Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Living Someone Else’s Life

Living Someone Else’s Life

Netflix.  Why do we, or I (me) anyway, get into these Netflix binges?  There have been TV series(es) I have avoided for years.  Something about them irritated me.  After several years I forgot why, but I remember watching one or two episodes and thinking, “Well, this sucks.”

Coulda been the actors or the plots or simply the script writing – the dialogue.  Something just seemed like it took long to get through an episode for what I got out of it.  No value for the time investment.

Recently, just because … well, because … I’ve been burning through seasons of those programs I avoided, and I arrived at a conclusion.  It’s the timing, the pacing of regular cable TV.  The commercials totally screw up the timing.  The writers get you up to a dramatic point, a place of tension, then blam! The networks hit you with diapers and scooters for the disabled and beer and make-up and other shit.  And these days those commercials go on and on and on.  You could take a nap before they get you back to your program.

So you subscribe to Netflix, or some similar service – you really do have a choice these days.  And you can take in each episode without the interruptions of diapers and beer and scooters and you can take in as many episodes at a stretch as you want, or tolerate.  The question is why?  Why do you, or me in this case, spend so much time – or waste it if you think you’re some hoity-toity intellectual – stuck on the couch watching these shows … as it were.

For me, honestly, I have begun to realize, I am escaping my own life by living someone else’s.  Episode after episode, with the script timing uninterrupted, truly puts me into the lives of the plot characters.  Why?  How does this happen?  The truth of this whole new phenomenon, and it is a fairly recent phenomenon, is that the plot characters are only actors.  They are not really police detectives, cops, FBI agents, Doctors.  They are actors!

None of it is real!  I find myself identifying with absolutely total fiction – in every way.  The story is not real, the people are not real, even the places they are supposed to be in are not real.  That’s why, in part, it never seems to snow in northern New England, the wind never blows in Chicago (the Windy City), it’s never cloudy in San Francisco, it never rains in Seattle.  No matter where the show is placed, it’s sunny and apparently warm. 

All the women can wear super tight low cut shirts (lots of cleavage) and never get cold (no nipples).  All the young muscular men can also wear tight t-shirts (but somehow they do have nipples - ???)  The comb-overs on all the old men do not flap around in any kind of wind.

It’s all fiction and yet we (I) get totally into it.  Binging on someone else’s life for hours.


Admittedly – yes I have begun to accept – that I have to get a life of my own.  Soon … hopefully.

dalepeterson.us

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