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It’s been two days in this wrecked, abandoned motel in remote Wisconsin, interviewing Laing about the rare films he destroyed, and I feel like I know him less now than when we first began. Laing brings one of the tapes back to the table. Lang, for whom in M and the Mabuse films there was no such thing as truth, only illusions, pitiful illusions, his characters pretending to be one thing when they are in fact another, a duplicity which lasts only so long, until the character betrays himself. Either the German Lang or the American Lang, depending on whether the films in question were made before or after he fled the fucking Nazis in 1934. For the first time I think of Laing in relation to that other Lang, Fritz, whose Metropolis had transformed everyone who saw it into detectives of film. Bright red and cone shaped, or like a metal insect that had been melted down and reshaped as a cone, about the size of a spark plug. Then he takes something from his pocket, a small object whose shape and function I still don’t understand. I make a move as if to say it's time to break but Laing gets up and walks over to the blue velvet throne-chair in the corner of the motel room and comes back to the table with one of the VHS tapes, unmarked.
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