Are you aiming at me, or am I aiming at you? With all these mirrors, it’s hard to tell, lover. ‘Course, shooting you is shooting myself. But you know, I’m pretty tired of the both of us.
— From Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai
Ifeel like I’m in summer reruns. Not watching them, living them. The other day I was skimming Dave Letterman, just channel surfing; it took me about five minutes — into about the fifth BP oil joke — to realize I was watching a three-month-old show.
Reruns.
Just got through reviewing 10 school subjects with my daughter for her grade two quarterly exams. Seems like a rehash of stuff I leaned about but forgot a long, long time ago.
Reruns.
It’s an occupational hazard. News watchers tend to get caught up in cycles. They see the daily Yahoo News flash on Obama, Sarah Palin, Katy Perry, think something’s going on, something new. Turns out there’s nothing “new” about it. Same old same old.
The Internet was supposed to break us out of the rerun cycle. There’s literally a million new possibilities, e-mails pouring into the inbox daily, the Facebook home page teeming with life.
Feels like reruns, somehow.
My viewing habits have turned to old film noir and Preston Sturges comedies. Seems I can only find freshness in the weird camera angles of Orson Welles’ Lady From Shanghai, the lurid poetry of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (that final apocalyptic scene on the beach in particular, with its glowing suitcase later recycled by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction), the crisp dialogue of Sullivan’s Travels, that early (1941) meditation on poverty porn.
Sullivan knew about reruns. Tired of making ridiculous studio comedies with names like Ants in Your Pants, the young director in the movie decides to strap on a hobo bag and do research for a hard-hitting film he plans to call O Brother Where Art Thou. Sixty years later, the Coen Brothers get around to doing their own musical version of the same name, sans documentary feel.
Reruns.
Or watching Lady From Shanghai, I’m drawn to the disturbing camera tilts, the funhouse mirror scene that reminds us of a more recent venture into viewer manipulation: Christopher Nolan’s Inception. I read the raging online debates as to whether it’s a dream within a dream within a dream, or a dream about a dream within a dream within a dream, and it just makes me want to go “Meh!” It’s a movie, people, make of it what you will. We’re so starved for fresh summer goodness that we’re rushing to elevate this one to “classic” status already? Wait a minute, I’ve been in this dream before, it feels just like a…
Rerun.
Every month the US government releases dire economic indicators: a lagging job market, a slow recovery, a possible double-dip recession. Even a recession turns excessive in the States — going for the double dip, when one’s enough. And damn if it doesn’t feel like a year ago, all over again.
Reruns.
Locally, the newspaper headlines remind us of perennial floods, ferry sinkings, “truth commissions” (an oxymoron if ever there was one). Yup, seems like déjà vu all over again.
All around me, people catch up on TV shows that have barely finished airing in the US, marathon runs of Top Chef or Fringe or whatever, consuming the new before the torrents are barely finished downloading, the CD burn is barely done cooling off. Hurrying up to watch it all before it turns into…
Reruns.
Meanwhile, you try to catch a new movie in the cinemas, but most of these moviehouses are blocked off for Hollywood blockbusters, stuff like Last Airbender and Step Up in 3D (3D: now, there’s a rerun) muscling out every other smaller movie that might want to get its moment of screentime, its few seconds in the sun. No wonder people turn to local pirate vendors for a glimpse of something small and indie: it’s even more contraband than porn.
Reading books is still a good hedge against that déjà vu feeling, because there’s always the possibility that someone will have written something that’s gonna make you stop, sit up and take notice: a new scope on life, something to remind us of what we already know, but didn’t know we knew, and somehow reading it on a page makes it reverberate in the real world in a more lasting way than a Flash Media screen or a flickering wall post. But that stack of books keeps growing taller, even as you plow through it like a steady lumberjack, and somehow the message is starting to become a little garbled, lost among all the pages and all the ink. After a while, sifting through people’s bound thoughts starts to feel like watching…
Reruns.
I know this to be a summer feeling, something I remember perhaps from early TV viewing days growing up in Massachusetts — the sense that school is over and so with it a lot of other things; that there’s a multitude of possibilities out there in the summer sun, but also a closing off, a shutting down, a recycling; that you won’t be able to see any new episodes of Charlie’s Angels or Six Million Dollar Man or Taxi or (old) Saturday Night Live for another, like, three months, and you’ll have to make do with what’s placed before you for entertainment, in the unwavering faith that you should not worry, they’ll make more, they always do, that’s what they do. They always make more.
And so with that inner conviction, you wade through the old, the familiar, the seen-this-already, the times when the repetition in life can seem like an external embodiment of your inner scream, and you wait…
After all, it’s only summer reruns. Something good’s going to come along any moment now.