Yet, the repeated conversation, like someone going through old diary entries and discovering a trivial detail predicted the outcome of a past relationship, does show a compelling change in Jack. The diary entry of the story is the remembrance of a conversation, during which Jack’s nomadic girlfriend divulges her desire to leave him. The first time she asks what if she vanished, Jack answers like a boy talking to his mother: “But there’s always a reason, or at least a context,” and proceeds to describe how the C.I.A or aliens must have her. He jokes about listening to her goodbye on his answering machine, or looking for her at the “Department of Missing Persons.” Soon, he is lecturing her on Westerns and Kevin Costner, getting the conversation so wrong, his girlfriend says, “in other words, you’d make fun of me.”
The surprising thing is he gets a second chance to get this conversation right. The girlfriend vanishes, and the reader sees Jack’s changed perspective through a remix of this conversation. He imagines telling her, “O.K., I’ll play. I’d ride to the ends of the earth, to the silver mountains of the moon. […] I’d follow your footprints across borax craters, ford molten rivers that parted like mercury.” This continues, and by the end he is searching through the C.I.A he earlier joked would have her, while also employing the help of a “hypnotist who specialized in negotiating the release of alien abductees.” These melodramas sound more desperate than humorous, and Jack returns to the line from the first conversation: “there’s always a why, or at least a context,” and reveals “You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night. Changed your unlisted phone number. Left no forwarding address so that mail was returned and e-mails disappeared into whatever graveyard file they go to.” Often memories become so heavy, one wants to return to them and try to lighten the load by saying the thing you wished you had said; this story provides Jack this opportunity, and he shows a transformation from cool sarcasm to desperate pleading.
What happens between these conversations, however, doesn’t have the same preciseness. The movie reviews, cyberspace obsessions, pornographic and drugged back-stories are plenty for the story’s hand, so the actual movie "Open Range" sticks out like an extra finger. I’ve imagined a short story using a movie as a conceit, but this one employs "Open Range" more as a diversion than a device. The most relevant connection between the movie and the story is a shared interest in “the war between free grazers and landowners.” Sure, the reader understands the girlfriend represents the free grazers, and the boyfriend is possessed by a virtual landscape, but "Open Range" has such a different tone than this emotional drama; actually it shuns emotions and prides in the campiness of nostalgic, tough guy, reticent morals. This isn’t the right movie for this story – maybe Tarintino’s "True Romance," with its mixture of sex and violence, would’ve worked better. The girlfriend of the story felt like Bruce Willis’ girlfriend in "Pulp Fiction", anyhow, and the car salesman ex-boyfriend reminded me of Sharon Stone’s Lester Diamond from "Casino". In addition, lines from Jack like “her face was so lovely to him that he hadn’t yet allowed himself to gaze at her with the full force of recognition. That was true of her nakedness, too; it dazzles him, and he found he could take it in only glimpses,” ring so false he sounds like Josh Hartnett’s character from "Wicker Park". (Or a dream stud in “Sex in the City,” such crap, too; in relationships, the more beautiful the girl, the more a guy looks. We, men, are consumers. We consume beauty like popcorn.)
Still, the movie reviews do help the story show the cyber-soaked, information overload of contemporary life; opinions so available the main character knows what to think about the movie before he sees it. All this criticism is a click away, and Jack’s compulsive search for the thoughts of others successfully overwhelms the reader. Also, the way the story uses the present tense camera to catch details like the “hygienically bright lighting” of Dunkin Doughnuts, and the quirky sadness of a computer asking “you sure you want to shut down,” is effective.
But the back-story, presented in long, sweaty flashbacks, reminded me why movies are in the present tense. These flashbacks were unnerving and tediously incongruous. We are told Dom is a car salesman in upstate New York, for example, but Jack imagines her “along a familiar cobbled street, past the candy shop and their breakfast café, […] to a Victorian house, where clothes of hers still hang in the closet of the ornate master bedroom, where on a velvet chair the photographs she asks him to delete were taken.”
This isn’t upstate New York, it’s Westchester, maybe Maine. This velvet chair belongs to a college professor, not a used car salesman. And, Dom’s pleas to the girl sound like Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris": “[what’s] this horseshit about differences –as if they ever mattered to you with your clothes off. You’re most devious to yourself. Do you think you’ll ever be as intimate? If you leave, you’ll always be lying. We’ll be, for each other, an absence, like a phantom limb.” This moment of dialogue felt like a porno director trying to add emotional ‘drama!’ to his movie with 'a deep, dirty flashback', when the right money shot would’ve worked just fine.
