PFor this end-of-year column, I had planned to tell you about exciting programs, but I must make a confession: I suffer from an illness that could be described as “chronic cathodic narcolepsy”. Basically, after starting a streaming series or tuning into a channel in the stream, I usually fall asleep after just ten minutes. It’s true that the lying position and the pilou-pilou blanket do not help maintain sustained attention. Like in the movie Invasion Los Angeles (1988), by John Carpenter, where billboards distill subliminal messages to the oppressed masses (“obey the authorities”, ” consume “, “abandon all imagination”), the screen seems to whisper in my ear a persuasive “sleep”.
I am therefore, in spite of myself, a consumer of the beginning of a plot, a cinephile of opening scenes, a subscriber to investigations that are never resolved. My mind is populated by a catalog of truncated works, but which nevertheless gave rise to embryonic ideas in my foggy brain. If we had to attempt an end-of-year assessment based on these vague bits of programs, I would say that what emerges from all this is above all a protean concern in the face of the coming catastrophe. The other day, for example, I started watching The World After Us (2023), a feature film by Sam Esmail (the director of the series Mr Robot), with Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke.
Before falling asleep, I was able to follow this couple and their children as they went on vacation to a luxurious rental house by the sea. Then, while they were sitting on a beach, the family suddenly witnessed the shipwreck of a huge cargo ship just inches from their parasol. In the evening, another couple, the one who had rented the house to them, suddenly made a worrying irruption into the building. Half asleep, I thought I heard something like “there’s no more Wi-Fi”. In short, I perceived there the echoes of an ongoing catastrophe, the contours of which I did not fully understand, except that it was linked to the failure of our means of communication, a feeling of worry reinforced by the stridency of the violins.
Psychological habituation to catastrophe
A few months earlier, I had started watching White Noise, by Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, the story of a family who tries to escape a chemical cloud by getting into their station wagon. “I want to know how scared I should be.”, says the youngest, while the population is thrown onto the roads. Twilight atmosphere, purplish stormy sky, then sleep again.
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