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March 20, 2006
People Who Watch Movies
People who watch movies become people in movies, I am afraid. With people watching movies, more and more, and with some people doing little else, really, than watching movies, I am afraid that this will in time eliminate much of the population—because, as I said, people who watch movies become, with each watching, steadily less people on their own, but only people in movies themselves. Of course I am not saying that people physically disappear into movies; only that they psychologically disappear into movies! And where the mind goes, the body follows, or the body gives up if it can’t follow. This, I fear, is how people die, I mean one explanation how and why they die--you could make an argument that movies, essentially, kill people. All I can vouch for really, though, is that people are drawn into movies, captivated by the apparent similarity they have to life, and once they start watching movies they begin to model their behavior after those in the movies, becoming effectively just like them. And from that experience they suffer a crippling blow; which is: they no longer can invent themselves in life, which is where they were originally . . . when I met them.
Because of this trend, it could happen that eventually there will be no people, but only several movies; maybe just one movie, with people in it of course, and that will be the way people exist--as people part of a movie. The trend of watching movies could engulf the entire population, that is where it could end, I fear. Now this movie, the final movie of the former reality of life, of course will represent a kind of epoch in the story of mankind. Compared say to former epochs, when there were no movies! All that can be known about these people, who all became movie people, will be only available in the movie they all became a part of, to put it rudely. Also, of course other pieces of information about the world will be able to be known, in haphazard fashion: various street scenes, living rooms, insides of office buildings, roads in the country, etc., all the movie settings where the people in movies forever swim, I am afraid. Maybe one person will be left, to watch this movie, in a dark theater. . . Or maybe just late at night on a television set. Many nights I have myself lived out this fear.
Bear with me as I develop this thesis in even more drastic terms. Certainly, all people who watch movies don't uniformly succeed in becoming people in movies— though that may be their only chance for any kind of survival. Probably just a very small number of people end up on film, finally, and the rest, by fiat of their decision in life to watch movies, just piece by piece fade away from being people, and don’t get in the final movie of mankind. Well! This is obviously so—there isn’t enough room in the actual movies, even with the crowds periodically there, in grandstands, traffic jams, scenes of escalators, even to be killed in battle—well, it must be that only a few sample characters (to be known as actors and actresses), and others in lesser roles, most just filling in the impression that it was a world with alot of people, actually are there in the movies. Most will just have watched--that will be the only thing that can be said about them in the future. I mean, the future after this epoch we are in right now, when, somehow having survived, the human race is looking back on us.
What I have seen is that people fade and shrink away, as soon as they start watching movies. It isn’t determined by the number of movies they watch, or what type they watch, but by their attitude toward what they watch. It is the idea of movies that is the killer, and the fact that movies have ascended to the position where they offer to replace life, for people. And, unfortunately, I can't say that people who remain people do so insofar as they DON'T watch movies—I mean, surely it can be no absolute guarantee of remaining a person, just to not have become one of those multitudes watching movies. Surely, other things must be required, to remain as a person in and of yourself. But the thing, anyway, we are concerned with right here is not this fate, of people who don’t watch movies, but the fate of those who do. Which now has been defined in properly drastic terms.
I know it even more for a fact that they are becoming people in movies, than I know just how this works. Why it should be that movies possess the mind, body, and soul of those who watch them—well, I am not sure. It's hard to really analyse. I just learned this truth more from the shock of witnessing what happened to people I've known, and then tracing that to the obvious, and unstoppable strange dependence they had. I saw this happening, before I thought to even analyse any movies, to see why it might be happening. And now, before I could do anything about it, the general reality of movies has infiltrated everywhere. Now people are actually serious about movies, they talk about them, and become critics of them! What a joke! They have opinions! Now people have their own video cameras, which are not a wonderful invention but the very devil incarnate. So they can play back a scene in life right away and watch that, like it were some kind of miracle. . . better than the original! And what is worse, people are auditioning every living minute of every day, unconsciously it seems, as if God (the Director) was going to give them a part.
