Now, having reached a respectable enough age, I'm realistic enough to acknowledge the fact that the once roaring engines of social politics have for some time been left idling and rusting away, but surely; this is something entirely different. Have the population become weary of everyday interaction with people unfamiliar to them? Have they become that jaded? Have they become super-saturated with the mundane and incessant media that is shoved impertinently at them from all directions? I can't help thinking that people in general are in real danger of losing their better sides entirely. Losing their basic good social instincts to the disparagingly ever-increasing amounts of tactless, self-abusive television shows, and invasive paparazzi mentality that the entertainment industry has drubbed into them from an early age. When I was a kid, nobody saw this coming, what with there being three TV channels to choose between, the most shocking programs of that time being no more daring than say, The Sweeney. No-one had any idea that sometime during the next couple of decades, the internet would be zipping through everybody's spare time, an infinite sanctuary from everyday life where the world and all it's tiniest details would be a mere click away, and where everything that was once truly offensive would now be joked about, read about, but never talked about. All of it open for anyone to view, and absorb. And there's the rub. People have been fed information at a staggering volume since the advent of the communication age, which naturally, has shortened their attention spans. All of a sudden, Everything is Nothing. The Great Human Comedy is then sadly in peril, life slowly becoming merely a thing for people to chew on and spit out, needing new flavors they won't have time to savor.
Anyway, to get back to Anna and Anna, the two girls were left, needless to say, carrying the carriage off the tram themselves which, what with my wife's hands being strapped into support sleeves, due to her recent carpal tunnel syndrome, and the other Anna being in that most delicate of conditions, was no easy task.
Every time I travel anywhere, I'm as polite as I can be to everyone that I meet. I believe that holding a door open for someone changes them a little as they pass through it, the brief mutual acknowledgment imparting a minuscule amount of what I recognize as being mild happiness. I know that with every small, polite interaction with a fellow human being the world reverts for a while to being just that little bit more engaging. I'm not, thankfully, bored of it yet.
Today's review will be a little different, as what I'll be reviewing isn't a film, but a TV series. I'm one of those people who never watches TV, preferring instead to buy DVD box sets whenever a promising series is released, which I'll then watch back to back together with my wife, who luckily enough has similar tastes to mine regarding content and quality. A couple of years ago, I watched a series called Lost, which was one of the more engaging stories I've encountered so far, picking through the myriad programs offered on the shelves of the media outlets, their packaging, interestingly, having become as much a part of the viewing experience as the content therein. This is something that has become more commonplace over the decades, giving rise to the "must have" phenomenon; the alluringly designed boxes, emblazoned with words like "special edition" or "extended version", allowing even the humblest consumer to feel like a true collector. However, Lost would gain nothing by being released in an extended version, having been produced with so many layers and sub-plots that keeping up with the ever-shifting storyline is actually challenging. Luckily, each episode begins with a recap, one of the actor's voices saying: "Previously, on Lost", after which follows a brief summary of past events in the series. This is common practice with TV shows, the summaries always centering around the characters that are to be in focus in the episode that they precede, and it's this method of reference that allows us to instantly re-immerse ourselves in each character's individual story, in order to follow each sub-plot more easily. But I digress. Having seen all the episodes up to the middle of the third season, I found my interest waning. I put it down, so to speak. I think it was due to the fact that there were too many questions left unanswered in the storyline, and I was becoming impatient. Just lately, I decided I needed to know how things turned out, so I watched the entire third season again, then the fourth, and am now enjoying the fifth. There are six seasons altogether, and the storyline has taken quite a few interesting twists and turns, something that the writers of this particular series are very good at adding, keeping the viewer on their toes with new surprises around every corner. Lost, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is a story that reflects the Big Brother Reality TV mentality; that voyeuristic study of human interaction, but does so with a storyline that is boldly different and cleverly written, putting one in mind of classics like the 60's show The Prisoner. But where Patrick McGoohan's character Number Six was the main focus of The Prisoner, Lost focuses on many different individuals. This is obviously a smart way to write a series, creating a character list from which everybody can choose their own personal favorites. Unlike real life, where several people will form a small group, due to shared interests or similar personalities, each person portrayed in the story has a particular personality trait of their own, which renders them unique within the storyline and, ultimately, alone. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all ends, and I'm hoping that the final revelation is as remarkable as the story has been.
Quentin Beck,
December 6th, 2010
You keep opening those doors Quentin - you feel good and the other person feels good. Screw those that don't have common courtesy; they're the losers.
ReplyDeleteThankyou, Davieboy. Always nice to hear from someone with a healthy social perspective.
ReplyDeleteWhat saddens me is displaying manners to, say, a shopkeeper, and getting stares of disbelief from any 'youth' in range. It's as if they're saying; why are you bothering? You don't have to do all that anymore.
ReplyDeleteSomeone said to me once that I had manners and my parents must have taught them to me. I replied that they never taught me manners. They just displayed them and I copied, as children will.