My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4 #16, October 26, 1998

IS IT LIVE OR IS IT MEMOREX?

A long time ago in London, as I watched the Old Vic performing Midsummer Night's Dream, I suddenly found myself part of the production as Puck came down into the audience and shook hands with us while he gave his farewell speech. When I saw the Christmas pantomime of Peter Pan, an outstandingly villainous Captain Hook, in an inspired ad lib, strolled onto the apron of the stage and snatched an ice cream cone out of the hands of a little boy in the lower box (who was not pleased).

I'm sure both of those plays could have been filmed, and all the best takes edited together into a kind of platonic ideal of those productions, just as orchestras have had their performances digitally edited and re-mastered into bloodless perfection. But the films and recordings couldn't possibly capture those electric moments when performers and audience come together to make the production happen. Nor could they have captured the feeling bound into my memories of those plays, the simple delight that I was, honest to God, IN LONDON.

Photographs, videos, and recordings all allow us to reproduce images and events, but not, I think, experiences. There's no question that a movie or cast album allows people who may never see a Broadway production to get a sense of what it's like. But a movie is not the same thing. Its cameras are not viewing from the second row, center balcony; they are part of the action. The cast album can't possibly catch the visual splash and excitement of the production numbers. And if Cole Porter's lyrics are just a bit too racy for the censors of that time, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" gets edited into pablum. (I grew up with original cast recordings of all the old musicals, and to this day, when I see the filmed versions, I fondly remember every single double entendre that was censored out.)

Movies and recordings never change over time, but live performances do. My son was telling me about the difference between the They Might Be Giants concert we both attended a few years ago, and the one he saw in Boston last week. TMBG's John Linnell and John Flansburgh assume their audience is already familiar with the act, so they keep changing it, adding new bits, morphing "Istanbul" and other favorite songs together in extremely odd combinations. The only thing that remains constant is the conga line.

And though videos and photographs may seem real, they are only one angle on reality--even the fanciest lenses can only record what's in front of them.

I think about this each May at graduation, when parents cluster in front with their video cameras to make a permanent record of sons or daughters walking across the stage, getting their diplomas and their hugs or handshakes from our president. That isn't their son's or daughter's experience of graduation they're recording, but their own. They are not capturing the daughter's struggle to look dignified while the wind tries to rip the silly mortarboard off her head, and the tassels flap into her mouth. They aren't capturing their son's nervousness and even terror at knowing there's no place to hide anymore, he is now totally responsible for himself. For sure they aren't capturing their children's sense of loss as four-year friends disappear, perhaps forever, from their lives.

And of course some parents may be so busy capturing it on videotape that they never really get to experience it in the first place.

I like the story about the minister who advised a young couple NOT to have their wedding videotaped, because the video, the official memory of their wedding, might in time replace their real memories. You see, he told them, things go wrong--the petrified groom drops the ring, the wedding dress makes the bride look unexpectedly fat, the singer flats a note here and there, the bride pushes the piece of cake into the groom's nose and glasses instead of his mouth. (In my wedding at City Hall in Chicago, a hungover judge reminded my groom that it wasn't too late to back out. Much to his credit, Bob said, "I had to give a blood sample for this woman--what more proof could you want that I'm serious?")

The camera, the minister said, will dutifully record it all. Your memory, though, is kinder. It will squirrel away the things that matter about your wedding. In your memory, the bride is always beautiful, the groom always deft and certain. Your memory doesn't so much see as feel--it records love, and hope, and trust. It remembers your friends and families, sharing in your happiness. With all that, do you need to catch on film the details that don't matter?

And yet as we watch victims of flood and fire talk about what is gone forever, the losses that matter most always seem to be the family pictures, the home movies and slides and videos that tracked their son from chocolate-covered toddler to toothless six-year-old to unaccountably tall, gangly teenager.

It's not that we can't remember them without the pictures--after all, it's only in the 150 years since the daguerrotype was invented that most of us have even been able to record what our family looked like. Unless we could draw them, or could afford to hire an artist, the best we could do before then was tell people "she's little and blond and mischievous, and when she smiles the whole world lights up."

Which is to say that when we look at people, we see a complete package the camera cannot, the face, the body, and the personality inside, all filtered through the way we feel about them. We see them through the spectrum of time and motion, while the static camera can only perceive one moment and fix it forever in time (any photograph of me is fundamentally a lie, because my face is never at rest--it's mobile, expressive, and incapable of concealing my thoughts).

Cameras record events and images, while our minds not only record them but assign them meaning. How many times have we all seen that film of the broad avenue, the open car, the handsome young couple waving at the crowds, the man suddenly hunching forward, the car suddenly speeding up and taking off--and yet you are not seeing the same scene I am, because I am also seeing myself being told by an ashen-faced professor that Kennedy is dead, and you are seeing whatever it was you were doing when you learned about it (and those of you who weren't born yet when it happened see it filtered through 30 years of conspiracy theories). We are all seeing not just a murder but the unscripted end of whatever story we told ourselves about Kennedy, whether fairy tale or Camelot; we are realizing anew that wealth and power and beauty are no protection against madness and fate, and that sometimes--even often--the bad guys win.

And yet because our minds do mush things together, losing individual moments in composite memories, pictures and recordings and videos do for us things our minds cannot. We are not good at remembering details, at recalling specific images and memories. The camera and microphone have the power to bring back one perfect moment in time that we had somehow forgotten.

They are also proof that we were here, dammit, and this is who we were. We have always made our dents on history however we could. By storytelling, passing our adventures and wisdom down from one generation to the next. By writing, whether a diary, a column, the great American novel, or "Kilroy was here." By pictures, whether our photo albums, our home movies, or the stick figures we drew on the walls of caves. You see, if we can leave that evidence behind, we too can be like Frank Sinatra--we will never really die, we will just stop giving live performances.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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