Adeline listlessly flips through pictures on her computer. Photographic equipment in her room indicates her interest in the art, and some of these pictures, along with two or three of her photos framed on the wall, show that she has some chops as a photographer. But the pictures clearly have lost a certain excitement for her. Her mother asks why she’s home on a summer afternoon but Adeline just shrugs. She tells her daughter not to be worried about starting college in the fall, and Adeline insists she’s not worried, even though she is – it’s a big transition for her. Instead, she tells her mother she’s worried that taking pictures is going stale for her. Her mother suggests that Adeline find a new challenge in photography, get away from her digital hardware and back to something simpler and more direct.
For the next few weeks Adeline starts taking photographs with different older cameras; she even starts working with a pinhole camera and toy cameras. After one trip to the mall, she and her friend Judy return to Adeline’s with a Polaroid camera. Adeline opens it up and Judy takes it from her and photographs Adeline. The angle is a bit distorting in the photo, and Adeline jokes, “I think I can look better than that!” She takes the camera from Judy, holds it out in front of her face, fixes an expression as she looks into the lens, and snaps her picture. The picture comes out, and she and Judy are amazed to see it develop into the slightly hazy image of a car driving down a road. The colors are somewhat desaturated, and the edges of the image are foggy. There’s a bit of a tilt to the image, and its angle is unusual, as though it had been taken from a point seven or eight feet off the ground.
“There must be something wrong with the film,” Adeline guesses, and Judy picks up the camera and takes a picture of herself, which comes out fine. Judy then takes Adeline’s picture, which also comes out fine. Adeline takes the camera and photographs herself as she did before; the picture shows a wildflower growing in a field, again with the same visual qualities as the car photo; only this time the angle is low and close up. Judy gets weirded out and goes home. Adeline starts to take another picture of herself but then stops and puts the camera back in the bag. She avoids saying anything to her parents at dinner that evening, but later that night, in her room, her curiosity gets the better of her and she takes another Polaroid of herself: the image of a howling dog.
Adeline tells her parents, who try to allay her concerns by saying there must be something wrong with the film, or the camera, or both; they recommend that she take it back to the store and get a new one. She does that the next day, but the new Polaroid, like the previous one, produces different images whenever Adeline photographs herself: a blue sky with white clouds, sailboats on a lake, a broken plastic cup lying on the grass. When Adeline snaps herself with the camera in her phone or with her digital camera, she gets a normal picture of herself; with the older cameras she’d been using, she also gets pictures of herself but they are strangely obscured, with foggy textures too imprecise to be actual images.
At college, Adeline seeks out the most knowledgeable teachers in photography and optics, hoping they can explain what’s happening. But they keep dismissing the situation, saying there’s something wrong with the film. When one of them implies that she’s pulling some kind of trick, Adeline becomes indignant and insists that they arrange a test where she cannot possibly have tampered with the camera. He and a fellow teacher grudgingly oblige her, and again the results are strange images: people in a field, pointing up at the sky; something burning; horses running. But Adeline is amazed when they still refuse to believe it’s not a defect in the film or a trick. Their response also has an undercurrent of anger, as though Adeline was somehow trying to take something away from them. One teacher finally tells her, “We’re not going to throw away the laws of physics and optics, which science has developed after centuries of research and study and education, just because no one knows how you’re doing it.”
That fiasco makes its way into the school newspaper, and Adeline starts attracting attention on campus, none of it good. People point her out, whisper among themselves, try not to be caught looking at her. Some shy away from her; those who are obliged to deal with her keep the encounter short. The local TV station gets wind of Adeline and airs a brief and condescending item about her on Halloween, implying that it must be some kind of a hoax. After the broadcast Adeline becomes even more of an outsider at college. Students deliberately ignore or avoid her; no one holds an elevator or a door for her anymore. A few students even become aggressive: Some kids at study hall won’t let her sit at their table; Adeline walks past a pair of religious fundamentalists who speculate loudly about the presence of the devil in the midst of good people.
Adeline is aware of the contempt and hostility around her, but she fails to notice when a boy starts following her. In the library, she sets her backpack down at an empty table, takes out a book, and goes to the return desk. Once she’s gone, he quickly puts something into her backpack – we don’t see what – and then departs.
At home that evening, Adeline finds an envelope in her bag. She opens it and out spill several Polaroids, all resembling hers: people running either to or from something, trees in a field, the rooftops of a city neighborhood, a pair of rabbits scrambling in the wild, a manhole cover. There’s also a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled on it. Adeline calls the number, and the first thing she hears is a boy’s voice saying to her, “You’re not the only one.” When she asks who he is, he responds, “Can you come here tomorrow?” He gives the address and tells her to come at three o’clock and to bring her pictures with her – and to be sure to bring back everything he’s given her: photos, phone number, even the envelope. “What’s your name?” she demands. “Rodney,” he answers. Adeline vaguely recognizes something, and asks, “Do we know each other?” “We do now,” he tells her, and hangs up.
That night, just before she goes to sleep, Adeline takes another picture of herself. We don’t see it when it emerges; all we see is her lying in bed and scrutinizing it very intently.
