The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes

These films, with an evolving sense of the apocalyptic, articulate a doom that resonates with each man’s sense of loss. “As the line expands,” Laing continues, “it destroys everything.” And by everything, he means everything, as the molten line expands beyond its frame in a moment of oddly contemplative horror. to shield themselves from the heat,” eventually retreating off screen. Shimmering waves of heat push out toward the edges of the screen.” The characters have to “splay their hands in front of their faces. It’s a roadhouse movie that ends when, as Laing explains, a “red line appears in the center of the screen,” vibrating “ever so slightly as if etched on the film itself.” And yet the characters onscreen see the line as if it is not on the film but in the film it divides them and when “the woman reaches across the table she jerks her hand back when it approaches the red line.” The line begins to widen, bubbling “slowly like lava. The first film Laing describes is Destroyer. The films he describes (inventions of Rombes, though credited to real filmmakers) - even a half-finished film and a treatment for a film - all lead to endings that seem to share Kiss Me Deadly’s intimations of apocalypse. Laing agrees to talk with Rombes’s narrator, but only through descriptions of the films he destroyed.

An unnamed narrator, a journalist on assignment, travels to a run-down Wisconsin motel to interview Roberto Acestes Laing, a film librarian who gained notoriety in the 1990s when he ritualistically burned single-print films “from the likes of David Lynch, Michelangelo Antonioni,” Maya Deren, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Likewise, Nicholas Rombes’s haunting debut novel, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is about a secret history of film films of destruction, films that destroy their own borders, films that are then destroyed. In this way, the scene effectively destroys both the world within the film, as well as the borders of that world. There’s nothing to prepare you for it - how could there be? Even an understanding of Cold War anxieties about nuclear holocaust cannot normalize this nightmarish ending. The scene is apocalyptic not just for its content, but for its violent incongruity with the rest of the film. The light begins to blow out the screen, first engulfing her in flames, then engulfing the building, then (perhaps) more. She opens it slowly, and it emits a blinding glow, which breathes and hisses and lights her face demonically from below. TOWARD THE END of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, a seemingly conventional detective story, a woman gets her hands on a mysterious and coveted box.

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes