The Core of Togetherness, and Me

Recently a certain someone giggled when I told her that the reason I dreamed of studying film was because of the Lord of the Rings special features. Yup, in high school my sister and I would watch "Cameras in Middle Earth" over and over, and not just for the fun of watching Legolas swing up onto that Oliphaunt.  I loved learning how tricky camera angles and painstaking animation work transformed Tolkien's words on the screen. So in giggling, she reminded me, rightfully so, that I am a (film) nerd. Somehow, though, over the past few years, I have misplaced that excitement, and that makes me nervous.

In HBO's Togetherness, Brett has also misplaced his. A father of two young kids and a saccharine but somewhat distant husband, Brett finds his life somewhat lackluster. He's a sound editor for the movies, and watching his friend Alex and sister-in-law Tina struggle financially has lulled him into inertia. In the first season, a memorable scene features him throwing a bit of a tantrum during a long film editing session because he's hungry (but really because the director doesn't like his attempt at some original sound-mixing). As Alex's career takes off in the second season, and after a brief confession of infidelity by Brett's wife blindsides him, Brett spins out in desperation; to cope with the news he follows Alex on a convalescent pilgrimage to their hometown of Detroit. There, they fall into the typical regression into boyhood, but it's fruitful thanks to a dug-up time capsule that contains a letter from teenage Brett and Alex to their adult selves. In it, they beg their future selves not to "be lulled into a mediocrity like everyone else and to remember our vow to stay true to the spirit of life." It's a majestic scene that contends with something so essential; the worry that in adulthood, we fork ourselves over to our numbing responsibilities.

Regressing means thrift store suits

Despite its naivete, the core of their adolescent wish resonates with me--someone who's seen their interests morph over time. Five years ago, film and culture dictated my passionate disposition and geographic location, but now I find myself less enthusiastic about those things -- so is the question that the core of me is muted, or has it merely changed? On the one hand, I'm nostalgic for the days I thought I knew what I loved. On the other, I think maybe I should accept that interests evolve but don't have to segment into disconnected pieces. Maybe my desire for pop culture informs my job in social media, which informs certain social justice leanings.

More recently, though, I think I've been conflating complacency with fear, and that's where it gets perilous. As a fascist presidential candidate gets more and more amplified thanks to our 24/7 news cycle, I wonder if I'm being paranoid, thinking that being complacent means I'm part of the problem, as a propagator and consumer of mass media. Am I a bystander of this terrifying political climate, or are my media habits actually doing some harm? Furthermore, have I lost all perspective on my core by being so exposed to media, something I've always been interested in?

Maybe it's a matter of rewatching Mr. Robot to assuage my guilty conscience.

The Affair

I've never had an affair, but recently I was pulled towards one. I found myself not answering texts, canceling plans, and saying to myself just a bit more, then I'll stop. I was enamored, enraptured. I lost the whole weekend to it.

That thing, while not an affair with another human, does bear its name: The Affair on Showtime. I'll only say a bit about the show because you should really watch it yourself. It's essentially the same recollection of an affair from two perspectives, Noah's (Dominic West) and Alison's (Ruth Wilson), each taking up half of an episode. However, things get complicated with and beyond the affair as the deeper, sadder details of these two peoples' lives emerge. You'll notice right away that little, superficial details change according to whose narrative we're in: the color of a dress, who kissed whom, when in the day something happened. Beyond showing us the faults of memory, these little details also highlight each character's worldview and self-perception. This narrative style is why I felt an affair-like addiction to the show, because watching was like uncovering the layers (and the deeper, sometimes sadder details) of the characters like you would a lover. I wanted more, more, more.

So many secrets.

What is it about television dramas that make you feel like you're cheating on your life with your TV set? How can we go hours and hours holed up with only food, sleep and HBOGo like we would with a new flame?

Binge-watching is rampant now that we have Showtime Anytime, Netflix, Hulu, and all the other il/legal streaming sites, but I think the technology is just an enabler for a certain personality type. Not everyone has this desire to tv-marathon. I was talking to a friend recently who said something along the lines of, if he watches more than a few episodes of something in a row, he wants to throw up and then go for a run. Good for him for avoiding atrophied muscles from too much couch-potato time.

I'd posit, at least for myself, that the personality type that can watch tv for hours, even ashamedly, is the same kind that thinks a lot (or too much?) about stories, connection, and possibly also about love and relationships. I've written about media voyeurism before, where I let media teach me lessons instead of experiencing them first hand in the world, and I think we media types like neat, dramatic, and constructed narratives because they are easier to follow than the random events in our lives. For example, how do I even know what an affair looks like? Since I've never had one or known anyone to have one (I'm still in my twenties, and at my age people are young enough that cheating usually leads to a clean breakup before marriage or kids), it's the movies and books and television that show me what the guilt and the illicit pleasure and the heartbreak feel like. While I'm definitely NOT wishing an affair on myself to chalk up to experience, I still use the power of storytelling to show me the truths and authenticity of humanity in the places I haven't gone.

Here's an embarrassing example that might help clarify my point. About a year ago I dated someone briefly (keyword, briefly) who dumped me for another girl. The Facebook message signaling the breakup cited an exclusivity talk with the other girl and not wanting to blindside me when we were going to hang out that night, hence the Facebook message. I wasn't falling in love in the slightest but I still felt rejected and undignified enough by the cowardly message for a good cry. The thing was, this person had made me a really beautiful, wood-carved plaque with a quote from Before Sunrise on it (readers of this blog will know that film is my absolute favorite ever). In my indignation over the breakup I grabbed the plaque, swiped the hammer from my desk drawer, and tried to break the thing. When that didn't work, I took a sharpie and scrawled "Fuck you" on it and threw it away. 

