writing writing

It's half-past one this Sunday, it rains outside quietly. I'm sitting in the comfy chair in my bedroom. As on most mornings, I get out of bed, I put clothing on, I eat, linger, reluctant to leave or frozen in the guilt of today's responsibilities. I've realized that expectation, and routine dictate my choices. It seems like it's been a while since I woke with a definitive goal or dream, something to rise to. It seems like it's been a while since I lived without something to plan or prepare for, yet I find myself to be fairly content in this moment.

On other mornings, I'll go back to sleep. Some department in my mind is analyzing the processes and obligations of the outside world. Throwing meetings, and searching for files. All the while a part of me, like a kid sick from school and at the office with mom, feels distant from these corporate affairs. These days my head is filled with deadlines and distractions and daydreams. These days I want to freeze time. I want to be transparent in the mind of others and my burdens.

I used to wake to an occasion each morning. No hesitation, attuned as if each day was exploration and consequence-less improv. My life eventually lead me to live in this suburb and to attend this middle school between a graveyard and a hospital. Someone or serendipity thought that this should exist, and I was in the making of it. Like in a movie.

It happened a few weeks ago. I went to a reenactment of the Stop Making Sense performance. Once in a Lifetime played, and it felt like I woke up from my life for a moment. In an interview with NPR, Byrne said: "We operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves 'how did I get here'." It feels like we all find ourselves in this forceful dream. I'm interested in the way that the experience of a movie affects our conscious experience, and what purpose it serves our lives.

As I read The World Viewed, I resonated with Cavell's "metaphysical memoir - not the story of a period of my life but an account of the conditions it has satisfied," (Cavell, xix), I wanted to understand the account of the conditions of when I felt associated with my life, and in the same light how movies change us.

Meals remind me of movies. I like meals. Meals with company. Meals without company are so so. We make the food or the food is made for us. And we sit down, with plate in front of us. And we feel a sense of purpose. Hunger is innate, routine, and this meal wasn't wrong in a way like snacking is. The meal is a part of our day that we attend to. It is a piece of time. It is shared in each family household, like Rockwell's Thanksgiving. Movies are like meals. We sit down to eat them. We are hungry, well what are we hungry for?

Escapism

The opening chapter of The World Viewed begins with the question of why movies are important. It ends with the question "What is film?" For Cavell (and myself) these are not separable. If this were his memoir, there was a turning point between Cavell and his relationship to movies. "The movie's ease within its assumptions and achievements - its conventions remaining convenient for so much of its life, remaining convincing and fertile without self-questioning - is central to its pleasure for us....how has film been able to provide this pleasure?" (15)

Like Barthes, Cavell notes that this mirrors reality unlike how a painting can. It could be said further that what painting wanted, in wanting connection with reality, was a sense of presentness - not exactly a conviction of the world's presence to us, but of our presence to it.... by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction....Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. (22-23). As if you step into a new reality. Until games virtual reality becomes indistinguishable from reality, movies are unlike other art forms because of this connection to reality or a pseudo reality.

Is the pleasure in the escape? Escapism is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy. Moviegoing, not movie watching, can be an escape in that you enter into a theater which boxes you off from all sights and sounds of the outside world. The motion picture Cavell describes "A camera is an opening in a box...for confining (senses), leaving room for thought.... It screens me from the world it holds - that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me - that is, screens its existence from me." (Cavell 24). "I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory). In this, movies resemble novels, a fact mirrored in the sound of narration itself, whose tense is the past" (Cavell 25-26).

I'm sure there are movie viewers that seek movies with a specific characters or story arch; characters that exist and are like us, with a quest, and goal that they live for or rise to. The audience can live vicariously through those characters within the two hour picture, but is infinite in its reality. To feel what it would be like if we were in love or successful, etc. To me the many genres Cavell denotes to the classic hollywood, and many of today's box office success exploit one's pleasure in their respective cliches, or if you believe in the human condition, our desires.

Movies that end with a resolution of a character's self or a success or failure of resolution in their world are common. And if a movie-goer wants to fantasize, and escape to a reality of success, it serves them. As we discussed in class, acknowledgement requires a decisive conscious choice. Movies sedate and force us to acknowledge a different reality because we absorb it like memory, and it screens us from existence. All those sheeple, and their simple pleasures.

Expressionism

Our dreams at night are senseless, and upon waking we feel misplaced from the normalcy of how it felt and how our awakened brain rationalizes our sleep. But every once in awhile we dream something that makes perfect sense. So much sense that we are in awe and want to know what happens next, and we know that we can't do it again, because the "toon in next time" left the station once you realized it was a dream. Daydreams can't compete. Daydreams are crude in indulgence like masturbation in contrast to sex. But movies. Cinema gives the dreamer lucidity, consistency and a living instance that will remain this time forward. A movie stimulates you more intimately. A night dream and movies overcome you with an affective response.

A director is controlling the scenarios they dream so that they cinematographically recreate this imaginary moment. It's like a dream going to the movies. Somehow you appear there. And the tone of it all, the coloring the music. Things you didn't know that we're going to happen do happen but you completely accept the next flash of images and film. This is your experience because you consciously acknowledge and decide how things make sense. Like oh "I became naked because I saw the sun and it was hot. And I ran down the road once I knew that and I ran and fell in my bed." Although a movie gives us the freedom to create something, it is only really true for writers/directors with the privilege of producers, actors, and all points of production, but I guess the best of directors and storytellers exploit the audience's captivity in fantasy creationism.

