by JackRiddler » Wed Sep 23, 2020 5:34 am
I expect it was something like this:
If you're watching ST, movie No. V, for some nth time, then you've watched a lot of ST. This is different from watching a stand-alone, one-time film, no matter how affective or powerful. It means ST, and all the ideas and dreams it plays upon, and of course the highly archetypicalized characters, occupy a region of your mental life that is not insignificant, however small or large. This is also true for me, and for many others.
I was thinking the other day how we children in my little world of Astoria Greeks were learning the Greek Orthodox creed (a recitation of the church's fundamental beliefs) back at my parochial elementary school. Every morning we were standing up to do both the Lord's Prayer in Greek and the Pledge of Allegiance (and the Star Spangled Banner, and the Greek national anthem). By the time I was 12, however, I was well along to growing up in America, a country that was more real to me than the notional Greece into which our school meant to culturaly naturalize us.
Until then, my access to this more-real country's literature, intellectual life, and ways of thought had come through television, science fiction books, comics, and newspapers. And, above all, did I mention television? Yes, television. The other day, as I happened to think on those times, I realized that by the age of twelve I had acquired my own personal prayer and my own personal pledge of allegiance. At the time, I did not think about it in those terms, but this 'prayer' and 'pledge' were truer to me than the formal ones we recited at the school. My prayer, and I know this is crazy or sad or funny, would have begun with the line, Meet the Mets, meet the Mets... Spectator team sport games on television were a very serious matter. Like many others, I vested hopes and dreams and fears, which are the province of prayer, in the fate of my beloved (usually hapless) team. And my equivalent to a creed, or a pledge of allegiance, the one that I believed in more fundamentally as an expression of world-view and Things that Should Be (Even If They Are Not), would have begun as follows: 'Space - the final frontier...' We, the humans, had a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where none of us had gone before.
So what do I figure happened with you, Handsome B. Wonderful? The first time you watched Star Trek V, my expectation is that you had watched and lived a lot of Star Trek up to that point, including movies I-IV. As you watched a compelling scene unfold before you for the first time, you anticipated an obvious conclusion to it. Your version would have followed and completed (or 'paid off', as the writers and critics put it) a central narrative and character-arc up to that point, about Kirk and his son. These things do, after all, have arcs. And arcs follow from our psychology. And by that time you were familiar with arcs, and even if you didn't use the word, you could have explained and broken down how they work. And, like all watchers of sequential film (or followers of human storytelling generally), you were habituated to anticipate the course of an arc, and to imagining what happens next in the story, before it happens. Hell, when watching something with others, predicting what will happen next is often a welcome part of the experience. Thus, in those seconds, before the scene reached its climax, you had already written, imagined, and effectively lived through the scene you now remember.
The writers, however, had come up with a different idea for the story. They never thought of your idea, or they flubbed the obvious, or they preferred their version. Or they followed some other compulsion, like what the producers wanted, or they needed to fit the film into a number of minutes, or to get it done in a given number of days, or to avoid using footage from the earlier films. And so, in the next few seconds, the scene on screen did not happen as you'd already imagined it, as you'd already lived through it. After this, in your mind, your own version, being more compelling to you (and to me, and presumably to most anyone), combined with your having seen most of it acted out on screen, before the part you imagined did not follow. Your version became a memory to you, one more compelling than the film scene as actually shot.
And who cares? It's a movie. The stakes in being able to recollect what you'd 'actually' seen, as opposed to the more compelling thing you imagined and felt and effectively lived through, were zero. Then you went home, or had a meal, or did whatever you did, and thought on other things. Then years passed, and perhaps you never thought of those few seconds again, until you watched the movie a second or third or fourth time. You had no reason not to set your version as a memory that meant something to you, as opposed to the screen version that, to you, meant nothing, or would have meant a minor disappointment at most. So, the recollection still was of the version that made you feel, not the one your 'eyes saw'.
This process is remote from forgetting, or from 'corruption' of memory, let alone an echo from a branching n-dimensional reality. What you're remembering is genuinely more important than the shot scene. And it doesn't matter at all that you're remembering it the 'wrong' way. Your way is the right way. You need not testify about it in court. If you get it 'wrong' later, it does not change your life. There is no threshold blocking you from remembering it your way, rather than the way the filmmakers shot it.
I think a lot of people have this Mandrake Effect with movies because the experience, while watching them, is incredibly real (if they're any good, if they grip you), emotional, awesome, tangible, intense, exclusive, and mental. It's all being completed in your head. At the same time, generally speaking, the reality and stakes of a movie are incredibly low. There's no reason for you not to shoot your own movie, for your mind not to remake it while you watch it, or after you watched it. It now occurs to me that the popularity of movies depends on that, and that all filmmakers, except the strictest auteurs, should hope that this is exactly what they are inspiring.
(Sir, we do not revise Mr. Kubrick's scenes in our heads. We don't. Please don't conceive of doing it again.)
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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.
To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.
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