240: Backdrop

It’s 1983. Charlie Sheen and Sean Connery star in Vacant Lots, the box-office flop romantic thriller set in the high-stakes / high-tension world of high-density office block construction. As was customary of the promotional materials and trailer edits of the time, the conceptual generosity of core narrative contexts, like ‘height’ was not underplayed, with frequent connections made between the vertical, the concentrated and the narcotic.

Connery plays Jack Killman, the coke-addled skyscraper architect, whose romantic dealings with his draftsman, Qirk, played by a career-defining Sheen are set in almost spasmodic tension with the former’s addictive personality, culminating in two schismatic episodes that demarcate the films three parts. Much has been said of this, but little attention has been afforded to Killman’s operating methods that form the backdrop to the lovers’ predicament.

Before the office units are assembled, and the internal, non-structural walls are fitted, the individual flats start life as temporary repositories of building materials, for the kitting-out of the floors below. Individual apartments are used to store specific types of construction material or components. 501, the southern corner-suite houses cavity insulation panels, while its neighbour, 502, is home to rolls of ceiling insulation. 503 stores the dividing wall ply sheets and joists, while 504 stocks pallets of plasterboard. Etc., etc. Once the floor below is completely finished, the remainder of the materials is carried up a floor and the process is repeated. But all the activity on the ‘working shop’ level invariably leaves a catastrophic mess that requires an average 4-day cleaning operation before construction work can begin, while floors are scrubbed, walls are patched and painted, gashes in ceilings are re-plastered, and all the detritus, collateral and fallout of a siloed construction team working with little foresight of its own aftermath, is swept, boxed, binned, bagged and flown by helicopter to an unspecified location.

A girl’s uncle allows her a day off school to choose a plaque for her mum.

A gay couple share an energy drink and a Lion Bar.

Soft music plays on the radio.

Liverpool airport, £55. If it costs us under 11, we’ll just have the insulin.

A man answers the door to two men holding a pale beige armchair.

The undertaker mistakes a death certificate for the invoice.

A man and a woman splash wine on a third woman or man, after they’re gone.

The victim was allergic to acetone.

The chair is very comfortable, but the arm rests are nobbled and the dog on your lap whistles up in your face incessantly.

A boy brings a sandwich to a woman up a ladder, painting the wall yellow.

A jilted lover graciously cedes to the better man.

In the rooftop chase scene, everyone is secreting their adrenaline predictably, manageable, conscientiously.

An elderly couple points at caravans in the caravan park.

A woman scans a barcode of olive oil with the Traceable app.

A man slumps onto a surgical steel table, burying his face into the clench of his forearms, while backlit X-rays hang behind him.

A woman talks over an incubator about the child’s dead one.

A bog is drained, revealing a single corned beef sandwich triangle.

If the cost is over 11, we’ll just have the insulin.