But that didn't make me feel better, only worse. I missed the plaque immediately, not because it was a symbol of our time together, but just because I liked it. What's worse, while destroying it I felt like I was watching my body write the swear as my brain was thinking, this is something someone in the movies would do. Silly, yes. Pathetic, slightly. But the takeaway there was that I should listen to myself instead of deferring to a narrative cliché. I tend to like my rational ability to know what keepsakes and memories to hold onto, however hurtful they once were, and I ignored that disposition in my moment of weakness. Because I watch too much tv, maybe.

Oh well, at least I'll have the Instagram snapshot of the plaque to remind me to listen to the moment. Haha, the irony.

Connections, and Her

So I cried at Her, again. Those lonely characters seeking companionship in technology made me sad about how we connect with others, and the second viewing wasn’t any less intense.

Both times I saw the film in the same theater—the first time alone, the second time not. The first time I was two weeks into my job, and taking myself to the movies was thought to be a detox from the overstimulation of adopting the new skills needed for a job in social media: the ever-presence of screens, instant communication, and connections through technology. What I got out of watching Her for the first time was not a detox but an accentuation of those things, albeit without the fast-paced excitement of my job. Her is pretty melancholy and takes a subtly cautionary stance on the future of technology as a crutch and sometimes impediment to true human connection. I sat through the credits, tears streaming down my face, thankful for being alone in a dark theater where no one had to share my discomfort.

The second time I was three months into the job, more confident in my work (and less exhausted by it) and also more optimistic about the power of social media to bring us together. Yet the tears came for the same reason, and I felt overwhelmed by the tendencies we have to use media for what we think is connection but really may be preventing it. My discomfort this time extended to my movie-going companion, who was less moved by it but who did articulate that it made her uncomfortable. So did my tears, it was clear, as she eyed me sideways while the credits rolled. It took us a while to dissect what had happened to me in the theater, and we slowly inched from a place of distance at our differing reactions back to a place of understanding.  The whole post-viewing discussion, and even tone, was surprisingly Her-like, as it highlighted how we, as people, can go from connection to disconnection and back again in the smallest moments, like flecks of dust being brushed off a table only to fall back upon it again. With or without technology, connection is hard, but I am thankful that Her made me aware of how humans need it, try to get it, block themselves from it, and finally find it, even if only for a moment.

I am a Media Voyeur

I spent this past weekend away from media, in a summer house in Birkerød, Denmark with some of my hallmates. Good food, beautiful views and more than enough cultural immersion (some of it exhausting, namely the 48-hour imperative to speak Danish) left me liberated from my media-saturated lifestyle in Copenhagen. But like any addiction, I found myself craving film as soon as I got back yesterday. So I watched Soderbergh's first feature sex, lies, and videotape (1989), which left me as conflicted about film as ever.

There's us, waiting for the bus. 

In the film, Ann is a prudish newlywed, John is her cheating husband, Cynthia is her sister who is sleeping with John, and Graham is John's friend from college who invades and disrupts their lives with his voyeuristic sexual fetish. He calls himself impotent ever since he admitted he is a pathological liar, and his only sexual activity is to record women talking about their sexual activity. When Ann finds out that her husband is cheating with her sister, she decides to make a tape for Graham, which is the fastest way to splitting up their marriage as she can think of. The film is eerie, introspective, and sensitive, and while it's a film whose style normally would affect me positively, I found it made me uncomfortable. 

Not because of the sexual content, but because it made me think seriously about how much media I consume. This is an undercurrent that has been bothering me for a while now, and it, strangely or not strangely enough, came to a head when the film exposed its characters for being voyeurs. Now, the concept of voyeurism in film is not new, nor is it new to me--Hitchcock and Mulvey come to mind--but what's new for me is the realization that perhaps all media is a type of voyeurism, albeit a non-sexual type. Well, maybe I'm not a voyeur but a gleaner of experiences through media that I ought to be having on my own. 

I've written about this vicarious adventuring and loneliness before here, but now I'm starting to worry that I rely on film and television to teach me lessons instead of living them. This comes particularly into my worldview with regards to interpersonal relationships; like the episodic structure of television, I expect resolution at the turn of every new emotion, experience, interaction. This impulse to rely on stories to give structure to my experiences is even more intense when it comes to romance (damn you, romantic comedies!). I remember seeing Garden State in high school and subsequently expecting my romantic connections to be as instantaneous and deep as they were in that film. My friend Kristian who limits his television consumption to "only things that are funny" tells me that I think in very "macro" terms about how men and women are instead of just learning about individuals, and I worry that media representations and generalizations of gender have a lot to do with this.  Media even helps me imagine a future I may or may not have decided for myself yet, but I can't see it any other way than what's portrayed in the stories I consume. 

I think observing Kenneth Burke's idea that "stories are equipment for living" is a totally useful and necessary practice, but the problem for me happens when I use stories as a crutch, or when my self-worth and identity are too formed by external stimuli. This became clear this weekend, when in the midst of a full-blown experience (read: party) I found myself lagging back and not fully engaging, because I felt uncomfortable not being able to be myself in a foreign language and place. So instead of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and trying to embrace the moment, I observed the behavior of others (which was of course amusing). I kept coming back to a certain question, though. When you don't feel like yourself, what's better: leaning into this discomfort to try to make the most of it and eliminate your 'voyeurism,' or listen to your feelings and come to terms with them? This is a question I usually don't have to ask, because media provides the escape. 

So, maybe in order investigate what I really enjoy doing apart from consuming media, I have to stop consuming media!