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?