Episode One: Ellen Page

MARY SAYS, I’M so messed up, I feel broken. She is cleaning her ashtrays, smoking a cigarette indoors, leaning against her kitchen counter. She has gone through all the liquor and ice cream in the house and cereal and white powder are spilled everywhere, in the carpet and on the hardwood. There is a long silence at the other end of the line. She hears the scrape of a cupped palm over the phone’s speaker when she starts to look for her car keys and realizes how drunk and starving she is when she cannot find her car keys, how the effort of even looking starts to turn her manic and makes her shake. The voice says, You’re not broken, Mary.

Inside the Volvo, Mary creeps closer to the window and takes too long to answer before dropping her phone in the crack between her chair and car door. The headlights blink on like eyeballs on the pavement. Gray skinny eucalyptus and palm trees sway in the wind with the power lines in the shadows. Hello, says the voice from the phone. Mary says, I am going for a slow drive now. Shut the fuck up. I have to figure out where I am and where I want to go.

She takes her time scanning the radio stations, waiting to hear something she could ignore, something fucking loud; she wants to pretend she is moving effortlessly. Mary says, Play it fucking loud. I am going to find you, says the voice from the phone from the floor, muffled under the engine and radio songs. She repeats again, I’m so messed up, pacing her breathing with the automatic wind shield wipers. Mary only turns down the radio when she notices her heart is pounding, somewhere along the highway.

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Alyssa is strangely quiet about everything, sitting at the entrance to the art gallery, looking spaced and drowsy. People often tell her she has the face of someone who has lived through traumatic events, a face now peaceful, as though she is indifferent to everything happening around her, her eyes are gigantic and absent. She says, I don’t fear the future, I don’t really think about the future. She is usually shocked when this comes up every now and again in interviews, normally shrugging her shoulders. Since the incident, she has been noticing her lack of desire, and her love for being inside and ordering delivery food. There is a man right now in front of her with a tape recorder held to her mouth. She is looking at ease in the daylight. She says, The distracted person, too, can form habits.

Alyssa explains again, years ago she was kidnapped and held captive. She explains, years ago, she was coordinating to be hostess with a different art galley, one with secret and private owners, and when she arrived to the venue, she was quietly startled to find there were many sculptures and steel figurine pieces that closely resembled her. She was paused over and over again, cold in her extremities, this pale expression on her face. Because of the heavy rain, the exhibition was nearly empty of attendees, aside from a few wet hooded students. Alyssa had spent most of the time pacing around the space, transfixed with her replicas, all erotic in poses. She is naked in every statue.

Alyssa explains that her memory begins to become woozy after she approaches the steel figurine of herself, only wearing a skirt. There she sees a man in a black ski mask, running his hands all over the sculpture, which causes her to flee. Alyssa does not even manage to get within sight of the main entrance, large visible double glass doors, before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness.

Alyssa says, When he spoke to me, I noticed a sweet grape Life Saver staining his tongue, from inside his mask. Alyssa wakes up in a dark warehouse, without remembering anything, almost completely void from feeling. She wakes up underneath a skylight, on top of piles of Styrofoam and new cardboard boxes. She has admitted later, in several future interviews, how it was the closest thing she has ever felt to being enlightened, waking up there, after being so afraid, in panic, so long in sleep.

The man with the tape recorder continues just to stand there, in his way entranced.

Alyssa tilts her head in a playful way and says, This exact thing also happened to someone named Mary right here in San Diego. She has a slight smile and waits there until his tape runs out with a small click. There is no one else in line and the parking lot outside the art gallery is empty with only birds and loose blown leaves. She says, The exhibition I am now hosting behind me, is about hamsters I think. If you keep walking inside, there are just giant portraits of hamsters, I think. I think it’s very cool. I have been inside for hours, just getting lost.

Before walking inside, Alyssa pulls the man with the tape recorder aside and says, Please, don’t ever come here and ask me questions again.

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ELLEN PAGE

Q.

I am involved in this very special kind of method acting, and it’s sort of a lifelong method, a very strange commitment my parents made for me before I was born. I was going to be an actor hands down raised under the vacant discipline of this special method, no questions asked. Since I’ve been alive, I have only slept in rooms that are perfect squares. Perfect squares and only perfect squares. I was only allowed to sleep in rooms that were perfect squares. My father would catch me sleeping out on my swinging tire in our front lawn and come out screaming at me, sometimes already holding his video camera. Sometimes, I used to think about all the times my parents have woke me up screaming when I was breaking the method, and think about those moments as scenes in a movie, and seeing how long that movie goes for. There are hours and hours of footage actually of just that, footage of my parents fucking yelling at me, and catching my reactions on tape. My face through time, from tape to tape, became perfect. My expressions were erased as though I was a soldier in training, polite and homicidal, damaged and photogenic.

The method was never explained, which really bothered me. It took me a long time in my adolescence to make sense of what my parents were doing to me every night. They were only screaming and refused talking to me or answering my questions. You’re going to be consistently baffled, they told me. They said, If you want to know the real you have to know this confusion.

In this new film, I play two roles, a woman named Mary and a woman named Alyssa. Because of the method, I feel as though I am always on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But after the come down, I feel as though I can be anyone. For both the parts, Mary and Alyssa, to prepare I pretended I was being buried alive by covering my face at home with a pillow every night while listening to their favorite records.