Living in Oblivion

You can never watch the same film twice. I have just watched Living in Oblivion again; twenty years after I first saw it. This is a film about how you can never shoot the same scene twice. There’s something in this about how children love to have the same stories read to them, something about how perceptions of sameness are really reflections of an attitude of defeat. Why is it that boredom is an invention of adulthood? What could be more definitive of the loss of childhood than the statement “I’m bored!”?

Living in Oblivion is a film about acting, about the difficulties of making a film; the opening twenty five minutes of the film shows repeated attempts to shoot the same thirty second  scene over and over again to no avail. Each time something goes wrong – a light bulb blows, a microphone drops into shot, the actors forget their lines, the actors perform incredibly, movingly well but the cameraman has slipped away to vomit and the magic is lost. You can never step into the same river twice; I guess now that when I saw this film first I saw in it echoes of a novel I loved  - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman  - in which the narrator fails to ever start the plot.

A film that can’t be shot, a novel that can’t get going and yet I really love both of them.  If something can’t be said to have begun then its end is perpetually deferred. The attitude that you can’t step into the same river twice is both fatalistic and hopeful, in short, it is an admission and denial of death. Especially when you are in a river of shit. Everything repeats and so, the rest is up to you. I like Yeats' decision to celebrate the futility of life given the inevitability of death:

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. 

What matter if the ditches are impure? 

What matter if I live it all once more? 

Endure that toil of growing up; 

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress 

Of boyhood changing into man; 

The unfinished man and his pain 

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; 

The finished man among his enemies?— 

How in the name of Heaven can he escape 

That defiling and disfigured shape 

The mirror of malicious eyes 

Casts upon his eyes until at last 

He thinks that shape must be his shape? 

And what's the good of an escape 

If honour find him in the wintry blast? 

I am content to live it all again 

And yet again, if it be life to pitch 

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, 

A blind man battering blind men; 

The sentiments expressed in that poem are a bit too cranky for my tastes. Still I like how it rhymes. Actually I can easily imagine Steve Buscemi, the main actor in Living in Oblivion reading the lines. In particular the whiney ones about getting dumped that follow "A blind man battering blind men..." that I have not posted because they're just too maudlin.