After a rather extreme version of the usual winter irresponsible incoherent dead-time day and night, I watched this 1968 film by Resnais – perhaps not the best choice for someone thinking about depression and the incoherence of his life. Or, perhaps, the best possible choice.
No, let me explain, briefly, or you'll think this is all stranger or more dramatic than it is. After reaching a certain point in Jung's autobiography (and being unwilling to read further into the relationship with Freud and its unhappy conflicts), and thinking about my own problems and concerns (winter depression, short and silent days, etc.), I'd downloaded a vast Internet collection of segments of Two and a Half Men, up to the present episode. A silly comedy, of course: which has, of course, gotten edgier over the past two years (has no one else noticed that Sheen looks markedly unhealthy in the past year, perhaps a bit too much like his alcoholic character?); which is about addiction and an incoherent life (but, unlike mine, a wealthy and pleasure-drenched version of an incoherent life, one embedded in my long-missed California). So when I found myself watching episode after episode, in order, up until the latest one which started on my computer at 9 am on a Sunday morning....
and then I went to bed, wondering about different kinds of addictive behavior and avoidance. At three in the afternoon David R. rang my doorbell, unannounced, to talk; I sent him away, unusually, and went back to bed; and then this evening saw this strange Resnais film about suicide, despair, time, fragmented time, memory, and les temps morts. It has a rather frightening premise: time travel limited to re-experiencing moments from one's own life – gone awry, where the moments are uncontrolled and out of order.
And now I shall go to bed, again, but at a more normal time, and tomorrow shall have a real and semi-normal day.
And yes, I know: what we're looking at here is simply a common experience: when passive television/film experiences can saturate a person, hypnotize a person, it can eat up their entire life – this is a familiar thing in Los Angeles, especially, but ever since the advent of videotapes it has been common everywhere. (And even before, in those strange habitués of repertory houses: early Woody Allen bears the mark of his having done this – obsessively spending too many afternoons seeing one film after another.) And now, with computers, it is even more common.
Watching too much: it is perhaps an experience that has grounded so many films of the nouvelle vague and other avant-garde forces... and their acute awareness of how bad we really are at handling time, how much it gets away from us, how by the time we have any idea what we wanted from it it's already gone. And of course, any scientist will be just as bewildered by time and experience: how can we live our lives in the face of the vast scale of things? (Even the many versions of the Hitchhiker's Guide makes this problem an endless object of fun.)
But it still seems resonant – the problem of dead time, of repeated time, of imagined time; and the fairly insoluble problem of whether time spent alone writing is any more interesting than time spent watching actors on a screen. Which of those is really temps morts? Are they both?
And what else is there for me to do, anyway?...
You will say: I would have been better off sitting and talking to David. Yes, I say: but – how long, each day, can I wait for such things to occur – by chance?...
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