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[5]. Also, it’s on videotape. In 2008, they expect us to believe that New York yuppies who can afford to party in a cushy studio apartment overlooking Central Park don’t even have a digital camcorder. As if.
[6]. I didn’t even notice the splash the first time I saw it. Ten points from Gryffindor.
[7]. More or less. Obviously, people aware that they’re being observed tend to act differently than when they’re unaware they’re being observed. In today’s postmodern era of self-image construction, even the most vacant nobodies on Big Brother or whatever understand that while they’re busy “being themselves,” they’re also characters in a drama, so they choose a part and play it. So perhaps they pretend to be themselves. Some of them are even aware of being cast based on the mix of people the producers are looking for. It’s certainly all “real” — these people do exist somewhere, that’s not a question. But the way they are presented on TV, and the way they present themselves, exists for the audience on a level of “reality” for which most of us have no frame of personal reference. After all, we’re not the ones getting paid to wander around without clothes, get into dramatic catfights, and bitch about how unreasonable everyone else is to a little camera in a booth somewhere. Well… I’m not getting paid to get into dramatic catfights and bitch about my friends on camera, at any rate.
[8]. Unless it’s some piece of didactic, experimental piece of garbage like Godard’s Weekend. But even at his most unwatchable, it seems to me that Godard is always misleading the audience to the truth anyway, by deliberately upending narrative convention. Since he makes use of the lies we’ve already been told, his films still flow with the pattern cinema has established.
[9]. And all because J.J. Abrams took his son to Japan and realized he wanted to make a Godzilla film set in New York. Friggin’ tourists.
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