Mercury Pictures Presents

“Several of her relatives, including her mother, had vanished into the water that day, disappearing with such finality it seemed they hadn’t drowned but dissolved into the froth. After Annunziata moved North and married Giuseppe, she purchased herself a plot in Rome’s Verano cemetery. The mason she spoke with guaranteed his tombstones would remain legible for at least two thousand years. When the time came, she wanted her name inscribed in big, capitalized letters, so no one would have any trouble finding her.”

Following the earthquake and tsunami that wrecked her life and took away her mother, Annunziata seeks to possess a piece of the earth that she has seen shaking and washed away beneath her feet. For Annunziata, the burial plot represents an attempt at permanence and stability in a world in flux.

“Its pages held hundreds of passport photographs pieced together, fixed with paste, provisioned with names, dates, destinations. The left half of each was punctured by a pushpin but otherwise unblemished. The right half, however, was folded, stained, and faxed by each weather-beaten mile of its journey. Maria couldn’t fathom the distances compressed into the seams of these reassembled passport photos.”

The two halves of the passport photos represent the fragmented identity of the immigrants. One part of them remains unaltered, rooted in their home, while the other is profoundly changed by their new country. The photos also represent the rift between old and new and the struggle for immigrant parents and children, though of one blood and culture, to understand each other, as one generation clings to the past and the other feels torn from the past and thrust into the unfamiliar.

“She stared into the hole, dwarfed by the fury lumbering within her, and felt the distances she had traveled, from driftwood debris to salon parquetry, and how even after years after the ground had stopped shaking the memory of the earthquake could still grip her in a rattling panic that took all her self-control to suppress. She had done everything asked of her and her reward was the grave she packed in her husband’s suitcase […] It was cumbersome, ungainly, a heaviness too impractical to bear, and yet she carried that portable grave across the Atlantic, then across America, because she would not surrender the piece of Roman ground she had gone so far to stand upon, and, if she died in exile, she would at last return home.”

Faced with the further upheaval and trauma of her husband’s imprisonment and their forthcoming immigration to the United States, Annunziata packs the earth from her burial plot into a suitcase that she will carry to America with her. The suitcase is cumbersome and impractical, but she stubbornly clings to it because it feels like the only constant in her unstable life.

“To the Italians who patronized the Lincoln Heights theater, the movie house was a classroom. Here you could study the conventions of your adopted country from the anonymity of the audience. Here you learned whom to desire and dread. The Frankenstein source material and later adaptations depicted the experience in the scene when the fleeing Monster comes upon a cabin in the woods. Forlorn and exiled, the Monster watches the family through the cabin windows, thinking that if he learns their customs and cultures, they will welcome him in from the cold. That’s how Maria saw herself in the darkened theater: a monster at the window of a house where she did not belong, trying to find her way to the lighted room within.”

The Frankenstein story is a recurrent motif in Marra’s novel. The monster, like the novel’s immigrant characters, is a hybrid, fragmented being. He knows no welcoming home, is shunned and banished wherever he travels, and is only accepted briefly by a blind girl who cannot be frightened by appearances. He is a fitting symbol for the immigrants who experience violence, imprisonment, and marginalization due to racism. In this passage, Maria compares the monster observing the family through the cabin window to the immigrant audience at the cinema, seeking to study American customs in the hope of winning acceptance.

“The Temple of Mercury once stood on the Aventine Hill where Maria had grown up. Thousands of years ago, travelers, translators, and letter writers climbed the Aventine to leave offerings to their patron deity before making a journey. Still standing beneath the studio gates, Maria rummaged around in her purse until she found a single penny. She laid the coin on the sidewalk and hoped it was enough to buy the protection of the ancient god of passage.”

The name of the production company, Mercury Studios, connects the ancient culture of Rome to the modern world of Los Angeles. As the “god of passage,” Mercury is an apt patron for the European refugees and immigrants working at the studios, all of whom require passage into American society. At this point, Maria does not fathom the nature of the journey ahead of her, nor how protection can become oppressive, as her work within the studio becomes at times due to a myriad of factors beyond her control.

“What got Artie, however, was that even though everyone knew Michael Romanoff was a fraud, he was still paid to consult on pictures about the Russian Imperial family. It was an ouroboros of bullshit: a man who built his artifice from movie fantasies became the authority legitimizing and propagating those fantasies. They weren’t remotely realistic, but then again, what kind of masochist enjoys realism? Realism is everywhere. It stinks. Artie had emigrated from Europe to escape all that dour realism. If Manhattan critics privileged with Anglo surnames and Ivy League pedigrees fetishized realism, it was because they resided in realms more artificial than any Artie conjured.”

