Jane Spencer’s ‘Little Noises’
I describe Little Noises as damp, cold, timeless and enigmatic.
It’s one of my favorite movies.
The film follows a starving, seemingly inept writer named
Joseph Kremple, a 27 year old who has difficulty speaking in a coherent manner,
no real skills or prospects but a single-minded dream of being a famous author.
With his equally desperate friend Timmy Smith, an aspiring actor with little
evidence of marketable talent, they stalk Mathias Liechtenstein, the
neighborhood literary agent, viewing him as the gatekeeper to the artistic life
they both wish to live.
Joseph’s unrequited love, Stella Winslow, is a confident
young playwright who seems to respond to Joseph’s romantic overtures with a kind of maternal pity that Joseph misinterprets
as a mutual feeling for him.
Joseph, incredibly, has his own fan in Marty Slovak, a mute young
man with a trauma filled past. Marty consistently
and intrusively seeks validation from Joseph by trying to have him read his
poems.
After hitting rock bottom Joseph resorts to presenting
Mathias with Marty’s poems as his own. The film ends with Joseph achieving the
success he wants at the price of forever alienating Stella, abandoning his best
friend Timmy and leaving Marty to a life of silent desperation on the street.
At night I listen to the composite soundtracks of films and television
shows that give me a feeling of peace. The sounds and familiar dialogue and
music help lull me to sleep.
My thoughts, as of late, while laying in bed listening to
the Little Noises composite soundtrack, center around what happened to these
characters after the credits roll.
Joseph and Stella would be in their late fifties. At the end of the film, Stella was about to
leave for England, where her play was to be produced. With her talent she would
likely live a comfortable life in the arts, maybe never reaching stardom, but
working within the literary community in a fulfilling and comfortable manner.
Until recently I always assumed that Joseph would squander
the opportunity he appropriated and fade into obscurity living a life of
solitary despair but two scenes have made me rethink this supposition: The
scene in which Joseph tells Marty that ‘all of the sounds, all of the words
ever spoken, are caught up in the sky forever’ suggest a truly contemplative
nature; and the scene in which he describes his ludicrous idea for a novel about
nomadic tribes in Antarctica suggests that he has a vibrant imagination but
lacks the life experience to pull from and break his writer’s block.
At the end of the film he attempts to make amends with Marty,
in a crass and futile manner, as if he were attempting to separate himself from
the poetry that did not belong to him and that he never wanted to write in the
first place.
The first lines of the film are Joseph stating that ‘There
is one thing I know in this life: I am a writer and I am destined to write a
great novel.’
As a person who believes in destiny and how strong a single-minded
desire can be, I believe that the next act in this story concerns Joseph
writing a novel called ‘Little Noises’, a literary confession of his crime,
that acts as the breakout work of his literary career and forever separates him
from the stolen poetry.
Unlike Stella, he supports himself solely with his fiction, making
this sequel in the vein of a F. Scott Fitzgerald or Charles Dickens romantic
tragedy.
Joseph finds himself reacquainted with Stella, giving a
lecture in the academic setting she has made her life in, and finally has to confront
the fact that despite carrying a torch for her for decades she has created a
happy life with a family and career and has nothing but contempt for his
success as she is the only one who knows him for what he truly is.
Jane Spencer is a writer and director with only two features
and a handful of short subjects to her credit. I have not seen her second film,
which released decades after her first, as it has proven different to track
down.
I would like to ask her two questions: Is Stella Winslow a
fictional version of herself? The rationale behind this question is that Stella
is such a huge part of the film but has only a handful of scenes and her
character is never fleshed out beyond being the audience to Joseph’s
unceremonious rise to fame and the girl of his dreams
The second question, one for which she may not even have an answer,
does the dream sequence at the end of the film suggest that Marty’s mother was
the original author of the poems that Joseph finally achieved his success with?
