“Sometimes he felt like he was living in a future that had already happened” … The High-Rise
I hadn’t heard of it either but I was going through bins or racks of recent releases in some post-apocalyptic black Friday place and picked it up with a few westerns, old ones, and some movie that looked like it was about aliens but was more a war buddy movie.
The lineup there is, if not the first line, one of the first, like a James Cain Novel it starts with the consequences and works backwards. I actually stopped in the middle to write this. Not because it’s boring, though obviously not riveting, but because I like the line so much and I found myself doing more pondering than paying attention.
It may not seem that good a line to you, but that may have to do with the presentation. You’re reading it here in this drab empty journal, you might be here out of a sense of nostalgia or morbid curiosity, Christ knows it’s not out of social obligation; Peace, I am a hermit. But with the back drop of destruction and a stoic clipped voice British voice reading it as though Pooh Bear were stating he were out of honey, I find it a very good line. If we were still doing prompts and flash Fridays I think it’s a good prompt. Maybe too good, it opens too many possible doors for five hundred words in twenty minutes or whatever variation of flash you are comfortable with.
Jeremy Irons plays a Jeremy Irons character to give you an idea of the sort of movie it is. I find myself throwing the word stoic around more in these last few years than I have in the previous fifty. Midwesterners are stoic, but not in the way the British are stoic. If there were a car crash between a stereotypical Midwesterner and a stereotypical Brit and both were bleeding from the head, the Midwesterner would smile and say “I’m fine, thank you, how’re you?” The brit would size you up like you’ve found the worlds dumbest question, smile tightly and say something like “I’ll manage, I’m sure,”
Sorry that paragraph was to keep from the urge for spoilers, something I suppose I’d have to finish the movie to accomplish. In some ways it reminds me of Bernard Malamud’s The Tenement, a stark book, quietly made into a movie a few years back, a well-made movie that I think might have only been seen by me and it didn’t quite manage to be as stark as the book. It also has, so far, the flavor of European films from the seventies, daring in their way, post sexual revolution, quaint and costume driven by today’s standards. Perhaps that too is why the line hit me, lightly when spoken, harder as the movie progressed.
We are living in a future that has already happened. We’re none to stoic about it. The plot isn’t too well defined but the story takes a lot longer to tell, most of it ends up on the editing floor. And though we concentrate mostly on our own roles and worry about how significant our part is, most of us are keeping up with the storyline in general. The degree to which things are stark or lush, loving or cruel, green or gray, depends as much on our personal mood, our character, than the story which, again, moves too slow.
In the last three months, I traveled over 7500 miles by land and passed through about fifteen states. I replaced my phone, car and computer, two of which I did out of convenience and to forestall obsolescence, oddly enough the computer wasn’t either of the two. The computer I understand the tech intimately, the car and the phone … make me feel a bit out of sync, like a missed one or two key parts of the future and need to catch up. I’m the architect of those small pieces of my fate, I’ve never been that comfortable with cell phones and yet my various work had me on the cutting edge of them even back when they were bricks and had a dial tone. I think I was without a cell from 2002 to at least 2010.
See? In my own personal mundane details, I find too many paths for ‘Sometimes he felt like he was living in a future that had already passed’. Piglet, I am a bear of little brain. Ok, going to finish watching and the line is purged as is my fear that if I don’t write entries as they come or when they should come, I will trail off altogether. For all the reckless restless recontouring (the three R’s) I am a creature of habit. My long road trips took me from the habit of daily exercise; ennui and inertia threaten to take me from the habit of expression, no matter how slight and meaningless, in 2016 mute blobs are not fashionable, but 2016 is fast coming to an end.
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