I have been intrigued about Charles Burns’ work for more than a decade, ever since I heard of Black Hole.
I never got around to read (or even buy) Black Hole, but I have seen Final Cut referenced ever since it was released, even hailed by The Guardian in their now sadly apparently discontunied chronicle “Graphic Novel of the Month”, which I used to enjoy.
The story here is pretty straight-forward: it is the 70s and we meet a group of friends. Brian and Jimmy are childhood friends, and they used to shoot home made horror movies when they were about 12. A bit older now, they do screenings of those to their friends, along with more classic horror movies. Jimmy introduces beautiful redhead Laurie to Brian - she wants to star in their next production, which is to be bigger than the ones they did as pre-teens.
This is narrated by both Brian and Laurie. Brian is more quiet than Jimmy - he admittedly lives in a world in his own head, and he is taking this movie they want to shoot so seriously that he gets controlling. He admits to the fact his own world can be terrifying. He also loves going to the movies to escape his real life and obsesses over them. We soon realise this is how he aims to get his mental health and family life in check and under control.
He also obsesses over Laurie.
Laurie is extremely beautiful and captivating, and while seeming more confident than Brian, we soon learn she truly struggles not only to make her feelings known, but to feel like she belongs. She is attracted to Brian’s intensity and art, but does not know how to deal with it. They go to a cabin on a beach with some of their friends, namely Tina, whose parents own the cabin, and later on a hike to a mountain, where Brian wants to film everything he idealises, much to other people’s annoyance (they want to drink, they want to have fun). The art is at its most beautiful in the natural landscapes, extremely evocative.
The things left unsaid by both Laurie and Brian have consequences.
What I loved the most about this book is how it shows us a set of people who look at each other, yet don’t really see the others, as they assign them specific roles they believe they are playing - which to me is incredibly intelligent in how it’s paired with shooting a film, where they are supposed to play parts and follow a script.
Moreover, this set of friends doesn’t quite seem to connect with each other on a deeper level - they are working on a project together, and if we remove that, there is not much that would seemingly bring them together.
The end moved me, as the set of friends watches the footage they worked on. Brian is upset, because it doesn’t look as nice as he wished (because no one else was taking it so seriously), and tries to visualise his own final cut, where what is unpleasant is edited out, and where he would have his own neat, tidy happy ending. But life rarely goes how we envision it, and people are not actors in our lives that we can direct and have doing what we want - so we know he cannot have this happy ending he wishes for.
Translated by José Cardoso de Menezes
If you’re in Portugal, you can get a copy via wook, in Portuguese or in English.
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