She isn’t just a symbol for the boy. He wants to be her, too, a werewoman from the other side. He wants to walk through the world wearing her otherness, wants those sequins and those strange curves, the sleekness of something designed, like a car or a Danish vase, something steely, something streamlined that perhaps doesn’t immediately reveal its purpose, something modern. She’s power and artifice and allure, an object of fascination—which means, really, that she’s in him already. He contains what he wants to become: an alien woman from the future, chilly queen from space who will move obliquely through this world, killing the men who try to encumber her.

And through the other lens, the one I’ve positioned on the screen of the Lyric Theater, from which the movie looks out at the boy? What does the lens reveal about him?

Sitting close to the screen—he needs glasses, and will have them before too long, but no one’s yet figured out that he can’t see well, and he himself does not understand that the world looks different to anyone else—he is too young. People don’t think so much about danger to children, not in ’61 or ’62, but he is still a little boy; where is his father, who’s dropped him at the curb two hours ago, or is it a double feature this time? Is it so they can be away from her, away from home, in this beat downtown already emptied out? The sprawl of suburbs turn their back on the failing center of the city, the only place here where things are old.

What I can tell you, what I can see most clearly about this child, is that he is absolutely, plainly alone, clutching the candy he hopes will last the entire duration of the film. He’s lived in seven houses in seven years. He’s a little pudgy, eager to pour his attention out of his body up onto the screen. His grandparents are dead or far away; his big sister’s a teenage girl with two kids now, in another state, so it’s him and his parents, who don’t seem to have any friends, who keep moving, disconnecting, and whom he already knows he can’t tell about a world of things inside him. Maybe it isn’t just them; maybe that’s what it is to be a person, all these dreams and apprehensions and questions you can’t say to anybody. Either because you lack a vocabulary for them, or because no one would understand if you did say them, since the interior of each person seems to be a separate place, as if everyone were permanently alone at the movies, watching their own silvery interiority up on some private screen while the dazzling afternoon goes on outside.