ bangs with the beat and with Eleanor because everything ⎯ the speed, the green vines and stark sunlight ⎯ screams DANGER so of course Eleanor goes farther and around the corner, in the overgrown back yard of the big house, there’s a low shanty that looks like you’d imagine a real slavequarters would look like, but festooned with prayer flags and Christmas tree lights. There’s only one door and one window and it looks like you could stand inside in the middle and touch all four walls without lifting a foot.

Eleanor is crouched as she slinks closer and she pulls her sweaty hair back behind her ear which I find endearing, and her neck is wet too and she creeps to the window – there’s no porch, just a tin roof extension over the door – and she looks in the low-right corner.

Again we see what she sees: nothing, just a small plain room with a wood chair and roll-top desk and a tall cabinet, maybe a chiffarobe, although I only read that word once in a book and I’ve never quite known what one was. The important thing I should point out as we look into the room is that there are no signs of life, no conspirators, no weird sage in a robe and definitely no Amy Aquino, and nowhere they could’ve gone.

The sound we hear as the screen goes black is the ⎯ in my humble opinion ⎯ overwrought voice-over of Eleanor sucking in her breath.