#theoldman

the fact that the old man is technically an adaptation of some fuckass thriller novel continues to be bewildering to me, someday i really will have to check it out and see what the hell it's like bcos i refuse to believe that all that *gestures* is a result of adaptational fidelity

emotions are useless! lived experiences are useless! none of what happens inside you matters because the inside of you is unvisitable! all that you can make matter is the narratives you relay to other people! the words you string into monologues which are the ghosts of things that die as soon as they are born! and still you are always lying whether you mean to or not! night and day i revise my appeals!

i've had strange relationships with pieces of media that took years to parse out before but this is the first one Like This

rotating the old man again. in the context of we're doing the weirdest most pared down version of BS imaginable for some reason i like the use of the you will account for me line because it makes sense for [list of reasons this post isn't about] but fucking. "everybody can tell there's no daylight between the two of you"(paraphrased)????? insane. insane placement, why would you drop that there. second (or third at the latest, idr) episode, you don't know shit about these people yet, they're [superior officer] and [inferior officer] with a sort of parent-child relationship already kind of discernible to the viewer but like. like. what? bizarre for both possible types of viewer (has/n't watched BS). it contributed to the weird ass atmosphere of that scene, at least, i guess, because waters is a fucking metanarratively tuned in weirdo who walks into adams' office, exchanges two short lines of completely normal other than the no daylight line hostile conversation with her, and then unprompted starts going off about "the beast that eats everything" for like 5 minutes while she just sits there and pretends they're not talking about her father. completely unprompted. like it drives me crazy to recall it and this is all waters does for the rest of his screentime, be "nosy" in a distinctly preternaturally aware, this-isn't-really-a-real-character kind of way (the actor slays it btw). and this isn't really a real person and it barely even feels like a real situation (the international manhunt &c.) like. also insane that there's people out there (see reddit) who watched this same thing and experienced it as, you know, normal thriller media nothing about this is normal or reasonable to expect? this whole show (1st season) feels like a ghost

still have doubts & will keep thinking about his unfortunately but i do kind of think. the old man is black sails' storytelling logic taken to its extreme conclusion. the results are. dubious. ?