My little nothing, My little Nothing

I first discovered I Await the Devil’s Coming through a teacher of mine, Jessie Kindig. I’ve taken two Gothic Literature classes with her through the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. I have a script I’ve been working on for two years that’s a Southern Gothic coming-of-age story, and Jessie read the script and gave feedback and made a reading list for me. I Await the Devil’s Coming was on the list, and immediately, I was enamored by Mary MacLane and how the diary has become almost completely forgotten. 

At the time, I thought I wanted to maybe adapt the diary to a feature, but of course, that would be a longer-term project, especially if it was to be set in 1901 in Montana. I am completely taken by Mary MacLane’s style of writing. She is so sharp, specific, and hilarious, self-aggrandizing and self-degrading. The smallest things (her family members’ toothbrushes) are blown to epic proportions in how she writes. She’s also known as the “first blogger” with her confessional style, which is also in the style of Marie Bashkirtseff, though also entirely her own. It reminded me of my own Xanga - a blog I had when I was 14. I wrote all kinds of personal feelings and angsty musings. Of course, my blog was far more “cringe” than Mary MacLane’s. This inspired me to, while I wait to do a bigger project based on her, make a smaller gesture inspired by collapsing the distance between 1901 and 2026, and to have the sense that any girl could be writing this from her bedroom. 

I wanted to have the sense of a girl blogging in her bedroom, so the Mary MacLane text is typed on screen, and the sound, during her parts of the conversation, comes from all kinds of sources you might hear in a young woman’s bedroom - music from the computer, cat and dog sounds, a baby crying off screen, family members yelling, music outside, cars outside, phones buzzing. You can hear her rolling chair move or her scratching her arm. Sound designer Andrew Siedenburg created such a realistic soundscape that also feels like it combines many bedrooms and time periods at once. I came of age with the internet and was really into Instant Messaging, and went into some chat rooms. I know Mary MacLane was more reserved in real life - she kept a pretty orderly routine and didn’t see many people, but in her writing, she was shocking and raw and hungry for attention. This reminded me of being a teenager in chat rooms, sitting in my bedroom waiting for my crush to sign in online, or writing to anonymous users in chats, and how these kinds of disembodied, spirit-like entities are present when communicating on the internet. 

The idea for the typing and the forest came at the same time, just an image in my head. I shot the forest footage years ago in Latvia. I brought a 16mm Bolex with an intervalometer motor with me, which is like a time-lapse machine. The light and landscapes on 16mm time-lapse are so much more magical than on a digital camera. I set up the camera and let it go overnight, and left it in the forest. The result was so ethereal and beautiful, but I couldn’t find a place for it in the film I was working on. I knew I needed to use this footage at some point. The forest is a mythical place of shadows; it was a perfect place for the Devil. And it also feels like a void; the trees in the distance never end. And for Mary MacLane, the Devil is a void she longs to be absorbed into through love. The pairing of a black screen with the forest darkening to black was perfect because eventually the Devil (the forest) becomes a black screen, like Mary MacLane, and they become one. 

The idea was always that the forest darkens all the way to black, becoming the blank canvas that Mary MacLane is typing on, and in that moment, they speak at the same time; she has finally been absorbed into him. The sound mirrors this. It’s very separate at first, almost in a kind of harsh way that feels very her then him, her then him - but that’s how it is talking on instant messenger. Her bedroom has the typical sounds of a teenage girl’s, and his space is the endless atmosphere of nature. Then they start to bleed into one another through sound before we notice it, and suddenly they have become the same entity. 

I didn’t change her writing, but I did take out a lot, because it would’ve been very long. And she also narrates her experience of the Devil, so I omitted that and kept it as just a conversation. I just love the way she writes. It’s so brash, so passionate, so existential, and so sharp and specific in its humor. She’s not afraid to confess the parts of herself we often hide from the world. As the world changes faster and faster, with accelerating technology and our addiction to social media and our phones, I’m drawn toward people of the past and what we can learn from them, but also how, even with all these changes, they’re not that different than us. Mary MacLane’s work became almost forgotten after her death. I Await the Devil’s Coming was republished in 2013, but she has so much other preserved writing (all of which I’ve read, it’s been compiled by Michael R. Brown), and it makes me wonder about all the other brilliant writers of the past, especially marginalized writers, who were creating such incredible pieces, like features in newspapers, which is some of my favorite of Mary MacLane’s work, that have now become forgotten. 

While I’m not interested in making a typical  “genre” movie, I do have a draw toward the supernatural and how I can playfully include these themes, but also in a way that’s thinking about our world critically. I’ve always been fascinated by the invisible, the unknown, and how we yearn for it, and how we try to transcend the limits of our bodies to reach it. In Christian mysticism, mystics were always on the edge of reaching the divine or being possessed by the demonic; it just depended on who was trying to interpret them. So it’s not so much whether it’s divine or demonic, it’s this desire to transcend. I think Crashing Waves touched on this, not only the footage from preparing for The Exorcist TV show, but also because the stunt performer speaks about the high they get from performing the stunts. Site of Passage is about how young women perform games with their bodies in the pursuit of feeling this kind of levitation as well, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” but also the fainting game etc. Mary MacLane is Nietzsche-like in her intense existential lamentations but also how she speaks of the sublime red line of a sunset and how she yearns for that to be with her always, but alas, is only momentary.