That Old Infernal Racket
Ever notice how it's always "that infernal racket"? As if it's supposed to invoke the crazed sounds that some restless devil would make? I think my upstairs neighbours must be breeding a legion of the buggers because I've gradually lost count of the incessant footsteps above me. It's either that or they're holding footraces for pot-bellied pigs in their living room. I'm betting on the latter at this point.
You know that legal rider they have to tack on to movies and TV shows? The one that's all "the characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental"? It sounds funny now, but I remember being a kid and being easily duped by my twisted grandparents into believing that the X-Files were based on actual investigations. It didn't help that the Canadian knock-off was presented in almost documentary format. Regardless, there was a good portion of my life where the line between fiction and reality was kind of blurred. It's not that I couldn't separate TV from reality, but just that I was becoming more aware of how topical and referential TV was. The fact that there are still reams of movies bearing the tagline "Based on true events" is no different. Fiction is so obsessed with presenting an idealized version of reality that it becomes necessary to attach disclaimers to help people make the distinction between the two. For me, it's tempting to say that this is a pretty sorry state of affairs. But in reality, I have to admit to being impressed by the subtlety of these media. When Orwell's radio broadcast unnerved a population, they were playing out fears of alien invasion and apocalypse. Now, all it takes is a well-written movie like Fargo or Taxi Driver for someone to dissolve the line between life and cinema. We need reassurances that the people we're watching aren't real, that their lives aren't actually being lived.
My point in all this digression is actually tangential to the above discussion. Or maybe the above discussion is tangential to it. I'm not sure. What I wanted to say was that now that I've been able to put the problem of the fact/fiction divide to rest, it's become fascinating to think of how it might be blurred artificially. Take the rider I talked about above, the one about coincidences. What if the coincidence actually held and someone was coincidentally living the life of a character from a movie. The individual would be a real flesh-and-blood person with thoughts and feelings, as real as you and me, but he would just coincidentally be called Richard Kimble and be accused of murdering his wife. I mean, what you run into him on the street and say "....Hey, aren't you that Richard Kimble guy?" And then he looks at you wildly, yelling "The one-armed man killed my wife!" before darting into the nearest prosthetics factory. Again, I digress. I just think that that would be a really interesting premise: a bunch of random people who realize that their lives are being led parallel to those of major TV and film characters. And they can't even sue for likeness rights because of the legal coincidence rider. Now that would be fun to explore.
You know that legal rider they have to tack on to movies and TV shows? The one that's all "the characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental"? It sounds funny now, but I remember being a kid and being easily duped by my twisted grandparents into believing that the X-Files were based on actual investigations. It didn't help that the Canadian knock-off was presented in almost documentary format. Regardless, there was a good portion of my life where the line between fiction and reality was kind of blurred. It's not that I couldn't separate TV from reality, but just that I was becoming more aware of how topical and referential TV was. The fact that there are still reams of movies bearing the tagline "Based on true events" is no different. Fiction is so obsessed with presenting an idealized version of reality that it becomes necessary to attach disclaimers to help people make the distinction between the two. For me, it's tempting to say that this is a pretty sorry state of affairs. But in reality, I have to admit to being impressed by the subtlety of these media. When Orwell's radio broadcast unnerved a population, they were playing out fears of alien invasion and apocalypse. Now, all it takes is a well-written movie like Fargo or Taxi Driver for someone to dissolve the line between life and cinema. We need reassurances that the people we're watching aren't real, that their lives aren't actually being lived.
My point in all this digression is actually tangential to the above discussion. Or maybe the above discussion is tangential to it. I'm not sure. What I wanted to say was that now that I've been able to put the problem of the fact/fiction divide to rest, it's become fascinating to think of how it might be blurred artificially. Take the rider I talked about above, the one about coincidences. What if the coincidence actually held and someone was coincidentally living the life of a character from a movie. The individual would be a real flesh-and-blood person with thoughts and feelings, as real as you and me, but he would just coincidentally be called Richard Kimble and be accused of murdering his wife. I mean, what you run into him on the street and say "....Hey, aren't you that Richard Kimble guy?" And then he looks at you wildly, yelling "The one-armed man killed my wife!" before darting into the nearest prosthetics factory. Again, I digress. I just think that that would be a really interesting premise: a bunch of random people who realize that their lives are being led parallel to those of major TV and film characters. And they can't even sue for likeness rights because of the legal coincidence rider. Now that would be fun to explore.