Having finally done some work today, I watched CSI – and it's my favorite episode, '4x4', an intricate puzzle of four overlapping segments that intersect in unexpected ways. Although the episode initially seems to run along the normal patterns for the show, the overlaps start amplifying the watcher's awareness of the people involved, without them understanding that awareness – even the investigators are never aware of all aspects of the story; we are the only ones who are given an Olympian sense of the whole, and how various small actions and confusions change people's lives.
It reminds me of other favorite scenes that have a particular flavor – that sense of a sort of compassionate grief, implied for instance in Blade Runner (when the first replicant is shot, and the film suddenly slows, transforming the scene from adventure to tragedy), or in some of the more formally constructed episodes of ER (I'm thinking of one where music swelling at the end cuts from one sad, reflective scene to another, and several disparate stories are blended into a single piece of choreography). I'm always impressed by this move – I suppose it's almost a cliché in contemporary film/TV, but I always love the sudden sense of the accidents and confusions of life coming clear, being understood, even though it usually seems to happen in tragic contexts.
I think that's what I keep hoping to figure out in my own life: all the fussy analysis, my shifting from one system to another (Jung to Freud to politics to spirituality to...), and my endless fussing over the meaning of details, my attempt to figure it all out. I keep wanting it to all make sense in some way, to see the point in some global fashion that enables me to know when I'm getting it right. Vain hope, I suppose – I probably need to get a life....
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