First off, I’m being tongue-in-cheek with the blog post title, so lower your weapons. And I’ll be brief. There are two things going on here.
First, a curious, perhaps pathological contemporary media consumption practices: For the last several years at least, the rituals of, well — watching shows on the old cathode ray tube (haven’t stepped up to the flatness, with apologies to the consumer confidence index) means that I basically consume a season of programming in anywhere from three to ten days, depending.
Second, a symptom exhibited by this ravenous media consumption practice: characters on these shows become “my friends” in an unsettling but, well — immersive way. Whether empathetic friends of friends that, you know — are closer to antagonists, they become deeper parts of the conscious mind in a way that sometimes I’m okay with, but sometimes I am entirely thrown off by.
I first noticed this kind of extradiegetic muddle when I had gone through a real immersion into the addictive and wonderfully preposterous show “24” which everyone and their hairdresser knows about so I won’t get into it except to say — I had JUST moved to Los Angeles where the show mostly takes place. Sure, I had watched episodes before while living in New York City, but this was different. After watching probably five or six hours into the morning dawn during one bender session, I had to get up to go teach a class or something and was still muddle-headed and POV day-dreaming about whatever CTU was chasing down.
First thing, a stop at the bank ATM on the way downtown. I pulled into a spot and began my egress from the driver’s seat and I instinctively looked in my door side rearview mirror to see if I was going to take off someone’s hip before opening the door — and:
CINE: SMASH PAN, QUICK SWITCH TO 60 FPS HD SLOW MO
CUT TO: A thick black Land Rover SUV with Jack Fracking Bauer jumping out of it.
I swear to god. There he was, jeans and fitted white t-shirt. I froze. Surely he’d see me and mercilessly slam my head into the dash after crushing it like a melon in the door jamb and demand to know where “he/she/it/they” were — or whatever MacGuffin that would lead to the next inevitable plot turn. But, whatever — Bauer was jumping out and I was busted. I’m sure I caught a glimpse of CTU backup dudes lurking around a corner. And his SUV was black, for chrissake. And that’s never a good sign.
Do you — stay in the car or draw and step-to.
Continue reading When Characters Cross: Extradiegetic Imbrication