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Summary
132. The Elevator – 175. And What Happens Next in this Movie
The elevator is filled with smoke, but when the door opens, the smoke doesn’t waft out. The smoke is thick, and Will has trouble breathing. From within the smoke, two large hands reach out and grab him in a headlock, the kind his brother Shawn used to give him, but harder. There’s laughter all around him, and Will compares the laughter to drowning, wondering how to tell water that drowning isn’t funny. When he is freed, he realizes the person who has him in a headlock is his Uncle Mark.
He remembers stories about his Uncle Mark. His Uncle Mark wanted to be a filmmaker. He would come up with ideas for films. In one love story, he casts Will’s mother and father in the roles as the lovers. Will marvels at how strange it is to feel like he knows his uncle even though he doesn’t really, he just knows stories about him. His uncle lost his camera, so he started selling drugs just to make enough money to buy a new camera. But even after he got the camera, he kept selling and eventually he was shot on the corner, which was taken over by someone else. Will says that, though Uncle Mark never shot anything again, Will’s father did. He thinks of another anagram: CINEMA = ICEMAN.
When Will asks his Uncle Mark why he’s here, his Uncle asks Will the same question, and Will says that when someone responds to a question with a question it’s usually a setup. He says another anagram is COOL = LOCO. Will eventually tells his uncle that he has to follow the Rules. Will thinks about how it was his Uncle Mark who taught Shawn the Rules. He tells his uncle that he’s going to get revenge for his brother’s murder. Uncle Mark asks Will if he thinks he’s capable of killing someone and Will says yes. Uncle Mark has him talk through what’s going to happen with Riggs as though it was a film script. Together, they describe Will getting the gun, taking the elevator down, and going to Riggs’s house. But when Will gets to the part where he’s supposed to say that he shoots Riggs, he freezes. He can’t get the words out of his mouth. He chokes on the word and hopes Uncle Mark will say cut. Instead, his uncle eggs him on, demands he finish it, demands he says the word, but he can’t. Buck joins in and says and shoots, and then Will says it, too. Uncle Mark lights up his own cigarette. Will is concerned about how much smoke is in the elevator, making it difficult for him to breathe. He asks Will what comes next. Will says that’s the end. Uncle Mark disagrees, saying it’s never the end. The elevator comes to a stop again.
Analysis
This section explores smoke as a symbol that evokes the disorientation and cloudy thinking that accumulates in the wake of grief. In this section, Will grapples with the suffocating smoke within the elevator, which gets thicker as each of the dead contributes to it with their own cigarettes. In the same way, each of the people that Will has lost contributes to the thick fog of grief that surrounds him. This fog of grief also makes it difficult for Will to make decisions, makes it hard for him to see clearly. The smoke makes that disorientation physical. As the elevator descends, the density of the smoke increases. This parallels the fact that, with each loss and death, the weight of Will’s grief increases. Will also knows that smoke is damaging for the living. In a sense, each of the dead is inhaling and exhaling death itself, as represented by the deadly cigarettes, and Will knows that the smoke itself is dangerous for him, as the only living person on the elevator.
This section also explores the dreams that were thwarted by the endless cycle of violence in Will’s community, suggesting that many invisible losses have accrued from so many deaths. When he was alive, Uncle Mark was driven by his dream to become a filmmaker, and, in a sense, died because he got sidetracked from that dream by the dangerous life of selling drugs on the corner. This illustrates that what was lost in the cycle of crime and violence is more than just the physical realities of the dead. Each of these deaths also meant an end to the life that could’ve been. For Dani, she lost the ability to grow up at all, and the community is missing the girl and then the woman she would’ve become. For Uncle Mark, the world will never know the films he could’ve made or if he could’ve gotten out of the neighborhood to find success. This hints at the weight of absence in the community, of all those unlived dreams.
This section also further explores the symbol of the anagrams, which are a creative tool that Will uses to express what is otherwise difficult for him to articulate. Will doesn’t name precisely how he feels about his Uncle Mark, but after he begins to be suspicious of his questioning, he attempts to distance himself from his uncle with the anagram COOL = LOCO. He senses that his uncle, who is fixated on his appearance and expects Will’s excited attention, has something a little unstable about him, underneath his cool appearance. This anagram encapsulates Will’s hesitancy to embrace the visit from his dead uncle and his suspicion that he’s going to interfere with his plan. The second anagram comes when Will stops short of saying directly that his father killed Uncle Mark’s murderer. Instead, Will shares the anagram CINEMA = ICEMAN. Again, Will is not entirely certain what he’s naming, but the anagram gestures towards his sense that there are “bad men” involved in his uncle’s story, the bad men who cost Will both his uncle and his father.
