I. VCR
My weird friend Miller got into swap meets and Marie Kondo last year, after moving to the Goo, which I guess is a thing that happens when you move to the Goo. I don’t trade much in swap meets, but I casually mentioned that I was after a working VCR, having somehow managed (not purposefully, I think) to run out of the once-omnipresent tape decks that littered my life for the better part of four calendar decades.
Dutifully, Miller texted me about six months later — long after my memory Memorex had been taped over, re: the earlier conversation — and told me she’d found a VCR at a swap meet. “How much?” says I, assuming some fee. “Free,” says she, living in the reality where these things are worth literally nothing, except when they are worth everything. Negotations beyond dollars, anyway. Here we are. Sweet deal.
It took a month or so more to actually negotiate to pick up the VCR from her; a number of false starts and missed connections and outright forgetfulness. I began to think the VCR might have been a myth or a prank. Then eventually it happened, and I got the big ugly heavy thing, and began the second leg of the journey, which was figuring out how to connect a JVC VHS player from, at best, 1999, to a 4K Sony television from 2022. After a few too many instances of believing the labelling on various Amazon products — which led nowhere — I just went down the list of female RCA to male mini-plug connectors on that vaunted web site, and ordered all of them. It cost me around $50. After I’d returned all the ones that didn’t work, it cost me about eight bucks.
I’d bought used VCRs before. They were, normally, crusty tape-eating monsters. Not this guy. It is pristine, and I didn’t even have to risk one of my “test” tapes to confirm this (Miller gave me a copy of Spice World to do so). There was a tape in the VCR — someone’s home movies, about fifty minutes of them, from 1996 or 1997 or somewhere around there. Two girls at the cottage, with parents and grandparents. A first day of school. Hallowe’en. I was too demure to really watch any of it, but I scanned through in fast-forward, unable to stop myself. Shaking inside a little bit, with this perfect clear little thing from someone else’s entire life, rocketing past me at 3x its normal speed.
II. TikTok
I got into TikTok. Finally! I’ve been off Twitter since Elon went after Fauci and transgender people in the same tweet, and after the druggy haze of just feeling like every stupid one-liner in my head needed to be expressed somewhere started to wear off, the only actual gap in my life experience caused by Twitter’s demise was having nowhere where the water cooler thing happens. You know: the one where something massively weird happens, and the Massively Online respond.
Enter the Titanic sub.
Look, it is what it is: I was obsessed. Ob. Sessed. I’ve always (well, “always” since around 1988) been obsessed with the Titanic wreck itself; and, less so, with the way the Massively Online make a meal out of something like this — and I don’t even mean that mean-spiritedly; I mean, the creativity and critical thought that surfaces among the best responses to anything this ridiculous generally makes me feel better about the internet, not worse. And after what had (at that point) been a week or two of begrudgingly having to admit that the TikTok algorithm really was as good as people said, because that stupid app was finally serving up some content that I actually was losing myself in watching, all the vectors pointed into the same spot in the middle, and TikTok became my social platform of choice.
I even posted a thing! After years (and years of Vine before it) of saying I simply lacked the lexicon to understand how to even start expressing myself in this medium.
Anyway. The Titanic sub thing is over; as anyone with half a brain knew (up to and including Jim Cameron), it was over long before any of the rest of us even knew there was a problem. Water boiling to the temperature of the surface of the sun; rich people instantaneously converted to paste. All that. We lived in the digital shadow of an almost impossibly human moment for four or five days — the alarming levels of hubris and irresponsibility and, ultimately, being snuffed out faster than a breath douses a candle. A death where no awareness of death is even possible, purely in terms of the nerve-conduction velocity. A massive, TikTok-sized echo of a thirtieth of a millisecond, which reverberated for days.
III. Aftersun
The best film of 2022 was Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, in which a woman (circa now) peers into the kaleidoscope of camcorder memories and tries to see her father. I don’t know that many in the TikTok generation will understand just how, well, kaleidoscopic those memories could be. Manual zooms in shaky handheld. Auto-dilating apertures as a person enters from the balcony, momentarily lost in unnatural blackness. All those things your iPhone does away with, automatically, so cleanly and efficiently that a wealth of people around the world will not know they were ever part of the mechanics of image capture. And this, before even A.I. gets involved.
Something that I realized recently was that A.I. will, within a decade or so, give the average consumer the ability to up-sample such 480p video into hi-def, 4K, or even further. (It can already do so at the professional level, albeit at great cost.) What a mindfuck it will be to run my old movies through such a system, and see in sharp clarity the river in Sherwood Park as my camera literally never recorded it, but as I must have seen it on the day, even if I can no longer remember it. The memory of those days is simpliy contained within the kaleidoscope now; the mechanics of image capture (circa 1992) have replaced whatever alchemies records memory in the brain. So it goes.
Aftersun, of course, is not fully captured in shaky 1990s camcorder. The majority takes place in the time period itself, photographed photochemically, capturing with eerie fidelity (to my eye, anyway) the way sun falls on growing bodies and aging ones, in anonymous Mediterranean beach resorts, of which I have at least a partial recollection. My time in those climes predates my camcorder, though — I was roughly Sophie’s age — so my memories are merely what they are, in whatever passes for my mind’s eye.
The transition from film to digital was resisted, at least in part, because of the directness of the latter, and it’s that directness that (adult) Sophie, in Aftersun, tries to exploit. The way the stark, unflinching eye of the camcorder sees an alien reality, mechanical, ungaussed, seemingly (to our eyes at the time) immune to poetry or nuance. She is looking for her father — really searching for him — in glimpses and gestures captured on decades-old tape, as though they might illuminate some piece of his interiority that hid from her 12-year-old gaze and might reveal itself to her adult one.
The best shot in the film, though, is on film, after Calum puts a thoroughly unconscious Sophie in their hotel room’s single bed, and she sleeps — the soundtrack full of the soft, steady rise and fall of her breath — and he creeps out onto the balcony, silent, to lose himself in himself. Our camera watches this; the camcorder does not; Sophie as a child and later as a questing adult will never have any knowledge of it at all.