The relationship between fantasy and reality is of central importance to the novel as a whole. Here, Artie reflects that, in an immigrant community where everyone is, to some extent, living a lie and fleeing from unbearably cruel realities, Michael Romanoff’s extravagant falsehoods are met with admiration rather than scorn. The importance of appearances also features heavily in the events of the novel, and Romanoff’s story illustrates how the appearance of truth can be of more use than absolute truth. This foreshadows several deceptions characters employ as they attempt to manipulate outcomes.

“Art, our children could never survive the world we’ve come from, and we could never survive the world they’re going into. By bettering their lot in life, we doom them to misunderstand us. I want to tell Adam that I became a bulldozer so he could become a racing bike […] You’re a good father, Art. You know how I know? Because your son is pissing in your hamper instead of trying on your clothes.”

Intergenerational conflict is a recurring motif in Marra’s treatment of the immigrant experience. Ned here reflects on how he and Artie have, paradoxically, alienated their children by giving them the opportunity of life in America. Artie is a good father precisely because his son does not want to be like him, and because he has broken the chain of intergenerational continuity, but he suffers from the loneliness and doubts all parents feel when they can’t bridge gaps between themselves and their children.

“Berlin propagandists accustomed to reaching into the mythic murk for precedent saw much to mine in the Busento riverbed: who was Hitler if not Alaric resurrected, the king who ended empires and dragged the curtain of the Dark Ages across the continent? And as the Italian and German regimes had begun discussing a military alliance, it was mutually decided that an excavation of their shared past could prove an invaluable propaganda exercise to sell their shared future. A few historical literalists in Rome bristled at the idea. Alaric had sacked Rome, plundered and massacred his way down the peninsula; it had taken Italy a millennium to recover the civilization it had lost. These concerns were pushed aside. Every totalitarian knows you cannot change the future, only the past.”

The falsification of history in the Nazi-fascist retelling of the legend of Alaric’s tomb exemplifies how truth is constantly distorted under totalitarian regimes. The glorification of Alaric as a precursor of Hitler reflects another concern that recurs throughout the novel: the tendency of historical narratives to focus on elite individuals (often tyrants) rather than on the innumerable “bit players” who surround them and who often suffer through their actions.

“It’s a backwards country where the criminal gets the defense lawyer out of jail.”

Giuseppe is commenting on Vincenzo’s plan to help them escape San Lorenzo. This sense of the world at war as surreal, defying expectations and going against logic, is characteristic of the novel as a whole and is key to Marra’s blending of humor with pathos.

“When one confino, a professor of archaeology transferred to Lampedusa, pointed out that tunneling and blasting the bedrock would destroy the burial site the podesta’ sought, it became clear to Giuseppe that not even the author of this ill-fated epic believed the legends. The scope of this endeavor, the marshaled resources, the relentless spectacle, this is what the diggers mined in these alleyways of the underworld. Such scales make the production the product itself.”

Much of Marra’s narrative is concerned with the creation of illusions for film. The description of the excavations, which everyone knows are just for show, again reveals the fine line between truth and performance. This quote acts as the foundational image for each character’s struggle with the nature of artifice in their creative and personal lives.

“There are photographs of the carnival street theater, the impromptu and ad-libbed dramas performed by peasants powdered in quicklime and redrawn in ghoulish slants of burnt cork, supposedly religious reenactments that invariably veered into protest against the latest indignity the state imposed. A photograph of advertisements hanging upside-down from a grocer’s storefront after a tax was announced on signage posted the right way up. The next picture, taken from the other side of the storefront, shows a dozen passers-by craning their necks to read the day’s specials. Photographs of a community so invisible he sees the exposures as proofs of life. This is what Nino will bring with him: only everything he runs from.”

Nino Picone initially views photography as a medium of documentary truth. He hopes to use his camera to bear testament to the marginalized, little-known community in which he has grown up. This quote’s imagery captures Nino’s fascination with the versatility of photography, which hints at his later manipulation of the medium and growth in his understanding of both the art and nature of truth.

“Was Ferrando Michele’s Moriarty? A pursuing evil he could only shake by throwing himself from a great height? His body was never discovered, but Ferrando bought a row boat and for months searched up and down the Busento, a tomb robber, a treasure hunter, searching for the resting place of Michele, the only body in the Busento worth recovering, the boy from Genoa who conjured snow in August.”

As a “tomb robber, a treasure hunter” scouring the Busento, there are parallels between Ferrando and the Nazi and fascist excavators. However, Michele is not a legendary, historical “celebrity” but an ordinary “bit player.” He is a “treasure” for Ferrando for sentimental, not materialistic, reasons. Ferrando’s constant and improbable comparison of himself to Sherlock Holmes is another example of art filtering characters’ perceptions of reality.

