I May Be Anxious But I’m Not Precious
On television
I’ve been charbroiled in anxiety these past two days. The reason isn’t important. Because I refuse psychotropic drugs (out of what might be a misguided fear of dependency), I have to find other coping mechanisms. Other coping mechanisms: smoking, pacing around, rocking back and forth. My boyfriend suggests dropping the former for painting (“Draw where you’re storing your anxiety!”); my therapist tells me to be kind to myself (“Girl, don’t smoke, let’s get a milkshake”—milkshakes are the proverbial American cigarette). Recently I discovered a fourth coping mechanism, which bests all of my prior coping mechanisms and some other ones I’ve recovered from (not mentioned).
When I’m not smoking or pacing or rocking I watch art house television until I pass out. God, I could do it forever. It can’t be cable TV but sometimes it can be Youtube—only if it’s High Quality Content, or what I, very qualified film expert, determine to be good camera work (recently I’ve watched a lot of Mark Weins). Most of the time it can’t be Youtube, though. There’s no green tape for that shit, and I pay for the velvet ropes. I’m getting precious again.
On the subject of my inexhaustible visual appetite, I’m reminded of something Susan Sontag once told Sigrid Nunez: “When I’m not consuming culture, my brain is empty—like static.” This is what I remember, at any rate. I just went back and found Nunez’s actual quote: “In the absence of distraction, she said, her mind went blank, and she compared it to the static on the screen when a TV channel stops broadcasting. She told me this, I know she did. I remember her words. I have thought of them very often since, but I still have trouble believing them” (Siempre Susan 69). It seems like Nunez isn’t so sure, either. In any case, there’s an abundant crisis of faith—Nunez in Sontag, Nunez in herself, Sontag in herself (or so Nunez surmises), me in myself. What happens in the absence of distraction is that the mind goes fuzzy and everything becomes overwhelmed by high-pitched scratches.
Side note: I had what you might call an art-ho boyfriend once (Oh, great story, you’re thinking) who was very endearing in a lot of ways. Once, when we got very stoned, he asked me to listen to static with him. I actually said yes, because I love frivolity and have no spine (this just gets better and better). He had one of those 80s-style box television sets with thick antennas and a little metal cap. It was late afternoon, and his room looked like a cave. We sat in the near-total grayness. “Bzzzzscrrrrchzzzzzzznrrrrzzzzzz,” said the static. “Bing,” vibrated the antenna. We stared at the screen in rapture. “I think I can see a pattern,” he said. “Sometimes I think the static can tell me the future.” He told me this, I know he did. I remember his words. I have thought of them very often, and every time I laugh.
Maybe I’m being punished because I didn’t take the static seriously. Now, I can’t stand it, and it’s everywhere. How can you live, with the static? You can’t. Susan Sontag, Sigrid Nunez tells us, slept very little—at most five hours a night. The static, man, it was like death, it drove her toward life. Toward filling it out with color and meaning, her life’s earnest work. For the first time in my life, I know what it feels like to be so anxious that your thoughts literally keep you awake at night. Driving you toward an insatiable insanity. So, yeah. I prefer the expensive stuff—the stuff laden with meaning, the thick shit, lubricant for the eyes, narcotic for the soul. HBO, A24, Monkeypaw Productions, White Rabbit, Studio Dragon, and the singular talents of Raphael Bob-Waksberg. The only problem is that once I start, it’s hard to stop.
Recently I had the pleasure of watching two great films back to back. Soul, the new Pixar release, and Minari, an A24 production. I’m not interested in penetrating the surface of the film, excavating for profundity, I can’t muster criticism now. What was remarkable to me was the experience of losing myself totally in the landscape of the story. People have always gone to the cinema for escape—escapism was the first sin of the cinematic arts. It’s said that when the Lumiere brothers screened some of their first moving pictures at the Salon Indien du Grade Cafe the audience shrieked because they mistook the images for reality. It might be myth but oh, isn’t it arresting. I guess we’ve accepted the totalizing medium of the video, by now. It’s the fabric in which our cultural consciousness plays out, the most expedient representation of life, the most common and most commonly imbibed product. Modern anxiety tends toward the all-consuming capacity of video: films like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One imagine worlds in which videographic realities are indistinguishable from the real real, a fear anticipated by the smashing interior world of The Truman Show. To live in an art house television show—my dream come true! Do androids dream of electric sheep? Likely—though more likely, they dream in holographic lenses.
I promised no profundity, and little did I deliver. But if you got all the way here (and you are among the few, I suspect) I ask of you: good shows, send them my way. Art house to the front, please. We may live in a videographic reality but gosh is there a dearth of good TV!