A Tangled Mess of Vague

this post is like 11 years old

@tvarchive tv appreciation week ↳ day 1: first tv obsession

1. With Roger’s voice actor standing off camera, Bob Hoskins acts into empty air and frantically sawing at his handcuff, continually looking up and down at different visual marks of various depths. Look at the slow pan up of his eyes in gif 4, and then the quick shift to his side. Think about how, on set, he was looking at nothing. 

2. Starting in gif 2, The box must be made to stop shaking, either by concealed crew member, mechanism, or Hoskins own dextrousness, as he is doing all of the things mentioned in point 1. 

3. In all gifs, Roger’s handcuff has to be made to move appropriately through a hidden mechanism. (If you watch the 4th gif closely you can see the split second where it is replaced by an animated facsimile of the actual handcuff, but just for barely a second.)

4. The crew voluntarily (we know this because it is now a common internal phrase at Disney for putting in extra work for small but significant reward) decided to make Roger bump the lamp and give the entire scene a constantly moving light source that had to be matched between the on set footage and Roger. This was for two reasons, A) Robert Zemeckis thought it would be funnier, and B) one of the key techniques the crew employed to make the audience instinctually accept that Toons coexisted with the live action environment was constant interaction with it. This is why, other than comedy, Roger is so dang clumsy. Instead of isolating Toons from real objects to make it easier for themselves, the production went out of its way to make Toons interact more with the live action set than even real actors necessarily would, in order to subtly, constantly remind the audience that they have real palpable presence. You can watch the whole scene here, just to see how few shots there are of Roger where he doesn’t interact with a real object. 

The crew and animators did all of this with hand drawn cell animation without computerized special effects. 1988, we were still five years out from Jurassic Park, the first movie to make the leap from fully physical creature effects to seamlessly integrating realistic computer generated images with live action footage. Roger’s shadows weren’t done with CGI. Hoskin’s sightlines were not digitally altered. Wires controlling the handcuff were not removed in post. 

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

I like my coffee like I like my nights. Dark, endless, and impossible to sleep through.

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights — mostly void, partially stars? That sky reminds us we don’t understand even more.

There’s nothing under your bed. There’s nothing in your closet. Nothing waits in every darkness. Nothing is the most terrifying thing of all.

I was thinking about the series of ongoing actions that we perceive as the present, and the amassing of memories that we treat as the living record of the past, and the hopes and dreams and assumptions that we project as the future. I was thinking about time. And about how it means something to so many people, and about how it’s so finite, and also so infinite.

If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

The desert seems vast, even endless, and yet, scientists tell us that somewhere, even now, there is snow.

But here is the truth of nostalgia. We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us, but that we didn’t take. Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past — a solid single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible — no matter how blessed you are by luck, or the government, or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind — it is impossible not to feel a little sad, looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. The village, glimpsed from a train window — beautiful and impossible and impossibly beautiful on a mountaintop, then you wondered what it would be if you stepped off the moving train and walked up the trail to its quiet streets and lived there for the rest of your life. The beautiful face of that young man from Luftnarp, with his gaping mouth and ashy skin, last seen already half-turned away as you boarded the bus, already turning towards a future without you in it, where this thing between you that seemed so possible now already, and forever, never was. All variety of lost opportunity spied from the windows of public transportation, really. It can be overwhelming, this splattered, inert wax recording every turn not taken. “What’s the point?” you ask. “Why bother?” you say. “Oh, Cecil,” you cry. “Oh, Cecil.” But then you remember — I remember — that we are, even now, in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that is still falling, still volatile — and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now. Where we never can know what shape the next moment will take.”

Monday would like you to leave it alone. It’s not its fault you’re emotionally unprepared for your professional lives.

Each day the sun rises and sets. The moon pulls the tides. Our hearts beat. Our loved ones love us back. And we share our inhales and exhales with the great organism that is our tiny planet. But, as you watch the sun rise again tomorrow morning, think to yourself: past performance is not a predictor of future results. And then force a smile, drink another cup of coffee, and try not to look down as you walk across the soil that will eventually fill your lifeless lungs and repurpose your corpse. Each day that is, is a blessing, Night Vale.

Time is weird. So is space. I hope ours match again someday.

There’s a monster at the end of this book. It’s the blank page where the story ends and you’re left alone with yourself and your thoughts.

An unknown person did something that no one else saw, the nature and extent of which is impossible to determine, and the result of which will be lost in the chaotic chain of causation and consequence that is history.

Your existence is not impossible, but it’s also not very likely.

Today you will meet a beautiful stranger. Actually hundreds of beautiful strangers. Everyone is beautiful and you know almost none of them.

When we talk about teenagers, we adults often talk with an air of scorn, of expectation for disappointment. And this can make people who are presently teenagers feel very defensive. But what everyone should understand is that none of us are talking to the teenagers that exist now, but talking back to the teenager we ourselves once were – all stupid mistakes and lack of fear, and bodies that hadn’t yet begun to slump into a lasting nothing. Any teenager who exists now is incidental to the potent mix of nostalgia and shame with which we speak to our younger selves. May we all remember what it was like to be so young. May we remember it factually, and not remember anything that is false, or incorrect. May we all be human – beautiful, stupid, temporal, endless. And as the sun sets, I place my hand upon my heart, feel that it is still beating, and remind myself: Past performance is not a predictor of future results. Stay tuned now for whatever happens next in your life.

Lie down and look up at the ceiling and breathe with those curiously fragile lungs of yours and remind yourself: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and fleeting. Don’t worry.

Perfection is not real. Perfection is not human. Carlos is not perfect, no. Even better — he is imperfect. Everything about him, and us, and all of this, is imperfect! And those imperfections in our reality are the seams and cracks into which our out-sized love can seep and pool. And sometimes we are annoyed, and disappointed, and that too is part of how love works. It is not a perfect system, but oh!

The terror you feel in quiet moments is not misplaced, just mistimed.

What is next for any of us? Death, presumably. With some stuff before that. I look forward to it!

“It’s a free country,” we tell ourselves constantly, without knowing quite what we mean.

Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet, it is.

There is a monster under your bed. A monster at your window. A monster any place you imagine one. You project your monsters on the world.

When life seems dangerous and unmanageable, just remember that it is and that you can’t survive forever.

The past is gone, and cannot harm you any more. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present.

Don’t let numbers tell you what to do. You are blood and earth, not theory and chalk.

Look past the things you think you see. Move your head just a touch to the left, a glance in a world of perspectives, and then…you might see it: an entire universe in the corner of your eye.