Leave the World Behind
Charlie melts into his mattress
Watching Twin Peaks on his ones
Then his fingers find a bottle
When he starts to miss his mum
Wouldn't it be lovely to feel somethin' for once?
Yeah, wouldn't it be lovely to feel worth somethin', huh?
I know you can't let go
Of anything at the moment
Just know it won't hurt so
Won't hurt so much forever
I'm not sure I know Charlie, but I feel I know his depression. I don't know the taste of the liquor that makes his eyes burn – the burn that momentarily extinguishes his pain. Nor do I want to. But my pupils have burnt through other substances, and my heavy heart has melted into my mattress along with the weight of the world. I'm not sure I know the Charlie Arlo Parks speaks of, but as I watched the Costa de la Luz – the coast of light – open up through the window of the passenger seat two years ago, his darkness felt familiar. Only I experienced it from a different perspective this time: sober. I no longer try to make it disappear behind a purple haze. I no longer have the time or the space to escape to faraway towns, to find consolation from fictional characters. Charlie’s approach is to hide out in a Lynchian town stuck in a perpetual loop of suffering; to numb hurt with more hurt. Mine was to dive into worlds of ignorantly blissful nothingness, perfectly mundane abundance; a Seinfeldian philosophy that hid behind sellable taglines and just the right amount of rich-people-problems.
I knew Parks was right; I'd felt this kind of unremitting sadness before – at a different time and at a different level – and while I couldn't let go of any of it in the moment, I knew it wouldn't last forever. Still, I longed for the option to dull its intensity. And I realized then that, often, the most effective go-to for taking that edge off a little, hadn't necessarily been the pharma and recreational drugs, but the places I settled in to let them take effect: big city cafes like Central Perks, small town charm in Stars Hollow. They offered the fictional backdrop I needed to let my own fade away just for a little while. At night, as I fell asleep. During purposeless mornings and days trying to fill agonizingly obvious or inexplicable voids. During a period in my life when I was not yet aware of time as a luxury.
Writing about pop-culture – TV specifically – used to be my main gig and I could go through countless shows in a year. Since having my daughter almost three years ago, however, I changed course a little and have been focusing more on editing and a different niche of writing. My screen time has decreased significantly, which is as much hard reality as it is a choice: when I do have time for myself, TV isn’t my first go-to. So, when I do watch TV, I am very specific about what I want to spend my precious downtime on. And stories of apocalypse and dystopian worlds aren’t typically part of my preference. I’m well aware of the fact that we, as a society, are currently constructing them in real life – a fact I’m confronted with on the daily – but I don’t need it to be staring back at me from our living room’s black mirror. There was something about this particular Netflix movie though, that made me – to the delight of the husband – say, ok, let’s do it; and we did, and I didn’t fall asleep. Instead, I watched, enthralled until the very – simple, abrupt and infuriatingly satisfying – end, when I finally understood what was meant by the title. It wasn’t just an ode to our very human ability to turn away even when – or especially when – times are at their most harrowing. To think, well, there’s nothing I can do, so let’s just have another wank. Light another spliff. Watch another episode. Pretend it’s not happening. Shameful, yes, maybe. But also…a salvation. Perhaps the only way other than reaching for the bottle, licking a frog, chasing prescriptions. Perhaps the least destructive way to momentarily Leave the World Behind.
*
Up until about a month ago, I’d see them, at almost every flea-market, at every second-hand store, and immediately turn away – at times with a nostalgic but dismissive smile, at others with an entitled snort. DVDs spanning all genres for the big screen and the little one, many originals in their sleek albeit worn casings, even more pirates in flimsy plastic covers and badly printed covers that make you think, come on, you could have at least made an effort. And, even as it was happening, even as I walked past brand-new box sets, and live concerts worth bragging about, somewhere in the back of my mind, there was this immutable knowledge, this little sting in my heart – one day, it’ll all be gone. All the media we now consume so freely and easily, all the music, films and shows we stream, save in clouds and download online will cease to exist in their physical formats; and when the apocalypse finally happens, and the internet becomes the inaccessible thing of joys and horrors we talk about around campfires – what the fuck are we going to do then?