I first had this idea many years ago. Was this what was going to take my friends, one at a time, like abducted by aliens. It was one night in the apartment of some friends in NYC, and after dinner no one could think of anywhere to go, so they casually just put a movie on the VCR. And as we were all watching I could feel my friends literally being sucked into the movie, with each passing second, desiring to become alike totally to the people in that movie; because, I saw, it was teaching them something. Like, how to be people. While I suffered the most awful lethargy, indolence, even spiteful indifference toward everything around me, all unattended and unfilmed realities gathering dust . . . I was afraid, like I was in a void. There was this glow of light spilling from the refrigerator, when I opened the door, as I had hopped away from the movie for a few seconds to get a beer; and I had these pangs of regret, as I stooped toward this little light, like these were special never-to-be-known-again, seconds. Like this was freedom. Then I was leaving life behind when I trundled back into the presence of that other eerie, captivating glow in the living room, the more easy feast for the eyes and ears, calling me back . . . like I wasn't ready to be born yet.
As I sank back in the chair, facing the animated screen, I had the flickering thought that all I momentarily saw going by could be filmed, filmed by experts! I could feel myself becoming a person in a movie, getting caught in that illusion that a camera was watching me with comprehension and hellish omnipotence. Alas, the silence of my friends, why that alarmed me all the more. These people who watch movies, becoming so like people in movies, that they need to watch more and more just to find out how to act! And they think like people in movies now. They have the illusion of a vaguely descending but certain plot coming upon them. And they have enhanced vision, and finely tuned hearing—when they wake up in the day, after a night of watching movies. They never move now but to see themselves in motion. They treat each other like people in movies treat each other, suspencefully, with everything for the future, for the next scene, minute by minute forgetting who they were . . .
For people who watch movies are already inferior to their old selves, if they had them. They always have to learn how to act out the scene, the scene now in their blood. What the eyes and ears soak up without thinking, that goes directly in the blood! Movies are a total transfusion . . . they are the solution to that old identity crisis, that old problem with consciousness, that failed project of . . . yourself!
Posted by mortimer at 08:18 PM | Comments (1489)
March 07, 2006
The Language Is Exploding
People are always saying, “I don’t know how to put this--” and, “I am not very good with words, but .. .”--and, getting your attention precisely in that way. So now you can expect something truly considered to emerge, while surely you have to empathize with the efforts of one so confessed, so unpracticed, a verbal stumbler, and forgive them in advance for how poorly they are going to put it. And you are practically willing to accept any old version of the thing, from whatever skimpy clues they can provide. You are all ears. Then they go ahead and try to startle you with the next weird opinion, of the thing that was not defined at all, that pops into their head. Tell you exactly what they mean? Hardly. In fact they will dress it up, what little they actually had prepared to say, and verily, I say, luxuriate in the position they have secured as having you be the one who is all ears. People are good at making other people listen; they have these language devices, they have this arsenal of rhetorical tricks, these feints and punts, and bows and ho-hummings, and employ all manner of deception, even beyond even the initial attention grabbing: “I am not very good with words, but--”, which works every time. to give them the initial space and license to speak.
I am no exception, and I also have stories that are potent with the sense that I am creating legends. The beautiful antique sewing machine, I say, turns out was not broken as my wife had thought. It works like a charm, after having been given up for dead, sitting there like just for appearance for half a year. She even did a painting of it, which one might think would seal its fate as a historical object. But then she wanted to make some curtains for our son’s new apartment in Brooklyn; and I said, just try it, maybe it works. The whole thing is hard to express! So many colliding factors go into it here, but miracle or not--it worked, the sewing machine. With the painting on the wall right there, around the corner in the l living room, there was something incredible about getting it humming again. Like--well I can’t even express the strange collision of impressions here. But, in the spirit of the curtain-making project it was important to stay focused, my wife knew: choosing the fabric would be the next step.
