A pit nearly ate a boy—or, at least, that’s what I remember.
The boy is looking out the window of his bedroom as the light reddens outside. The ground starts cracking open and the red light invades the room as the house begins to shake and the ground yawns wide. The boy is grappling with something, maybe a teddy bear, and is scared but also acting like he has expected this moment.
That image is frozen in my mind. It wasn’t uncommon for me to view such films unsupervised because television was my closest friend at a young age. This wasn’t because I had neglectful parents or no friends at school. It was my deep introversion and bad stutter that solidified my television habits. I had piles of VHS tapes with pirated material recorded from the TV, often from the free weekends of Disney Channel or HBO that used to show up on cable, and these helped develop the closeness I felt with television.
My parents weren’t strict when it came to content that my sister and I watched. My father had a deep affinity for anything within the action, western, and science fiction genres, so by twelve or thirteen I was already versed in the violent landscapes of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and the dusty streets of Silverado and any number of John Wayne films. My father even showed me Alien and A Clockwork Orange. My father didn’t view film content as most Evangelical Christians did. Showing these films, warts and all, were a tangible way of sharing himself with my sister and myself. He lived a life of the mind even while his hands were hardened by manual labor. These films brought him stories to escape the mundanity of everyday life. Between my mother’s love of happy endings and my father’s love of tension and release, I became a lover of film. And I had the pirated VHS film collection to prove it.
Yet even with a strong fondness of film, the name of the boy swallowed by the pit, and the name of the film the scene comes from, evades me. In trying to find its title, I’ve concluded that it’s an amalgamation of two or more films, including, possibly, The Gate (1987) and The Pit (1981). I can’t be sure since neither quite fit that image in my memory. It is as if my memory cut and edited its own cinematography from select named and unnamed films I viewed on the multiplicity of cable movie channels during my early pre-teen years. The film in my head may not actually exist outside my own biological video collection. My brain holds whatever trauma the image evoked in me. This is what it must have been like to live prior to home video technology: the mind and body engaged in the sensory information flickering before them, with no rewind or fast forward buttons to investigate the nuances of each scene or relive the lines and action that brought on fits of laughter or tears.
Through most of cinema history, a film had to be viewed within a community of moviegoers in a shared space, the theater. Once viewers left that space, memory had to do the hard work of recall to re-experience the imagery, narrative or soundtrack of the movie watched in community. We have since mechanized how we formulate human memory.
Like the band on a VHS tape, the band of intimate, personal individual history, playing over and over in our minds, becomes warped and distorted as we age. We meet a high-school peer ten years after graduation and recognize the face, but struggle to grasp the name. We forget where we put our keys last night. The dust and wrinkles of time have a way of pockmarking the picture, and the timing becomes bad.
Being born in 1983, I can’t fully imagine what it was like to see a movie in a theater and then rely only on memory to recount all the sensory information it conveyed. Technology has allowed me to revisit films whenever I want. I rely on machines to re-watch and recount what I have seen, and to correct my false memories. Those without these technologies are left to use their minds as creative sensory organizers.
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Are the generations that grew up before home video more attached to the films and stars of their era, since viewing those films encouraged, through recollection, active investment in the creative process? It’s not uncommon to have a specific film in your head only to find that, when revisiting it, years later, your memory had distorted it in various ways. Does the “correct” version seem like a whole new film? I’ve seen the discrepancy between the memory of a film and the actual film play out on my grandmother’s face, on my father’s face as well. It’s like a metaphysical event. One will swear a film was in color when, in fact, it was in black and white. Another will conflate two or more films and is convinced that there was a line of dialogue or plot point that never existed.
When many think of the film Casablanca, the first line of dialogue that usually comes to mind is “Play it again, Sam.” It has become ubiquitously connected with the film, yet that exact phrasing is never uttered to Dooley Wilson, who plays Sam. Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) says, “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake,” and later in the film Rick (Humphrey Bogart) tells Sam to simply “Play it!” Such an inaccurate memory, I assume, is the experience I had with my image of the pit and the kid. I think I saw this horrifying movie, since it’s right here, vivid in my mind, but I cannot know until it has been named and confirmed by rewatching the film, if the film truly exists.
The human mind is wondrous — way more so than recording technology. Two minds can have two completely different experiences and memories of a film. Part of me wishes I could experience a world where I collaborate with John Ford or Frank Capra or Jordan Peele or Sophia Coppola through memory, remixing films I’d once seen and conjuring slight differences with each remembrance without the help of home video technology. Films could then be engaged in endlessly complex and fascinating ways. I’d rewind whenever I please and enjoy the various warps and specks of the cinematography within my mind.
Living with a film is different than rewatching it. This act of living with a film, the recollecting and processing of it, involves the work of deconstructing and restructuring its components in one’s mind, grasping for threads of meaning from its multifaceted angles. However, rewatching a film forces the mind to reckon with the actual chronology, to see how one’s recall stacks up against it. Rewatching for verification is a remnant of Enlightenment-era empiricism. Poetics, on the other hand, gives facts and evidence meaning culled from the mind. This kind of interpretative ability will always be a dividing line between humanity and machines.
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And yet the interaction between humanity and machines remains instructive. The tapes in my VHS collection eventually break and become unplayable. The tracking marks obscure most of the picture. The film simply slows or stops. Images disappear. No amount of rewinding can retrieve the pictures and sounds powdered upon its surfaces.
This is the kind of breakdown my father and fifty million others worldwide—and ten million more each year—live within, the dimmed screen of dementia. Their biological home video systems lost the tracking somewhere along the way and the inevitable clunk will come. No 3M tape will mend it. They are isolated against their will—unable to speak of their pain, their joys, and their love.
We form relationships so we can observe and engage each other’s living film, with all the comical and tragic trimmings. Unlike the VCR, we can’t record and hold their film’s every little element—every image with its extras roaming in the background, every song or note of incidental music that formed their lives’ soundtracks, every character and plot point. We can capture some, but we work with our own limited mechanics. How then shall revelation be released upon this situation? If the sensory world is all there is, all our biologically rendered films will be lost. Perhaps this situation, then, is why many of us feel the realness of the divine in our bones. We unconsciously yearn for our stories to be remembered.
According to Christian scriptures and tradition, if God is who he says he is, then his memory is thorough, unfailing, clear, true, meaningful and everlasting. To paraphrase Scripture, he is the great “I am” who holds the totality of human history in his memory. He alone can view the whole of each person’s biological VHS tape. His mind is wholly true and creative, something we can’t even comprehend. The hope, then—and perhaps a reason for why many hold on to the Christian faith—is that one day we will gather in the divine’s darkened theater with our loved ones, and with all those we never knew but loved nonetheless. We will watch all of our stories spilled out on the bright screen, laughing and crying through each. The narratives will endlessly weave into each other like extras on a busy sidewalk. The revelation of meaning will be full and endless, a communal celebration of transcendence upon the screen, like those old Saturday matinees my parents and grandparents cherished. The matinee of humanity.