A Motion Picture
The sun is coming through the window and it feels good. The light is different today, more like the dark, because the heat on my face makes me want to sleep. I had this plan of turning on the TV and watching rolling news, you know the anchor in a suit jacket and tie as if business casual presentation is enough to transform subjectivity into truth. I would watch it and write and make some powerful point about the relentlessness of experience, about how things just go on and on, and how it is kind of tiring and sickening after a while to be forced to watch all this experience, to keep sitting in front of it, like hours and hours in the cinema and your butt slowly going numb, your attention really lagging at this point, not to mention your bladder and the need to go as the film just won’t fucking end, epilogue after epilogue after epilogue, and this film is super avant-garde, not your regular blockbuster or three-act structure, that consists mainly of closes ups of almost disgustingly normal just-bumped-into-him-or-her-in-the-street-type faces lit very seriously from beneath, no background, just black, and the faces are insisting that the film you’re watching is going somewhere, has been written with a very specific destination and reason in mind, and that reason will become clear soon enough if you just have a little patience or faith or less cynicism that this is going somewhere. The worst thing is it seems to get more saccharine the further it goes on, and you start to think it has become a bit pretentious and presumptuous if you’re completely honest, so you begin to look around at the other members of the audience to maybe catch the eye of the person next to you or nudge the guy in front and share an eye roll or knowing smirk or a silently mouthed theHELListhis, but every single person in the theatre seems captivated, sitting rapturous, barely blinking, looking dehydrated from their concentration and inability to look away, popcorn and soft drink long since consumed. This only amplifies the discomfort you feel about the absurdity of what’s on the screen — a gentle-looking man now with thick-rimmed glasses and neatly-parted grey hair saying you just have to trust that things will work out OK, that the story has the ending you want, think of it as a journey, a path etc. etc. etc. — and you have the strongest urge now to stand up and say OK, OK, enough is enough, no more of this shit, and leave your seat and feel your way down a dark flight of stairs to the door where light is leaking from the bottom in these flat bars that remind you of cirrostratus clouds, but for some reason you keep waiting it out, silent, uncomfortable, and not because you believe anything of what’s being said on the screen, the clichés, the vagueness, the self-deceptions and rationalisations that give them the gall to keep talking, but because somehow you have forgotten exactly what lies behind these two heavy doors at the bottom of the stairs, where there is no definition or certainty and you are scared of stepping out, though you arrived through that same entrance/exit not even that long ago, really, in the grand scheme of all things.
