Recently, I’ve been experimenting with background movies. The idea is fairly self-explanatory — a movie played in the background of a party, social gathering or just when sitting around alone, crying. The movie isn’t intended to be watched; in fact, the point is to not watch it. Of course, the natural instinct among polite company is to sit down and pay attention to whatever the host is playing, which rather puts a damper on the whole “background” part of the equation. So the solution I’ve come up with is simply to play the most heinous, unwatchable garbage I can rustle and hope that nobody can stand to focus on it.
I’ve found that the most useful materials for this sort of thing are old commercials. There’s something about them that makes them at once extremely comforting and absolutely impossible to pay attention to.
Old commercials exist in a world where the relationship between one’s means and ends was always direct, always clear cut, always reassuring. Do you like popcorn? Buy this popcorn. Do you like live shows at the Lower Daviess County Memorial Arena featuring hit local bands, delicious food and fun for the whole family? Well, buddy, have I got some news for you. While they prove entirely too saccharine for conscious consumption, the point of a background movie is not to entertain, but to generate a vibe.
These days, if you get more than three people together, there’s a good chance that at least one of them is going to have no idea what’s going on at any given time; this will inevitably lead to a fission reaction, in which the nervousness of one party guest ripples outward like warm Jello across the others and before long, a positive feedback loop of desperate nihilism has your friends carving up the furniture with their nails. Or, at least, it does in my experience. In situations like this, a dull commercial hum in the background proves an invaluable asset because it shows that no matter how unsure and terrifying things might get, someone somewhere once knew, or at least thought they knew, what was going on.
So next time you’re meeting with your study group; and it’s 8 p.m. on a Friday; and you all feel that you should have better things to be doing; and you can feel the despair growing in your stomach like a rancorous orchid; and the faces of the people next to you look like they’re molded out of plastic, not really people at all, more automatons ... Throw on a YouTube playlist of old commercials, pop a chill pill and breathe deeply. And who could ask for more than that?
The Starving Aesthete: Background movies