“It took Vincent three and a half years to travel from Italy to Los Angeles but only five minutes to return. He followed Maria past the jungle forest into a piazza paved in ersatz travertine that held the cream-colored haloes of streetlamps. He felt like an explorer stumbling into the magnificent ruins of a lost civilization rearing up from the wilderness. Curated storefronts displayed an assortment of unseasonable dresses and inaccurately priced shoes. Italian-language signage emblazoned the window glass in boldface fonts […] Café tables sat empty under a white-and-yellow awning, a chair leg steadied by matchbook, a stack of menus at the maître d’s stand. Unadorned by posters or sloganeering or Mussolini’s watchful gaze, the piazza recreated no Italy he recognized. Perhaps these inaccuracies were a form of flawlessness, Vincent thought, not errors but imprints of possibility. Perhaps that accounted for some of the sense of homecoming he encountered in this distant suburb of his extinct world.”

Both Maria and Vincent are very attached to the Italian piazza set at Mercury Studios. A perfect recreation of an Italian square without any traces of fascism, Vincent paradoxically feels more at “home” on the set than he ever did in Italy itself. As elsewhere, ideals prevail and endure in art that have been suppressed in historical reality. The piazza is idealized, which is an example of the conflicts throughout the narrative between appearance and reality, art and life. The idealization appeals to Maria and Vincent because they can reinvent themselves in this image and shed the broken reality of the homeland they left behind.

“Popular on any itinerary was a safari through Chinatown in omnibuses pulled by dray horsed and tiered in theatre seating. Bellowing through megaphones, the guides recounted local histories as spurious as those presently dispensed on the street below. In their telling, every teahouse was an opium den, every well-dressed man a tong gangster. No Chinatown resident—no matter how respectable—escaped the leveling force of the megaphone man’s typecasting. As a boy Eddie was incentivized to comport himself accordingly because those rubbernecking tourists who believed anything would toss pennies and nickels, once even a silver dollar.

On some soundstages it felt no different: he was a Chinatown nobody working for change while a white man behind a megaphone told him how to act.”

Throughout his life, Eddie Lu feels obligated to perform an absurd caricature of his ethnicity—to realize the assumptions of the dominant culture. This is true in his on-screen career, where he is forced to play stereotypical Asian villains, and also in his offscreen childhood, where he makes extra money satisfying tourists’ exotic fantasies about Chinatown. The quote marks a turning point for Eddie, where he begins to see each layer of his professional self as the embodiment of tropes and to peel them away to reveal his authentic self.

“His nightmares never featured Gallo or Ferrando or Himmler, only Concetta Cortese. What relief did waking offer when the nightmare’s monster was the dreamer himself? He had deceived her, preyed upon her hope, stolen her son’s death from her. Was unworthiness the waste heat of survival? Did all émigrés see themselves in a similar haze? Or was his unworthiness rooted in the specific history of his stolen name?”

All of the immigrant characters in the novel suffer some form of “survivor’s guilt” toward those whom they have left behind. Nino is haunted by the memory of Concetta Cortese, whom he left waiting in vain and unaware of her son’s fate. His perception of himself as a “monster” in his survival in some ways recalls the Frankenstein motif.

“Artie knew Ernst was right, of course. This was a business, not a civil liberties organization. Nonetheless, the faintest doubt rippled through his certainty: For the past few years he’d produced movies to stoke fears of enemy spies living among us. He’d believed he was on the side of the angels, but devils must tell themselves they’re angels too.”

Artie has just learned of the restrictions to which his “enemy alien” members of staff are to be subject. He realizes that, in promoting fear of enemy espionage and by agreeing to make indoctrination films, he has struck something of a “devil’s bargain” himself. He struggles with a fundamental problem in the conflict between Life and Art. He has enabled the existence of art that willfully misrepresents life, and now he has to wrestle with consequences that will harm people who work for him. The realization pricks his conscience over the greater harm to the general public who cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not in the films.

“‘Wherever possible,’ Vincent read aloud, ‘we will highlight not only the values we fight against but those we fight for: due process, equal protection, civil liberties…’ He was halfway through the list when he seemed to realize the filmmakers were excluded from the universal rights their pictures promoted.

‘Historical accuracy has never before impeded the fantasies this place produces,’ Anna told him. ‘Why should it now?’”

Reading through the official agenda for the indoctrination films they are scheduled to begin making, Vincent becomes aware of the gulf between the principles he is listing and the real situation of the immigrant workers at Mercury. The gap between the fictional output of the movie studios and the official narratives being turned out by government authorities is increasingly narrow.

