In reality, though, Laura just needs a non-smashed version of her hubby’s face to bypass LAM’s two-factor-authentication system and delete the digital record of her misdeed. Laura couches her creepy-as-hell order in a guilt she knows Arthur will feel acutely: the desire for absolution from someone already dead. She’s lurking in his workshop when Laura shows up to request that Arthur, who quit the SFX biz but not his craft, make her a macabre maquette of her recently deceased almost-ex. Which brings us at long last to our girl Charlie, who has recently accepted off-the-books, low-paid work as Arthur’s assistant. Later, Laura will tell Arthur that his old friends were actually in the midst of a divorce - a detail that might be true or might just be designed to convince Art that Max was really suicidal. In the end, rather than wait for the toxins to do their dirty work, Max leaps to his death from the cliffside mid-century mansion he and Laura have called home. In turn, Laura serves Max a poison tea, a perhaps disproportionate response to Max reneging on his commitment to love and protect her for as long as they both should live, but I don’t like to judge other people’s marriages. He threatens to go public with the revelation, which I personally think makes him a poor husband. It’s as he nostalgically sifts through all this old film that he rediscovers the Dragonfish dailies, including footage of Laura unscrewing the bulb. In advance of the company’s 40th anniversary, Max is personally digitizing and archiving all of the film in the studio’s vault. Although Arthur took a step back from LAM, the husband-and-wife team of Max and Laura shepherded it into the age of computer effects. The message of this episode of Poker Face is simpler: Retrospection can be deadly. The message of that story is a little confusing to me, but the gist is that one really should listen precisely to the instructions of the gods (H/T Edith Hamilton). But look back he does, and so he watches on as his beloved is swept back to Hades. Orpheus must remain in front of his wife at all times and never, ever, under any circumstances, look back. His song successfully persuades the gods to give her back, but those fickle monsters put (unnecessary) conditions on the rescue mission. In Greek mythology, you may vaguely recall from AP lit, Orpheus attempts to save his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld by playing mournful music. “The Orpheus Syndrome” is both the name of the episode and the movie that Arthur has been slowly making about what happened that terrible day on set. Max’s death at the hands of Laura is the mystery that kicks off “The Orpheus Syndrome,” though it won’t be until Arthur’s suspicious death, also at the hands of Laura, that our girl Charlie Cale gets involved. He quit Light and Motion (LAM), the special-effects firm he’d established with his college friends, Laura (the inimitable Cherry Jones) and Max (Tim Russ), the latter of whom we won’t really get to know. ![]() Because Laura never confessed to unscrewing the light, Arthur assumed the blame, changing the trajectory of his life and eventually shaping his own death.Īfter Lily’s tragic drowning, Arthur - played by a croaky Nick Nolte in present day - retreated from filmmaking. Poker Face seems to land the fault for Lily’s drowning death on Laura’s reckless indifference to human life, but in truth it could have been Arthur’s error for pushing Lily too far - for making her so afraid of losing her starring role that she minimized concerns about her safety. She was desperate to wrap the scene and get her movie back under control. Arthur’s business partner, Laura, surreptitiously unscrewed the bulb on the primitive alarm system. When his pretty young thing worried aloud that an underwater scene was too dangerous, he told her that spending hours submerged in a Perspex tank with no access to oxygen and no safety coordinator was just the job, “honey.” If Lily felt she was at risk, she should press the emergency-call button, which would set off a red light for the whole crew to see - if she really needed it, that is, and she wasn’t too intimidated to add yet another take to yet another day with an overspilling shot list.īut we’ll never know if Lily hit that button. Arthur could be a demanding, belittling boss, and Dragonfish was running over budget as well as behind schedule. Thirty years ago, a beautiful Hollywood starlet named Lily Auburn was cast in the directorial debut of one Arthur Liptin, a special-effects genius helming his first creature feature. Photo: Vulture Photo: Karolina Wojtasik/Peacock
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