house. His wife is pacing back and forth, alternately wringing her hands and weeping into a handkerchief. There is no question that she has already heard the news about Hector’s disappearance. Chase enters, the ignominious C. Lester Chase, author of the diabolical plot to rob Hector of his soft-drink empire. He pretends to console the poor woman, patting her on the shoulder and shaking his head in false despair. He extracts the mysterious letter from his inside breast pocket and hands it to her, explaining that he found it on Hector’s desk that morning. Cut to an insert shot of the letter in extreme close-up. Dearest Beloved , it says. Please forgive me. The doc says I’m suffering from a fatal disease and have only two months to live. To spare you the agony, I’ve decided to end it now. Don’t worry about the business. The company is in good hands with Chase. I will always love you, Hector . It doesn’t take long for these lies and deceptions to do their work. In the next shot, we see the letter slip from the wife’s fingers and flutter to the floor. It is all too much for her. The world has been turned upside down, and everything in it has been broken. Less than a second after that, she faints.
The camera follows her down to the floor, and then the image of her inert, recumbent body dissolves into a wide shot of Hector. He has left the office and is wandering the streets, trying to come to terms with the strange and terrible thing that has happened to him. To prove that all hope is really gone, he stops at a crowded intersection and strips down to his underwear. He does a little dance, he walks on his hands, he sticks out his fanny at the passing traffic, and when no one pays any attention to him, he glumly climbs back into his clothes and shuffles off. After that, Hector seems resigned to his fate. He doesn’t fight against his condition so much as try to understand it, and rather than look for a way to make himself visible again (by confronting Chase, for example, or by searching for an antidote that would undo the effects of the drink), he embarks on a series of weird and impulsive experiments, an investigation of who he is and what he has become. Unexpectedly—with a sudden, lightning flick of his hand—he knocks off the hat of a passerby. So that’s how things are, Hector seems to be saying to himself. A man can be invisible to everyone around him, but his body can still interact with the world. Another pedestrian approaches. Hector sticks out his foot and trips him. Yes, his hypothesis is surely correct, but that doesn’t mean that more research isn’t required. Warming to his task now, he picks up the hem of a woman’s dress and studies her legs. He kisses another woman on the cheek, then a third woman on the mouth. He crosses out the letters on a stop sign, and an instant later a motorcycle slams into a trolley. He sneaks up behind two men, and by tapping each one on the shoulder and kicking them in the shins, he instigates a brawl. There is something cruel and childish about these pranks, but they are also satisfying to watch, and each one adds another fact to the growing body of evidence. Then, as Hector picks up an errant baseball that rolls toward him on the sidewalk, he makes his second important discovery. Once an invisible man takes hold of an object, it disappears from sight. It does not hover in the air; it is sucked into the void, into the same nothingness that encloses the man himself, and the moment it enters that haunted sphere, it is gone. The boy who lost the ball runs to the spot where he thinks it must have landed. The laws of physics dictate that the ball should be there, but it isn’t. The boy is mystified. Seeing this, Hector puts the ball on the ground and walks away. The boy looks down, and lo and behold, the ball is there again, lying at his feet. What in the world has happened? The little episode ends with a close-up of the boy’s startled face.
Hector rounds the corner and
The camera follows her down to the floor, and then the image of her inert, recumbent body dissolves into a wide shot of Hector. He has left the office and is wandering the streets, trying to come to terms with the strange and terrible thing that has happened to him. To prove that all hope is really gone, he stops at a crowded intersection and strips down to his underwear. He does a little dance, he walks on his hands, he sticks out his fanny at the passing traffic, and when no one pays any attention to him, he glumly climbs back into his clothes and shuffles off. After that, Hector seems resigned to his fate. He doesn’t fight against his condition so much as try to understand it, and rather than look for a way to make himself visible again (by confronting Chase, for example, or by searching for an antidote that would undo the effects of the drink), he embarks on a series of weird and impulsive experiments, an investigation of who he is and what he has become. Unexpectedly—with a sudden, lightning flick of his hand—he knocks off the hat of a passerby. So that’s how things are, Hector seems to be saying to himself. A man can be invisible to everyone around him, but his body can still interact with the world. Another pedestrian approaches. Hector sticks out his foot and trips him. Yes, his hypothesis is surely correct, but that doesn’t mean that more research isn’t required. Warming to his task now, he picks up the hem of a woman’s dress and studies her legs. He kisses another woman on the cheek, then a third woman on the mouth. He crosses out the letters on a stop sign, and an instant later a motorcycle slams into a trolley. He sneaks up behind two men, and by tapping each one on the shoulder and kicking them in the shins, he instigates a brawl. There is something cruel and childish about these pranks, but they are also satisfying to watch, and each one adds another fact to the growing body of evidence. Then, as Hector picks up an errant baseball that rolls toward him on the sidewalk, he makes his second important discovery. Once an invisible man takes hold of an object, it disappears from sight. It does not hover in the air; it is sucked into the void, into the same nothingness that encloses the man himself, and the moment it enters that haunted sphere, it is gone. The boy who lost the ball runs to the spot where he thinks it must have landed. The laws of physics dictate that the ball should be there, but it isn’t. The boy is mystified. Seeing this, Hector puts the ball on the ground and walks away. The boy looks down, and lo and behold, the ball is there again, lying at his feet. What in the world has happened? The little episode ends with a close-up of the boy’s startled face.
Hector rounds the corner and
Similar Books
