Absolving the Present & the Terror of Time
Absolving the Present & the Terror of Time
On revisiting the past through media.
I am about to be the first person in the world to inform you that there are a lot of remakes around. There are lots of reboots. Sequels. Homages. Adaptations. Throwbacks. Alas, you were not aware of this fact until now.
I’m watching Stranger Things, a relatively niche TV show you probably haven’t heard of. It’s set in the '80s. Last year I developed a minor obsession with Netflix’s Fear Street, which takes place in the ’90s. Everything Sucks! Derry Girls. Cruel Summer. Yellowjackets. The Get Down.
We reminisce about a time when we knew less.
I’m a 2000’s baby, so there’ll always be a somewhat laughable dissonance when I try to describe the decades preceding my delightful existence. Still, despite some resistance when I was first introduced to the idea of a life unplugged, I’ve learned to mourn for a reality that I’ll most likely never experience.
So, what does it mean to ‘know less’? I’m certainly not talking about intelligence. I’ve endured years of torment from friends and family insisting that communication and connection were simpler back when we all ‘knew less’ and, for a while, I couldn’t comprehend what they meant. Why would you want to ‘know less’? What’s appealing about a trip to the pub cushioned by hours of untruthful exclamations? Why wouldn’t you want a big bowl of red-hot fact soup to slurp at any time?
As you might have guessed (or known), I’m a very online person. And yes, ironically, I am publishing this article online. Sometimes my brain feels like that GIF of the maths lady, except instead of numbers swarming my head, I’m being haunted by random pieces of information I’ve unintentionally dug up from the shallow grave of the internet. I have access to a written record of this singer’s thoughts back to 2014 and thus could map out the ebb and flow of her internalised misogyny, etc. I am uncomfortably aware of what every celebrity thinks about a certain trial in the news and thus get anxious every time I open my phone.
We are drawn toward shiny things and big numbers. We are so spoilt for choice that it hurts to choose. We don't like what we like; we like what 252k other internet bugs do. Bizarrely, an echo chamber is much quieter than the number of voices we have unzipped the tent to by being constantly wired in. We have access to everything. And so, we want to be everything. And so, we become nothing.
We have access to so many things/facts/ideas/opinions/perspectives that we have become unable to form an identity around ourselves. The 2010s/2020s – the age of technology – simultaneously mean everything and nothing. Real human beings turn into tiny specs of a screen that can either click yes or click no to everything that you represent. I have 22k followers on TikTok, 9k on Letterboxd (of all platforms), and 4k on Twitter. If thirty-five thousand people sat in a stadium to listen to me talk, I would probably have a panic attack so explosive that it would rupture the space-time continuum. Somehow, I’m mostly fine with it online, except when somebody tells me to [insert awful thing here] for not liking the artist that they would go to war for, unarmed.
Why are we like this? Nothing means anything. Nobody is real. I like this viral tweet and I like a viral quote tweet that diametrically opposes the original viral tweet because I can’t make my mind up. Over a million people have seen my face and yet I still cry most days because I’m convinced I have no friends. I scroll past a thread about climate change – one of the remaining real things – and am knotted up in terror for the rest of the day because I already feel so tiny in my pathetic little retweet. Rinse (or don’t. I’m tired). Repeat.
I reminisce for a time when I knew less. I’ve had anxiety for my entire life, which probably won’t surprise you if you’ve reached this point in the article. When I was younger, I would crawl through a pile of books until my knees got tired because I was, frankly, hellbent on camping out in another place. Now, my brain has been strung out into silly string from chewing up all those words. These days, I binge-watch TV shows whenever I need to turn off all the noise.
Lots of people need escapism; this isn’t a foreign idea. What I’m learning, however, is that lots of people specifically need to escape to a time when we knew less. To sit in front of a TV and place yourself in between two characters who don’t have to check their emails every hour or chew through their gums waiting for a call. There is a particular kindness to watching desktops be unpretty, moon-sized boxes filled with not much graphic design and not much else. There is a calmness to walkie-talkies and radios and phones attached by a wire to a wall and not by an umbilical cord that plugs right into you.
So, when we can’t use our trusty time machine, we snuggle up to the characters we already know in settings we’re familiar with because – thank goodness – we don’t have to learn something new. As a filmmaker in the early stages of my career, I’m not saying I’m a massive fan of an industry dominated by generating revenue off pre-existing narratives. But aren’t we all a little bit excited for Disenchanted? Would anyone else watch an Ocean’s Fourteen & Fifteen? Who’s going to direct the twenty-first adaptation of Little Women?
There is no identity to our current reality other than perhaps dread & doom scrolling. Trends are microscopic and as reliable as tipping a Flake out of the wrapper and expecting to not make a mess. There is no ‘look’ to modern existence beyond potentially growing the little horn thing on the back of our necks that we are supposedly developing because we spend too much time on our phones. There is no being cemented in time if our cement changes colour, shape, and sogginess every month and a half. Many of the most prominent shows for young people, whether intentionally or not, do not feel as though they belong in the present. I mentioned Stranger Things before, but even the likes of Sex Education and Riverdale seem to be confusingly grasping at threads of the 80s and 50s, respectively.
The world is spinning quickly, and time is speeding past so speedily. To live in this current timeline without blowing up like a balloon and bursting is to exercise your leg muscles every morning and run, run, run. We must be acutely aware of how long it takes to shed a layer of skin and how many more years we can expect to live before we die. Our leg muscles need to be sparkly and squeaky, and the only option aside from moving forwards is moving backwards.
Realistically, I am a mover-backer. I don’t particularly want to run, run, run all the way into the bright stars and not notice where I am until I get there because I ultimately have a social media addiction and struggle with eye contact. I hope that one day we can slow down and unplug one or two cords and know a little less.
Until then I will probably rewatch Stand By Me and cry. What can you do?
I get it. As someone who finds themselves trying to unravel the past through media and film to find meaning in the present day, this is something I constantly think about. And now that media and even fashion has taken a turn to try and indulge these things we seek, I kept asking myself how’d we get here. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these things, I do. But why is someone whose favorites are from x and y decade is the one with respectable better taste?I’ve been writing an essay about how in our era with everything in our fingertips things just seem a bit too polish, a bit too easy. And deep down we all crave authenticity. We find ourselves searching this in content where they didn’t have much but we’re able to find happiness in what they had. We are given access to connect with thousands around the world but feel dissociated from our own life. And if we start emulating what we consume, we think maybe things would turn out different. But does it ever actually