The part where I start to diverge from Cavell

On pages 22-23, Cavell argues that presentness in photography, and the validity of reality exists because we were separate in making this real picture, a camera shot it, unlike a painting: "Then our subjectivity (our absence from the photograph) became what is present to us, individuality became isolation. The route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgment of that endless presence of self." He supposes that we value art because we wish for selfhood (simultaneous granting of otherness). And from it spawns romanticism between representation and the acknowledgement of our subjectivity.

I disagree with Cavell because I think we enjoy the breaking of selfhood. Selfhood is the quality that constitutes one's individuality; the state of having an individual distinct identity. It is this weird phenomenon when you watch a movie and you are somehow split from the outside world that we attend to like a pipeline. What does he mean by this individuality. It seems like individuality has to do with divisibility. Its as if you had a real objective power to separate yourself from the existence that the outside world dictates for you. Its like how I felt when i woke up and said no no no more. It's like me staying still in that comfy chair was like defying time, and the pipeline. It was this divisibility from my life. I think that's what sleep is like, what movies are like. They give you this freedom to say every part of my subjective experience isn't mine anymore, but more to be divisible from yourself.

Our subjectivity is not earth shattering. We already feel our view and individuality is defeated. And what followed is our obsession with the attempt of objectivism. Your ideology became as personal as yourself. With subjectivism or neoliberalism. I don't know if the truth exists for people. I don't think they trust their thoughts. They want to be right maybe, but I don't think they want that thorn of rightness. They want to exist. They want a movie because it's as if you escaped yourself, and your obligation to yourself to be right. In a religiously scientific society, we assess good and bad to opinion. It's not about developing a hypothesis. This world is past the developing understanding of information.

I think that this answers something about how we view our own agency, whether there is some freedom in being absurd, emotional and irrational. I think irrationality is kind of beautiful. It's something that goes against the way everything seems to be. It's only for ourselves, for us humans. Its intoxicating to not have a self enact on the world. Dreaming and entering the world of a movie is an acceptance of absurdity. Its an escape from the scientific religious society predicament.

I'm watching a movie. No one cares about who I am or have become, and I don't want to be it because it was always better when I was less of a stack of experiences of a person, to have a personality, then to be like wind. For Cavell, the time before the modernity shift might have been of individual freedom, "When moviegoing was casual and we entered at no matter what point in the proceedings... we took our fantasies and companions and anonymity inside and left with them intact" (Cavell, 11). Movie times and movie going became regimented, and the advent of World War II took our belief that we have no power on the world.

The screen relieves us from our own experience. When we watch a movie we are invited into a world that is not our own but is like our own, and allows us to experience a life that isn't ours. It's like when you're really talking to someone on the phone, and you both exist in a space that isn't in your room or your friend's but somewhere between the phone cables. So it is an out of body and breaking the continuum of our day, and our local experience, into something connecting like that phone line.

Cavell may hint this with his love of privacy, and our displacement from our natural world or experience. "In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world's projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it" (40-41). It seems kind of funny to me that selfhood and individuality is the arrowhead of your experience or to Cavell this natural habitation.

Are our realities automatisms like Deleuze's way of breaking recognition? To be forced to recognize another style of thought. I'm not talking about taking a step back to examine things. The intrigue is the escape from selfhood. Maybe it's about being in an individualistic society. We value the development of character. Your life seems to become these automatisms. These recognitions that you react to. Its like you can't help it anymore. So go to this movie, and it intercepts your selfhood. Breaks the continuum of your experience. It is unlike the experience of a theater because you as an audience as a self have some say in the performance. Cabbage and tomatoes.

Footnote: I looked around online for someone to agree with me, because I want to be right, and I found Prof. Leddy of San Jose State University's blog post to reckon with. "Cavell says: 'It could be said further, that what painting wanted, in wanting connection with reality, was a sense of presentness - not exactly a conviction of the world's presence to us, but of our presence to it.' (69) This is where his theme of the great quest of overcoming skepticism comes in: 'At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became subjective.' (69) I would call this the Cartesian wrong turning: a wrong turning that everyday aesthetics seeks to overcome. The opposite of individuality in Cartesian isolation is individuality interacting with the surrounding world, i.e. the sense of John Dewey's notion of experience." This was meant to be a footnote because he deserves some "rightness" too.

Movie going reminded me of my young self. When I was a kid, I didn't have to plan. I did not have selfhood or a conscious effort to be a person or an individual. There is only the now to experience. To explore. There comes an age when I grew up, and that for me entailed giving up my freedoms of living and life to prepare. My person was intertwined with the planning, and pipeline to a future or ideal self and circumstance. Or the pipeline, planning, preparing, becoming has been my natural habitation.

What happened to me. Bryan told me that he watches a film each day, and that Bryan Arita only chooses responsibilities he can get out of if need be. He has allowed himself a life where he can make choices that are not dictated by expectations, and routine. If you think about sleeping with Sarah, does that mean you're unsatisfied with Rebecca? Could you ever be satisfied with a single Rebecca? Could you ever be satisfied with your life without escapism, expressionism, or an escape from something that isn't your own? Well Rebecca, and you change, and for the convenience of free will, it would be a hell of a lot nicer to live a life that satisfied your dreams. Unless you want to talk about Paterson or Ikiru, part of life is accepting what it is, and your hinge of existence in life, and part of it is allowing, and making decisions that express and create your own dream. But whether that is possible, I guess it depends on your dreams, and who you are.