The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015)
"I'm going to hide this tape when I'm finished. If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of record. The storm's been hitting us hard now for forty eight hours. We still have nothing to go on."
It's 2004 and I'm on my way back from the market. I go there every Saturday, with a large rucksack, the kind you might take if you were going to stay in Rajasthan for 6 months. I head there with both kids, buy fruit and vegetables for the week, and then head home, like a pack mule. It's always the same routine, with a few minor variations, but this time there's a hell of a variation. We come across a freshly placed streetlight, concrete still drying. I don't often find myself in the vicinity of wet cement, so I decide to mark this occasion by writing my children's names into the concrete. Every weekend after this we always make a detour to see their names written in the ground. One day I take a photo of this. You might think this is overkill, taking a photograph of something permanent, but you'd be wrong. For around eight years later that streetlight was removed, and so too was the concrete bearing my children's names. Now all that remains is the picture.
The whole thing got me thinking about selfies, obviously. Now I don't take selfies. Apart from that time I found myself in the lecture theatre where the Ludovico Technique scenes from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) were shot. Well... how could I pass *that* up? I'm not 100% against selfies either, despite what you may think. I don't think about them in purely black or white ways, it all seems a bit grey to me. But the fact remains that I don't like being on camera. Anyway, here's what I thought selfies probably boiled down to:
1. I was here
2. When I was here I, and everything, looked like this
1. How can I be sure I was here? That I am here? I mean, I can feel everything, and I can smell it all, and when I speak people respond. Most of the time. But the way I engage with the world is primarily by looking, and when I look around I sure don't see me anywhere. Selfies get around this. They allow me to see what the world looks like with me in it. Putting myself into the frame puts me into the world. And me is one of my favourite people. If being alive in the early 21st Century has taught me anything it's that I'm just as important as anyone else, if not more so. I should be in the world. I deserve to be in the world.
2. Did you see that last Tweet Leonard Nimoy wrote? It went like this: A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. But again, selfies (and photographs in general) can get round this problem. They can take a beautiful moment and preserve it in amber, put it behind glass, like a firefly in a jar. I can relive that moment and that place and those people again and again and again, simply by taking a picture of myself in that moment. I can hear everything as it was. I can make that moment eternal. Immortality achieved.
Or maybe not.
You see, as time goes on the picture stays exactly the same, but I'm eternally changing. As are you. And because of this our relationship to our image changes: to the places we've been, the people we've known. Remember how that door in the background of that picture used to be broken? Well it's fixed now. It's no longer the same. And here we enter a third space: one occupied by a combination of the facts as they were, and the fluidity of how we picture it in our head. Memory is fallible. That's why eyewitness statements have to be taken with a pinch of salt. We think we remember things perfectly, but we don't. We redraw images in our head, remember things differently, read into things where there was nothing to read into, take for granted that which demanded to be examined.
I'm saying these words to you now, and even though you've never read them I think you knew this already. I think you've even considered it in your own way. And even though it's different from how I've built it up, and perhaps I don't necessarily agree with how you would explain it all, your way is equally valid. Maybe more so. But again I find myself straying, all of this is just a lead in to tell you about my camera.
I have a camera which is special. It takes pictures that don't stand still, but ebb and flow. As I fall in and out with different people the pictures change to mirror this: the drink in my hand subtly shifts to one that is my current favourite, not my then favourite; the surroundings look like they do now, not as they did then. Don't waste your time trying to see these changes happen. The photographs may look inert, but they're alive. They wait for you to fall asleep, turn away, blink, and then they shift. Look at this picture: that night I was close to you, had my arm around you, our faces pressed together, warm, smiling, the sounds around us made sense, but something has shifted in you or me or both of us, and now there's a darker quality sitting behind our eyes that belies this mistrust of where we were that day, and every time either you or I look at the picture we nod to ourselves solemnly and say "Yes, this is how it was."
It's 2004 and I'm on my way back from the market. I go there every Saturday, with a large rucksack, the kind you might take if you were going to stay in Rajasthan for 6 months. I head there with both kids, buy fruit and vegetables for the week, and then head home, like a pack mule. It's always the same routine, with a few minor variations, but this time there's a hell of a variation. We come across a freshly placed streetlight, concrete still drying. I don't often find myself in the vicinity of wet cement, so I decide to mark this occasion by writing my children's names into the concrete. Every weekend after this we always make a detour to see their names written in the ground. One day I take a photo of this. You might think this is overkill, taking a photograph of something permanent, but you'd be wrong. For around eight years later that streetlight was removed, and so too was the concrete bearing my children's names. Now all that remains is the picture.
The whole thing got me thinking about selfies, obviously. Now I don't take selfies. Apart from that time I found myself in the lecture theatre where the Ludovico Technique scenes from A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) were shot. Well... how could I pass *that* up? I'm not 100% against selfies either, despite what you may think. I don't think about them in purely black or white ways, it all seems a bit grey to me. But the fact remains that I don't like being on camera. Anyway, here's what I thought selfies probably boiled down to:
1. I was here
2. When I was here I, and everything, looked like this
1. How can I be sure I was here? That I am here? I mean, I can feel everything, and I can smell it all, and when I speak people respond. Most of the time. But the way I engage with the world is primarily by looking, and when I look around I sure don't see me anywhere. Selfies get around this. They allow me to see what the world looks like with me in it. Putting myself into the frame puts me into the world. And me is one of my favourite people. If being alive in the early 21st Century has taught me anything it's that I'm just as important as anyone else, if not more so. I should be in the world. I deserve to be in the world.
2. Did you see that last Tweet Leonard Nimoy wrote? It went like this: A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. But again, selfies (and photographs in general) can get round this problem. They can take a beautiful moment and preserve it in amber, put it behind glass, like a firefly in a jar. I can relive that moment and that place and those people again and again and again, simply by taking a picture of myself in that moment. I can hear everything as it was. I can make that moment eternal. Immortality achieved.
Or maybe not.
You see, as time goes on the picture stays exactly the same, but I'm eternally changing. As are you. And because of this our relationship to our image changes: to the places we've been, the people we've known. Remember how that door in the background of that picture used to be broken? Well it's fixed now. It's no longer the same. And here we enter a third space: one occupied by a combination of the facts as they were, and the fluidity of how we picture it in our head. Memory is fallible. That's why eyewitness statements have to be taken with a pinch of salt. We think we remember things perfectly, but we don't. We redraw images in our head, remember things differently, read into things where there was nothing to read into, take for granted that which demanded to be examined.
I'm saying these words to you now, and even though you've never read them I think you knew this already. I think you've even considered it in your own way. And even though it's different from how I've built it up, and perhaps I don't necessarily agree with how you would explain it all, your way is equally valid. Maybe more so. But again I find myself straying, all of this is just a lead in to tell you about my camera.
I have a camera which is special. It takes pictures that don't stand still, but ebb and flow. As I fall in and out with different people the pictures change to mirror this: the drink in my hand subtly shifts to one that is my current favourite, not my then favourite; the surroundings look like they do now, not as they did then. Don't waste your time trying to see these changes happen. The photographs may look inert, but they're alive. They wait for you to fall asleep, turn away, blink, and then they shift. Look at this picture: that night I was close to you, had my arm around you, our faces pressed together, warm, smiling, the sounds around us made sense, but something has shifted in you or me or both of us, and now there's a darker quality sitting behind our eyes that belies this mistrust of where we were that day, and every time either you or I look at the picture we nod to ourselves solemnly and say "Yes, this is how it was."