We postmodern thirty-somethings have this problem: we consume too much, and too quickly. Hayao Miyazaki says in an interview somewhere that his delightful film My Neighbor Totoro should only be viewed once, or once a year at worst. But we postmoderns don’t consume media in that manner. We like something to its death. We watch Totoro, we buy it, we watch it three four times in a month until its delight is extinguished.
Then what is left but a search for another delight to consume, digest, and put aside. It amazes me how many CDs we own and, even more, the number from the early 90’s that I will never be able to listen to again: the Seventy Seven’s Sticks and Stones, Charlie Peacock’s West Coast Diaries, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. I loved those discs once upon a time.
Stephen Frear’s High Fidelity opens with a close-up of a needle in a record groove. A long umbilical cord is strung out from the stereo receiver to Rob’s headphones. Then Rob, addressing the viewer, says something to the affect of, “Which came first? The music or the misery?”
It’s a wonderful image of infantile desire: somehow we are created by media to desire, but desire in such a circular self-defeating fashion. The record goes around and around as do Rob’s infatuations, until he tires of the same old exotic underwear fantasy (they are never worn past the first date).
We appear to need lack. Without lack we have no direction, no purpose, no meaning to project ourselves through time and space. But women (or men) can only be consumed for so long before they also lose their delight. We look around. We make a new tape, if you are Rob, and give it to the next cute girl to walk in Championship Vinyl.
I find this circularity distasteful. I find it too easy. I’m reminded of my other favorite film on relations, My Dinner with Andre, in which Andre points out that we have affairs, we desire, because it is easier. To flirt, hunt, and take prey is ingrained into us. So that what is difficult for us to do as humans is to remain at peace and make a project out of some thing, or some one for the rest of our lives.
When Rob stops his circular, ultimately conservative desiring and chooses to marry, he also chooses to become a record producer–the critic/consumer begins to create. That is one sort of answer.
(There may be a more positive spin on this issue: maybe thinking of life as a tenuous dance of desire in which we give love to others, without pain, and move on to others is another way of being (See Sammie and Rosie Get Laid for a version of this). A hard way, no doubt, that could quickly spiral into simple imperialistic possession of others. A very grounded friend of mine and one-time practitioner of polyamory told me once that one of the biggest problems with multiple partners is time management, finding worthwhile time to be with each of them. Without such time, lovers become just objects).
Here is where many of us in our 30’s find ourselves:
You have the best job you will ever have. You have a house, children, spouse, and one or two cats. You have thirty years ahead of you and you lack nothing. How can you or anyone propel themselves through 30 years with no lack?
Where, in other words, to locate another dream?
Music and movies. I could not spend my life simply watching them. I would throw up my hands with disgust. Most men take up (literal) hunting, or renovate cars. They find hobbies.
My case is not yet dire enough for cars and hunting. I have not reached the end of lack. I lack. I am not bored, yet. My career could go farther. A little farther. So I project myself, get meaning for myself, through pursuing this lack. But where will I be in five years?
It is an ironic fact that family to do not operate as projects in my mind. This is perhaps for the best. Should relationships be considered projects like an essay on Thomas Pynchon or Alan Moore? I hope not. On the other hand, why is it so difficult to inject focus and energy into relations with others? We know self-evidently that what we do in our work is near worthless. Sure, it may further the progress of knowledge a bit. But so very, very little.
Why can’t we refocus this energy to what self-evidently does matter?
Perhaps it is because family is always there. They are so familiar that one cannot have critical distance to see them as project, as things that can and should be improved. Perhaps the very fact that family is there constantly is enough to undermine any focused attention. Is it not impossible to focus on something that is always there in front of one? Rather like glasses which disappear even while they sit very squarely atop one’s nose.
The lesson appears to be that important things recede from consciousness, while things and people which are slightly other to everyday experience attract one’s mind and actions (only to recede to the background when their time comes).
It’s the delineation of a problem, not an answer.