She arrives for their meeting and discovers that Rodney is only 15 but prodigious enough to be a junior at her college – which is how she knew of him. He’s also a sad amalgam of condescension and timidity, arrogance and vulnerability. He makes sure he’s gotten everything back from her and then tells her he can’t believe she went public with what’s happening, that she’s only courting trouble by thinking the jerks could be of any use to her. As he lays out his Polaroids for her, he talks about the days when radio was only a couple of AM stations in any one area, and every now and then some unlucky jerk would pick up stray radio signals in the metal fillings in his teeth, and static and music and voices would actually come out of his mouth. “We’re like that,” he tells her. “Somehow we’re picking up some stray vibration of energy, and when we resonate with it, we can get these different random images on film.”
Adeline notices that he too has a picture of a car on the road, although the angle is different, and she shows him her photo. Then she starts spotting other images of his that correspond to hers and begins to pair them up. She questions if Rodney has told his parents about the pictures, and he snorts, “Those idiots?” “Who have you shown these to?” she asks. “Just you,” he tells her, “because you understand.” When Adeline protests that she doesn’t understand how all this is happening, Rodney answers, “No one does. But you understand what it’s like to have it happen to you.”
He starts speculating that they must have some kind of special neurological kinship, but Adeline is increasingly distracted by the array of photos, hers and his. Seeing bigger patterns, she begins to rearrange them, putting certain visual themes together: cars in motion; people in an open field; fire; animals running or snarling; birds in flight; the sky with clouds. “They aren’t random images,” Adeline tells Rodney. “Something is trying to make itself clear through us. Something is being announced.” “Maybe it’s something that’s already happened,” he offers, “and we’re just registering its aftershocks.” She immediately disagrees: “It’s something that’s going to happen,” she tells him – but she has to admit she doesn’t know why she thinks that.
Rodney grabs his Polaroid and takes a picture of himself. What emerges is an image of the sky, only there’s a strange dark area that glints with strong colors. Adeline goes into her portfolio and pulls out a picture she’d set aside, telling him, “I took this one last night, just before I went to bed.” It’s the same image, only from another angle. They look at the two pictures of this unknown thing: a meteor? a UFO? a nuclear bomb detonating? a dimensional doorway? an angel? Shaken by what he sees, Rodney turns to Adeline and says, “I thought we were two people who were just the same kind of freaks; now you’re telling me that we’re both in on something that’s really big, only we don’t know what it is that we’re in on!” When he declares that no good can come of people knowing about this, Adeline disagrees: “People have to know what it is that’s revealing itself through us.” Rodney urges her not to drag him into this – “What can I say about something that I don’t understand?” He tells her he’s already become too much of a freak, on campus and at home, just because of his intelligence. “I can’t let myself be marginalized any further,” he tells her. “I saw what they did to you. There’s no way I could put myself through that.” Adeline assures him that she won’t tell anyone about him.
Driving back home from Rodney’s, Adeline glances at a traffic sign: a curved arrow, indicating a curve ahead. She starts with recognition, pulls the car over, grabs her portfolio, and goes to the first Polaroid she took of herself, a car driving down a road. In the picture is a traffic sign that indicates a curve ahead, which has the same bent corner that this sign on the road has. She takes that curve, which leads her to a large park.
Walking through the park, Adeline comes to an open meadow where she sits on the grass. She notices the cast-iron fencing at one edge of the meadow, then flips through her portfolio and extracts her picture of a toddler in a field, looking up. In the background is the same type of cast-iron fence. Then she looks at her photos of people in a field and starts comparing the trees in the background to the trees around her, but it’s hard for her to tell for sure. Adeline closes the portfolio and leans back to recline in the grass but feels something under her back. She sits up and sees she was on a broken plastic cup. She opens the portfolio and finds the photo: It’s a match.
She takes her cell phone from her purse and calls Rodney. “I’ve found it,” she tells him. “I’ve found the place in the pictures! I’ve found where it’s going to happen, it’s in the meadow of Bailey Park!” Adeline urges him to join her out there and bring his photos, but he resists: “That album of pictures has never left my room and it’s never going to.” “You’ve got to choose,” she says to him. “Fear or faith, you’ve got to choose.” “Faith in what?” he demands. “I’m not sure,” she replies, “Faith in what’s real? In where we are? In what we can be, what can happen, what’s possible?” Adeline realizes that he’s ended the connection, and she puts the phone away. She takes a swig from her water bottle and then takes up the Polaroid to photograph herself again. But she stops, gets her phone, and calls again. She listens as it rings.
Rodney is sitting at home, staring at the album containing his pictures. His cell phone is ringing but he doesn’t pick it up.
Adeline ends the call and puts down the phone. She notices a cluster of trees in the distance and starts looking though her portfolio for a certain picture.
An hour or two later, the beginning of sunset: Adeline is still out there in the park. No longer perusing pictures, she is gazing up at the sky in wonder and expectation. She is smiling. A large dog runs past her and breaks her reverie; she laughs as it comes wheeling around to run back the other way and tries to call it to her as it goes by. Adeline picks up the camera and takes another photo of herself. As she sets the camera down on top of her portfolio, she sees Rodney walking toward her, carrying his album of pictures. She grins and waves at him, and he shyly waves back. He sits down on the grass beside her, and she says to him, “Check this out.” She grabs her portfolio, placing the camera with its emerged but still undeveloped photo on the grass. She points to the broken plastic cup and then opens her portfolio to her picture of it. They become engrossed in their discussion of correspondences between where they are and what’s in their pictures, their voices glowing with enthusiasm and awe. “Wow!”s and laughter punctuate their easy communication. They don’t even notice that Adeline’s camera has developed another picture.
(This treatment, written in 2013, appears here for the first time.)
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Film: Scripts & Treatments: Contents
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 