The Machine
Went to see the film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada " at the Cinema du Parc with Karen and Micheline. We met earlier for coffee upstairs and were figuring out how to deal with the movie passes. Micheline had a card that was expired, but had a couple of entries left on it. They can't really take the money and not honour it can they? Between her card and ours there were three left. Perfect. There are no people at the counter when we arrive at the ticket counter and we hand our cards to the cashier. He looks at Micheline's card, hesitates and says that he can't really honour the card, because it's expired. He's not comfortable with saying this. If we like we can call the manager, he says. Then he says that things are really tight with the cinema. This catches me off guard, that he would be so candid about the financial affairs of the business he is working for. I ask "Is it because of downloading?" "Not really" he says, "More to do with people watching films at home." This is troubling me. No people going to the cinema any more. What does that mean?
The film is great, The story of a cattle man burying his Mexican friend who's shot by a border patrol rookie, and dealing with his friends burial wishes. Beautifully filmed. Tommy Lee Jones character loves the Mexican people around him and lives a tough more simple life, in Texas, surrounded by hot head sherrifs and border patrol, who live in a wasteland of Americana TV. There is an interesting inversion in the movie about how one culture's wasteland is another's community.
We leave the theater. I am still trying to figure out what it means that people don't want to go to the movies. What happened to the social experience of the theater? Is it being replaced by networked gaming? I hear that the story lines and characters are becoming way more complex. I am so unconnected to that. People are spending a lot of time on the internet, including myself, staring into screens, building virtual relationships. Buying and selling virtual properties. It's an addiction of some kind. No people in the cinema. We are moving more and more to life as envisaged in The Matrix, everyone's physical bodies plugged in to the machine, while they believe they are having real lives. In fact we are just food for the machine.
Do we need to live in cities any more? The virtual world tells us we can get anything and everything on line. Micheline mentions the suburbs, and that the downtown of Montreal has no families in it any more. Full of 18-34 year olds, hedonist hipsters all. She mentions that in suburban culture, going to the movies wasn't so common, people would go to the video store and rent the films, then watch them at home. So we have suburban culture in the middle of the city now. Because there are no kids being raised in the city, we import them every semester in giant university waves, like the tide going in and out, and they bring their suburban attitudes with them, and prefer to watch films in their apartments and if they're lucky, on monster flat panel TVs with surround sound. Unless they're gaming of course.
People are getting farther and farther from each other. Karen mentions that the city is oddly quiet. It's true. Perhaps we are going deaf. The kids are going to go deaf with their Ipods that's for sure. What a metaphor. A deaf culture. Can't hear nature or each other. Not to confuse this with the culture of deaf people. That's a whole other thing. I put the quietness of the city down to the cumulative and communal anxiety of living with war, both the war in Iraq and the war on the environment we are waging. We are less and less able to ignore it. We cannot trust the beautiful day any more. Is it warm and sunny because we have fucked up the environment so much that it's warmer than normal this time of year? Or is it just a nice day? We don't know. We are less able to believe our senses though. It's sort of my fault. But I don't know what to do about it. My guilt will not make the weather change back to the way it was at any rate. The guilt I felt for being a man didn't free women either.
I have never felt more alone than the last few weeks. I am working for an English Arts Network in Quebec, and am charged with phoning people and telling them about the organization and it's relationship to the RAAV, the official body that recognizes artists. The organization is trying to make the services that exist for artists in Quebec more accessible to anglophones via this network and website. Part of the isolation problem is that I am spending my time in the basement of the house, where my computer is hooked up, and the phone. My work space is so cluttered, and I don't want to bring that to the rest of the house. I live in clutter. It drives me crazy, but I cannot put something back where I picked it up for some reason. It all has to be out on the table and in my visual space all the time. Like I said, it drives me crazy. Anyways, here I am, in the basement, phoning people and typing responses into a computer. Mostly alone. What happened to working with people and having a good time together? I've always been a bit suspicious of groups, but now the challenge is to try to connect. I'm afraid I don't have the skills to do that now, I feel so out of practice with the art of negotiating with other people. The irony of working for an organization whose goal it is to bring people together, and the reality of the work being so solitary, doesn't seem so funny to me at the moment.
The hard part is making the call. Once a conversation gets started it's OK. I realize that alot of people are feeling alone, like me, only they're not saying so. Some people just want to talk and talk, fill me up with their minutiae, so perhaps I am their 15 minute therapy session. That''s OK, I can imagine being a good therapist. They even thank me for my time sometimes, but it is my job to call them, and take up their time with my questions, so I should be thanking them. Some like to complain about how hard done by they are by the world. I try to keep those short. Some are so happy that I'm calling. What a wonderful thing you are doing. Some are suspicious, not wanting to become part of any institutional process. It will pull them into the machine, and they are trying to stay outside of it. Inside and outside of the machine. The machine that is building us and killing us at the same time.
Can I make art work about this? Can I make art work with this? In this? Without this?
Saw the film "Hard Candy" tonight with Karen, and it was interesting in that it's a reversal of the victim in the normal aggressor male vs. victim young woman. I guess what I got thinking about was the indifference to someone's pain that an agressor must feel in order to hurt someone. I was thinking too, that the reason people get so fucked up about abuse of any kind, sexual or otherwise, is that as the victim, instead of seeing your power from your own strength or perspective, you are distracted from walking through life towards your own self realization into walking through life and seeing you through your abuser's eyes. You are constantly evaluating yourself through the eyes of your abuser, because for that remarkable, memorable moment in your life, that person was expressing power over you. When it comes time to imagine your own direction, and where your own power lies, that memory is sitting there fresh as the day it happened, and interferes with the you that is trying to surface.