Between The Crown and The Real World
Biopics; Reality tv; Wittgenstein's picture theory of language
Sometimes you get into conversation with a group of people, and, because most of us are incapable of expressing anything sensible in the vast arena of available reality, of conversing through the overgrown weeds of the mind and challenging one another without much of the ego getting in the way, we fall back on the oh-so reliable default conversation topic: Have you seen that one show? OMG you have to it’s SO GOOD!!! It’s actually an amazing little trick, and you can heave yourself through the sludge of any tedious conversation with this volley, and the eyes of your opponent will widen and they will reliably retort with even greater enthusiasm about the show that you have to watch, some show you keep hearing about on the fringes of other conversations, one installment in the death-fortress of entertainment, a leaflet in the glittering infinity swirling around us like a nightmare you can’t wake up from. You toss names of movies or shows back and forth like it was an inflated beachball, quickly tallying up hundreds of hours of your puny, regret-stained life, in what you manage to summarize as entertainment.
But this is more than entertainment. We are collectors of crudely belched anthologies, stories of the lives lived better than our own, and television-watching takes a unique strain of humility to pull off, to be able to just sit there and watch and listen to others quietly, without interrupting them. We can at times live vicariously through the gallantry or murderous perversions of others. Television and movies complete us. They resolve our timidness, and push us into the future as we lean back into the mite-infested contours of the couch, the huge screen of desire glaring hallucinations in front of us, giving us dopamine or whatever like the slow drip of an IV bag.
Now, I prefer finishing my day with a little television watching, or a good movie where I can escape the ravenous demands of the world. I usually wake up moderately early—this morning, at 5:30—and continue steadily and productively until about eight or nine o’clock at night where I can finally begin to wind down, kick my feet up and sift through the maddening supply of entertainment. I used to watch ‘smart’ entertainment—Criterion Collection stuff, Kurosawa and Fellini and Bergman and every other important movie maker I came across and had time for. I’m pretty sure I did enjoy them a great deal, allowing me to look down at the bucktoothed peasants still consuming their monster movies and rom-coms like their lives depended on it. And I still love those old black and white and Technicolored spectacles.
The best filmmakers can take this potentially bland, formulaic recipe and turn it into a transcendental awe of Otherness, a collective worship of the ephemeral condition of ourselves. That old Criterion stuff is actually not just craggy pornography for the film nerds; there’s a patience and mastery of thought that is regularly hard to come by through today’s lens. But these days, I do not catch myself in the pattern of throwing on something as beautiful and challenging as Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), or Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998), or Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) after a hard day’s work. I sometimes watch genuinely bad television. Even until recently, I used to live for days where I’d spend the entire day violently hungover, with my blackout curtains pulled shut, in the fetal position, masturbating all day and watching four or five terrible movies, or bingewatching a whole season of something. I used to like those days more than I did partying with my friends the night before. Thankfully I don’t do that much anymore. For the most part, I’ve sworn off alcohol—or at least am trying to. And television is more and more becoming just television. I invite the circus into my living room, my own personal court jester, with all his bells and tricks and exotic costumes, and I command the thing with a remote control: Amuse me, peasant! I demand. I will pause him mid sentence and fetch myself some Sleepy Time tea, and then return and make him proceed. There is so much garbage I have willingly consumed lately, it makes you realize the scale of the gears of the culture industry. It does eventually creep into your mind, and make you ask, who on earth would go out of their way and into great financial risk to make this?
Sure, I love the idea of reading for an hour before bed, of really winding down into the smoothly purring gears of slumber. Occasionally I’ll feel guilty and realize I’m not reading enough, and then I’ll read a few nights in a row, and I’ll genuinely feel much better, as if my mind is able to rehearse the language of imagination better than it knew how to before. But again, reading, like good movies, require work.
But because I am only capable of criticism and malevolence, of never having anything good to say about much, I have a little bone to pick about the kind of entertainment that should be made and invited into our homes. Biopics are a certain kind of irrational evil. Of course not as an all-consuming general rule—there are plenty of well-intentioned stories of real characters larger and better than fictional ones—but of the obvious ones, the leaders of popular culture, thoughtless productions that could just as well take the Wikipedia page about so-and-so and shove it through an AI scriptwriting machine like it was a hotdog maker.
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