“To camouflage its Santa Monica aviation plant from aerial attack, Douglas Aircraft enlisted Mercury’s set designers to erect a residential neighborhood of false fronts on the roofs of its factories and hangars. A hundred feet in the air actors culled from Central Casting lived in floating subdivisions. Emerging from plywood houses, the actors watered shrubs leafed in dyed chicken feathers, walked dogs past smokestacks disguised as telephone poles, watched inflatable cars move by wires across painted-on streets. There was a functioning postal system, a morning milkman, kids playing catch, and housewives laying laundry on the line. Life on the roofs of Douglas Aircraft was as idyllic as a Norman Rockwell painting. The residents of those placid heights were perhaps the only Angelenos untouched by the war.”

The meticulously created and choreographed residential neighborhood placed on the roof of Douglas Aircraft is one of several examples in Marra’s novel of wartime real life exceeding the wildest imaginings of Hollywood. Hollywood skills for fabrication are enlisted in a war effort that proves, curiously, to be essentially theatrical.

“Why this urge to recreate the places she’d fled? The deeper into banishment Anna journeyed, the more vivid her recall of the city she left behind. She felt lifted into an omniscient altitude from which she peered down upon streetcars and cafes and slums. Everywhere human bustle blighted her model’s architectural precision -the prim hausfrau averting her eyes from a legless veteran, the brawl between brownshirts and Red Front Fighters spilling from a Biergarten, a couple of policemen fishing a body from the Landwehr Canal -imbuing the miniature with the festive depravity of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell.”

Anna’s miniature model of Berlin differs from the Italian piazza in its imperfection. She has not excised the ravages of Nazi rule from her recreation of the city. As a miniaturist, Anna’s vision over the city is god-like and omniscient, giving her a sense of control that has been lacking in her chaotic personal life. On a darker note, the miniaturist’s perspective also foreshadows the bird’s-eye view of the bombers, which she will help to destroy her native city.

“They stopped short outside and stared at the fleecy whiteness layering the streets and rooftops. Fat flurries wandered through the air and clumped on Anna’s eyelashes. For a moment, she was sure she had wandered into an outdoor winter set, and she marveled at the production values, how real it all looked […] Concerned that Axis spies would use weather reports to plan aerial attacks, the government had banned public meteorological forecasts. No one could have known that on New Year’s Day 1942, for the first time in a decade, it would snow in Los Angeles. Watching flurries pile high in the palm trees, Anna experienced a quiet moment of gratitude.”

As with the fake sugar snow flurry that frames Ferrando’s most vivid and erotic memory of Michele, snow here again represents a transient but miraculous moment of genuine wonder. The preceding pages have included a lengthy discussion regarding Anna’s dislike of the assumption that refugees should feel grateful to their host country. However, the bizarre juxtaposition of snow settling on palm trees leads to a moment of genuine, heartfelt gratitude.

Life in Germany as a Jew—and in America as German—had sensitized Gerhard to plausibly denied bigotry […] Eddie saw the director was stricken with the neediness of the well-meaning, the doe-eyed gaze that says Forgive me so I don’t have to change. Five years in America and Gerhard had fully assimilated into the custom of causing offense while demanding courtesy. ‘You can’t get mad,’ he called as Eddie walked out. ‘You’re paid too goddamn much!’”

Like Anna, Eddie feels frustrated by demands that he feel grateful for whatever he is given in America and the assumption that he has no right to take offense at discrimination and prejudice. The irony is intensified by the fact that the person thus patronizing him has been in the US for less time than him. Eddie is a second-generation immigrant, while Gerhard only arrived five years previously. Nonetheless, Eddie’s Chinese ethnicity leaves him lower down in the food chain.

“As he watched, Artie felt cored by contradiction. Conspiracy was one of Hollywood’s most reliable plot engines, but by encouraging audiences to accept the plausibility of conspiracies in peacetime, had Artie primed audiences to see enemies everywhere in war? Weren’t these stab-in-the-back fantasies as perverse as any found in German propaganda reels? And weren’t fears of fascism coming to America borne out by the concentration camps going up in the California desert?”

Again, Artie feels uncomfortable with his role in spreading paranoia about foreign nationals. With the establishment of internment camps for Japanese nationals, Artie sees disconcerting parallels between America and Nazi Germany.

“For entire periods of her life, this suitcase was what she thought of when she thought of home, and now she carried it across the room and gave it to the person she loved.”

The suitcase passes from Giuseppe to Annunziata, to Maria, and finally to Eddie. Annunziata uses it to transport earth from her burial plot in Rome to the US. She relinquishes it when her daughter leaves home, and Maria identifies it with home from then on. In giving it to Eddie, she entrusts a part of herself to him.