Her initial choice of material for the making of the curtains was a riotous, flamboyant pattern that would be hard to live with. Indeed, a considered rejection was made after some discussion with the proposed recipient, emails exchanged, etc. But, this had a flourishing result, in that she now gets to use this fabric in the upstairs room, our other son's former bedroom, that is being turned into an Art Gallery. And will feature all her eleven “Pomme de Terre” paintings. When she was on the phone with him describing how she came up with this zany choice of fabric, she said "I guess I was a little over-zealous”. That word not only had flown to her aid, but was repeated by him to his friend in the room, and became THE WORD. It characterized not only the fabric, but my wife. And now it was quickly used to rationalize her project of the new room--where zealousness was not only to be preferred but was required. And not to overshadow the original project of curtains for the other room, but! You see how people get carried away! That is my point, this is what I mean by the explosion of language. A material use of words, a mighty pun in this case--verily dictating the future.
It is language that is alive, and serviceable to more than one projected use. There is poetry randomly but amply dispersed in the clipped, colorful, raging and rampant talk of a highly literate citizenry--these days. Its topics are usually common, because it is the common which is unresolved, shared, universal, and bound up with mysterious aims. Our talk is glib, but various; our logic is fallible, or missing entirely, because we are jumping around. Life is a gamble. Nobody knows why they are alive. People are facile, and it is true they have a sense of being inadequate to express the extremely specific emotions they have, and the novelties around them. “Forgive my obfuscation,” the man says, waving his arms. “I hardly know how to narrate the simplest story.” But the truth about talking is that language is so seductive it hardly ever leads in the exact direction of what you were trying to say. You have to either bend it to your meaning, or bend with it. Usually, it is not only stronger than you are, but has more interesting meanings in wait.
“These are the vicissitudes,” Rick said, “yeah, that’s right--the vicissitudes.” What he meant was the various inevitable aspects of the situation, the changing face and weather, the what you get just for getting into it, one might say. “The flotsum and jetsum!” he adds. The slings and arrows, if you like. He was specifically referring to all the, um, crapola (there's a word!) surrounding his place of employment, but putting a word like “vicissitudes” to it did more than dress it up; it verified the actually profound nature of all human interaction. Not only that, I knew exactly what he meant, or felt I did because you have to be able to take the sense of an analogy and transfer it to your own, how shall I put it?-- stellar life.
Of course I like to make grand (I want to say: stupendous) analogies. I’ll go on and define the exploding material base of language itself, as the essence of the poetic. Because I think the literal power is in the words, always more than what the speaker means. Certainly not what they mean historically--as if a person could speak or write by putting together antique meanings. (Which pretentious writers actually do try--as if the stupid contemporary world had stolen their tool kit.) It is the meanings that explode in talk, with words like in these snippits: “overzealous”, “vicissitudes”, “ostentatious”.
“If I had to use one word to describe these people and that wedding, it would be: ostentatious,” Mr. Cullivan tried to summarize. Of course he had just proved he didn’t need to use just one word, he’d harangued on that wedding, and those people, with a barrage of colorful speech already, to those us who were listening to his enthusiastic report. But here is another of those rhetorical tricks; you sound like you are putting it all together, with a final concept, when you say, “I don’t know, if I had to use just one word . . . “
When you look at the status of these individual words in contemporary talk, it seems like the language is on the brink of a revolution. This poetic language absorbs meanings, collects them by association, then throws you a bouquet. Your average dull literary writer, however, is a prig, he looks for the “perfect word”, the best three adjectives to describe--a sunset, or a donut. He is precious, and stilted--and yet not nearly flowery enough. He won’t let language have it’s day. It is the prettified novelists, and the precious poets, all those “literary” artists who are stifling the language, and restricting the imagination. People are way ahead of our literary culture, which if I have one word for, it would be: reactionary!
Maybe the way to put it, is that the poetic is the language that is alive, the material use of words in which the power is held in the words themselves. When you define it this way, it is easy to see that those who operate by the name only of poet are the very ones shutting down this language. The rough and ready language, and the really highflown, ambiguous, humor-filled language, with all its calamitous possibility, and ability to involve obscurity. Rioting in the mouths of the talking populace, in spite of a dull and bookish establishment.
Of course, perhaps I need not mention, if there is one thing that us talkers require, lest this whole nice arrangement fall into a stasis, or a stalemate, if you see what I mean by that word, it is that their public be . . . how shall I put it? --gullible.
Posted by mortimer at 01:43 PM | Comments (1088)