Poltergeist (Gil Kenan, 2015)
“It is a light that implies life and memory of love and home and earthly pleasures, something they desperately desire but can't have anymore. Right now, she's the closest thing to that, and that is a terrible distraction…”
Linda leans forward in her chair and talks, again, “Have I told you that idea about ‘the Watcher’?” I’m lying down on the couch, as I’m supposed to, and reply with.....
“What about ‘the Watcher’?” Linda leans back.
“I’ll take that as a no then.” For a moment I consider struggling to get up, but don’t. I reposition myself instead.
“Well that depends,” I say, “Maybe you told me some time before, but I don’t remember.”
“So let me start, and if you’ve heard it you can interrupt.”
“As if I would.”
“I know. How very dare I?” I like Linda. She’s a lot of fun. She leans over and grabs a lighter, lights a cigarette. This is a cue that I’m in for a long story.
“I thought Doctors weren’t supposed to smoke on the job.” Linda chuckles at this.
“Please.” And then she begins… “The Watcher is the term for that part of your consciousness that keeps everything else in check. It monitors your behaviour and when you start to become too outlandish it acts as an inhibitor, pulling you back.”
“So that’s why I don’t punch strangers?” Linda nods, and continues.
“Not only is that why you don’t punch strangers, it’s also why you don’t urinate in the street, steal things you don’t need, and so on and so forth.” This is the moment I decide to sit up.
“I thought you were going to talk about that Friedman et al study.” Linda ashes, then passes her cigarette over to me. She asks the question with her eyes, without speaking, so I speak for her.
“The one about privacy, and being watched in public?” Linda exhales, makes a face, shakes her head, speaks.
“I didn’t like that paper.” I take the cigarette from her without saying thank you and start talking…
“Or that Buddhist idea about the watcher self.”
“The watcher self?” I get up here and start walking around. Linda looks tired and moves over to the couch.
“Yeah, do you know about ‘dukkha’?” Linda shakes her head, reaches her hand out. I pass the cigarette over and continue. “Dukkha is the idea that all life is suffering. Or, that’s what it translates as. It's a Buddhist term No matter what stage of life you’re at everything is suffering. Everything is difficult.”
“How do they account for moments of joy?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, the watcher self looks at your past, and it finds moments of pain or embarrassment or whatever…
“Ugh, I feel uncomfortable just thinking about that.”
“Uh huh. Anyway, what it does is creates a distinction between the ‘me’ who that event happened to and the ‘me’ who is remembering the event.”
“So why do I still feel sick at the thought of some of these things?”
“I don’t know, is it a lesser pain at all? Is the pain of going through a difficult moment at the time worse than that of reviewing it?” Linda looks around, surprised to see that she is lying down.
“How did I get on this couch?”
“CUT!”
There’s a cacophony of noise as the crew finally relax the silence they’ve been working so hard to maintain. The 1st AD comes over to Linda.
“Linda, darling, the line is How did I get on this couch, not off.”
“Oh, did I say off?”
“No. I just thought we’d stop the whole shoot on a whim. Five minutes to reset, people!”
The 1st Ad walks off, clearly annoyed. I lean in to Linda, whisper, “That guy is an absolute tool.”
“I know. How do you think I was?”
“With him?”
“No, in the scene, in general.”
“Oh, I thought you were great!”
“Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“I’m not just saying that.”
“I wasn’t sure I was going to portray a Therapist convincingly.”
“Why?”
“Well it’s so easy to fall into clichés, right? But you want things to be real, not phoney.”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘real’ and ‘phoney’.”
“One time I went to the doctor’s and the doctor was something like an absolute caricature of a doctor. What I mean by that is that he dressed and spoke and looked like your absolute stereotypical idea of a doctor. So, if I asked you to draw a TV, for example, you might draw something square, with a rabbit ears antennae on the top, despite the fact that you haven’t owned or seen a TV like that for around… what? Two decades? Maybe more? So this doctor I’m seeing, he’s straight out of central casting, and I was hyper aware of the fact that I was at the doctor’s. So I decided to start ‘acting’ like a patient, putting on little affectations. I got the idea that I would play the role of myself, and I fell into this space where everything around me began to feel more real: the chair I was sitting in, the light through the window, even the air I was breathing… everything was far more real than I had ever experienced before, and I realised that this thing that I had classified as a ‘performance’ began to feel more urgent and real to me than the uptight, carefully wound construct I normally live in when being real.”
“What do you think made the difference?” I ask. Linda shrugs.
“Who gives a toot.”