If My Life Were a Movie...
Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 11:50PM 
It’s a bit like the Proust Questionnaire in that the answers you give today, could be entirely different tomorrow or even three minutes from now. If my life were a movie, today, it would be Antonioni’s Blow Up. No, not for the obvious reasons of fashion and what not – actually, that aspect of the film comes off as so twisted, and in all of it’s Fab Mod-ness, surreally frightening. And no, not for all of the dope-smoking parties (so college) - really, tell me Sophia Coppola, why are they “so glamorous?” Perhaps the glamour is the aspect of the film seen by some in the long-shot abstraction. The abstraction is everything – the more you blow up the image, the more abstract it becomes, and then even more things appear to the viewer.
I tend to think that this is what people see about each of us: we keep others so far away that they see us as abstractions, seeing things that aren’t really there. It’s an existentialist dilemma of reality, self-deception, perception, and knowledge of self. Do you ever have those encounters where you are paid a compliment, or an acquaintance tells you something of yourself – how they see you, and it couldn’t be further from the truth? It happens to me all the time. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche puts the problem this way:
"Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image. Not infrequently, it was an antithesis of me – for example, an “idealist” – and those who had understood nothing of me would deny that I should even be considered."
One morning I saw a friend on the bus, who quickly told me: “You must have the most fabulous job in the world,” while I was actually thinking to myself that I didn’t want to go face another day of work. I didn’t know what to wear to a wedding this summer, finally threw something on I wasn’t in love with, and felt like a shrinking wallflower when I finally got to the party… and yet during cocktail conversation I was told: “You’re such a confident little spit-fire!” One of my best friends told me just this week: “You are always so pulled-together,” when a few hours earlier I had caught myself in a mirror, realizing that I was without lipstick and combed hair, again.
I’m sorry, who are you talking about? When I am told things like this I have to fight the instinct to look over my shoulder for the girl they’re really talking about. It feels so insincere to stand there, smile, thank them, and appreciate the compliment. Where do these folks get their information? More importantly, who is the impostor that’s going around being Ms. Fabulous-Impeccably Dressed-Perfect-Person that looks like me? How do I get to meet her? Apparently, Jaspers had already thought of that in Existenzphilosophie, when he said:
"We should like, so to speak, to stand outside ourselves in order to look and see what we are; but in this supposed looking we are and always remain enclosed within that at which we are looking."
No dice, I guess. I suppose I’d rather feel a little *off* but carry myself as though I know exactly what’s happening. I guess that’s the good part. But the dichotomy fascinates me. I suppose this is why I identified with the unnamed photographer in Blow Up. Not that it’s his own personality that’s so different inside and out, but his own reality turns out to be only his reality, and not reality at all. The film shows over and over that his cultural reality is only desirable, glamorous, and exciting because his contemporaries define it as such. Much the same way that designers create all those “It” bags each season – who says they’re so necessary and coveted? (Bingo big girl - it’s the editors, writers, buyers, and fashionistas who decide that those very things are important because those "It" things define their own silly lives. And we all believe it because we read magazines, watch movies, and love celebrities.) Once you take the desire out of its context however, it’s totally meaningless. “It” bags in Wyoming? Being a drone in the fashion hive, I willingly acknowledge that it’s because we all buy into the reality of the “desirable product” that make them ravenously sought-after. I suppose if I were smoking dope in the party scene of Blow Up I would think that was glamorous too… And yet, the photographer quickly learns that without validation of his reality (everything seen in the park, the body, the girl...) none of it exists, if it ever existed. He attempts to get another person to see his reality, but gets so distracted by his cultural context (the party) that it doesn't happen, and everything from the park is erased.
So, maybe it's just me - maybe my friends really are validating my reality even though it seems so different from what I know. But again, it's all within our cultural context; within the context of my own life then, I must really be the confident spit-fire with a fabulous job – at least compared to everyone else I know. Maybe their lives are really a total mess compared to mine. Hmmm. If no one sees the proof of what a mess I am, then the mess doesn's exist. If I believe it, it is so. If I pick up the tennis ball, the mimes can keep playing.
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