Reading Cues

In spite of his much greater awareness of all manner of film-theoretical issues when perusing various cinemas (angles and shots; how close-ups establish protagonist status; etc. etc.), I nonetheless turn out to be reliably better at spotting certain kinds of purely NARRATIVE cues than my old man. This is because he doesn’t care about stories. He has famously declared at many different points in his life that “[he doesn’t] give a fuck about history.” He lives in the heady, theoretical realm of the eternal present where only man’s ideas and not his acts must be squeezed for allsoever they shall be worth, and I am the one being like “BUT HOW DID PEOPLE GO TO THE BATHROOM AT A FANCY PARTY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY” and looking at pictures of medieval manuscript marginalia and roaring with laughter:

Seriously, GIVE me a break with that stuff!

Also get outta town with this stuff as well! This is a compilation of notes medieval scribes scrawled in the margins of whatever book they were copying. These are so delightful. “I am very cold.” I HEAR YOU BROTHER. “Thank God it will soon be dark” kills me. No electric lights! Darkness is a scribe’s best friend, for when it falls he may rest his weary hand! Indeed, here we see the wonderful marginalia: “Oh, my hand.” Think about it for a second, seriously. The only way to make a copy of a book was for some poor schlub whose parents had unwisely taught him to read and write to sit down and WRITE IT ALL by hand. So a lot of the documents that survive to us and that we have built vast amounts of knowledge of the ancient past upon are either these weird scribe copies of now-lost originals, complete with the scribes’ bitchy and humorous notes and doodles, OR in even more delightful fashion, sometimes actual STUDENT NOTES. For example, literally everything we know about this one school of composition centered around Notre Dame in the 12th century comes from this one student’s lecture notes. His name is “Anonymous IV,” and he apparently sat in on a lecture in the 13th century, that was ABOUT the previous century. And he just wrote down presumably whatever the teacher was saying. OR NOT. We will never know. And now that document is taught to music students in every college in the western world, as part of the historical record. Imagine if some bullshit you wrote in your notebook somehow became the only known documentation of an already-long-gone previous era of history!!! Terrifying! Like imagine my students’ notebooks with all their weird scrawls trying to write down shit I say about the Ars Nova, and then imagine that a thousand years from now, one of those notebooks is THE ONLY document historians have explaining the Ars Nova. Student notes taken regarding a subject already 700 years in the past, studied by people 1,000 years later even than THAT, but used to try to come to some conclusions about the stuff from 700 years ago, about which no actual contemporary documents survive, perhaps due to plague or drone strikes. So then they have to be like “Student X, whose codex appears to be garbled notes relating to the Ars Nova, which we believe was a period in music history occurring sometime between the time of Socrates and a style of music known as ‘bebop’ which scholars have been unable to recreate.” And maybe they will misunderstand the long-dead students’ notes-to-self or bored meanderings or TOTAL malapropisms as being actual documented fact. “The composer Machaut seems to have been a ‘dude,’ which we believe was a term connoting great respect” And like they’d think the student’s name was maybe “Mead” because that was stamped on the cover of the notebook. “Mead was a student sometime between the 20th and 22nd centuries living in what was once America, or possibly Canada. She or he refers often to something called ‘Mad Men,’ which scholars believe is a rude epithet characterizing late-capitalist imperialism, the governmental structure of the time period.”

ANYWAY back to how good I am at reading narrative cues compared to my autistic husband (no offense to autistic people–I am specifically referring to a study on autism where they made an autistic dude watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and then afterward all he remembered was things like the patterns of light and shadow on the wall, and was unaware of things like “Elizabeth Taylor” or “fighting” or “horrible alcoholism”). Thus things like knowing INSTANTLY that a Thomas Hardy anti-heroine is pregnant when she chickens out of drowning herself because of what people will see when they find her in her wet clothes. PREGGO. Or like during the first fifteen minutes of “Panic Room” when I (correctly) predicted every single thing that was going to happen with Jodie Foster’s daughter, and my old man goes “That’s a GIRL????

Anyway this is all a lot of rowdy-dow for not too much payoff, because I just wanted to point out that we went to see The Conjuring, and it was pretty stupid, and in an early scene we see a dog who is unwilling to go into the house, and I was like “that dog is dying in the next scene” and the old man said “No way, the dog is going to survive,” and within maybe 45 seconds the dog was dead.

Mostly my clairvoyant talent can tell: when someone is pregnant; when an obscure disease is going to come into play later (just kidding, it always does); and if and how an animal is going to die.

There are only three kinds of dogs in film:
– heroic dog who saves the day and is rewarded by most half-hearted pat in history before main character turns away to embrace secondary character
– family dog (almost always a golden retriever) who we only see every once in awhile and who no one appears to be aware of or to spend any time caring for
– tragic dog who dies EITHER through heroic rescue efforts OR due to main characters either being dipshits or assholes (in the case of the Conjuring, dipshits: in this day and age (the 70s), who moves into an ol’ haunted mansion in the middle of nowhere without even realizing it has a basement?? I know everyone was on mushrooms but Jesus Christ. You reap what you sow)

FINALLY IT IS TIME TO GO HOME
GOODBYE