When Fiction Becomes Reality
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And they're under the ground?
Their bodies are. Yes.
Tell me what ‘dead’ is.
When you look at the photographs o f Thomas and
Timothy, do you remember the stories o f what
they‘re doing?
Yes.
Well, Tom and Timmy are alive in your imagination.
Then, into the triangle of Ted, Marion, and Ruth Cole steps Eddie
O’Hare (Jon Foster), a junior at Philips Exeter Academy. Like the central figure
in coming-of-age films such as Sophie's Choice, O’Hare will most assuredly
learn more from living with the Coles than he will from his job, correcting the
punctuation in Ted Cole’s newest story, "A Sound Like Someone Trying Not To
Make a Sound.” O’Hare’s father, an English professor who remembers Thomas
and Timothy Cole from their time at Exeter, wants his son to work as Ted Cole’s
apprentice, although ultimately O’Hare spends more time as Cole’s driver (Cole
had lost his license three months before for driving while drunk) than he does
learning the craft of writing. The 16-year-old, who was hired by Ted Cole to
spend the summer as his assistant, falls in love immediately with the sad,
sensitive, maternal, perceptive, withholding Marion Cole, who picks him up at
the ferry. He becomes their messenger and translator; rarely do Ted and Marion
Cole appear together in a scene, and O’Hare often serves as a conduit for
information.
While Marion Cole temporarily escapes the memory of her sons’
violent death—one son’s leg was severed at the hip, and she picks up his shoe
from the wreckage without realizing the shoe is attached to his leg—her husband
finds refuge from her inability to engage with him and refuge from his own grief
by drawing and subsequently seducing women in the community. As Irving
explains in his novel, the models go through several stages—innocence,
modesty, degradation, and shame—that precede Ted Cole’s ultimate and
inevitable abandonment of the women.
At the heart of the film is Ted Cole’s children’s tale The Door in t