I know it’s happening because I too Marie Kondo-ed my DVD and most of my CD collection about three years ago. It was painful, but also weirdly beautiful because, while they no longer served a real purpose in my life and the world as it is now, they played a significant part in my past life and its various versions of me. Holding the Japanese edition of a Six Feet Under box set in my hands, I instantly revisited that weekend back in my studio apartment overlooking a narrow, typically Andalusian pueblo street. When we – the friend who’d introduced me to the show and I – locked and smoked ourselves up for an entire weekend to watch the final season. We emerged only once, to run to the supermarket in our pajamas because we had run out of snacks. At the end of it all, we rejoined the world, eyes bloodshot, hearts in warm tatters. Said friend and I, we no longer speak, but we’ll always have “the static”. Suffice it to say, I kept the (incomplete) collection. I held on to all my concert DVDs too, and two videotapes: Turks Fruit and Pulp Fiction. Make sense of that combo. I walked down many a memory lane as I sorted through my collection of shiny discs and clunky tapes, but none hit me quite as hard as my collection of Friends videos.
*
Some twenty years ago, my mom, my younger brother and I made the trip from Holland to Callais and across the channel to the UK, the way we had many times before. And as always, once we emerged on the other side, we drove from Dover to Manston to visit my grandparents. It wasn’t an easy visit; my grandma had just been through another bout of radiation to treat her breast cancer, and, as always, the tension between my mom and my grandpa became palpable once the first 24-hour civil politeness policy expired. Still, in my memory, it was an (almost) perfect weekend. And one thing that played a huge part in this was our visit to a local boot fair. Because that was our thing. That’s where we went to delight on things others were ready to pass on. That’s where my grandma would light up, no matter how she was feeling. That’s where we all walked a common ground, regardless of past peeves and present problems. That’s where I found the tapes that got me through some of my lowest times – when the ground beneath me cracked wide open and into a gaping, dark hole that wanted to swallow me whole.
That boot fair will always go down as the biggest and best haul I ever made. In one, fell, early-morning swoop, I basically scored an entirely new seasonal wardrobe, some funky room décor and, just as I was running out of pounds to spend, I found seven seasons of Friends on VHS. I was young and apparently a lot dumber than I thought because, instead of haggling, I just bought the five tapes I could afford with what was left of my money but still: I walked away feeling pleased with myself and all my old-new finds. I had only recently gotten back into Friends. My grandpa had introduced me to Chandler, Phoebe, Rachel and co. while I was staying with them one summer, a few years before moving to Holland. I had taken to them right away, but upon my return to Germany and the awful dubbing that is costumery there, I ditched them for VIVA instead. When we arrived in Holland, I was stoked to find that all shows ran in their original language with subtitles. Only Friends, of course, was on just around our dinnertime, hence the excitement over now owning all seasons – so many episodes I hadn’t seen yet! – on VHS.
When we left my grandparents’ house at the end of the weekend, none of us could have known that we would never return to what was, ultimately, a second home. That strong connection to a country my brother and I had never lived in, yet had somehow grown roots in. And for me, it marked the definitive end of a troubled but beautiful childhood that had increasingly muted itself only to make way for everything but a carefree adolescence. What had been such a sunny and warm getaway from all that had felt gray and cold to me at the time, instantly changed in tone – with the colours of my grandma’s beloved garden, and the comedy of my grandpa’s collection of Wallace & Gromit toys fading into achromatic hues as we drove off and back to The Neverlands. The place in which I felt I never caught a break, a breath, a spell of genuine self-belief. Until I discovered the ultimate home remedy for myself; one that left me feeling calm and comforted albeit pathetic. Which was fine. Feeling secretly pitiful was far better than feeling openly – and mostly invisibly – stuck in a constant state of fight or flight.
*
The night I slipped the first video into the VCR – The One Where it All Began – was memorable in so many ways. It was a Friday night and I had the house to myself for the whole weekend, as was frequently the case in those days. I was already a high school dropout at this point so, instead of going to my residency at a day center for “kinderen met gedragsproblematiek” (or moeilijk opvoedbare kinderen[1], as I’m pretty sure it was referred to back then), I spent the whole day rearranging my room – therapy in and of itself. Y’all know what it’s like kicking back and dropping into an entirely new constellation you managed to construct with a bit of willpower and a lot of elbow grease in just one single day. Oh, what a beautiful sense of accomplishment. Of being able to change all the complicated structures and outdated perspectives we are incapable of changing in our lives outside of the four walls we build for ourselves. Our snow globes. I felt content and relaxed and so excited to be spending the night with a group of fictional Friends, and an XL Party Haze that was gifted to me by an actual, tangible friend. Who happened to be pretty disappointed by the fact that I chose to smoke it on my own – or so she thought. Really, I had saved it for them.
No one had told me life was gonna be this way. That I would find myself hiding, at times completely retracting from the best friends anyone could wish for. People, like her, who wanted to spend time with me, celebrate me on my birthday, be around me even when I was the Eeyore to their Winnie the Pooh. I wasn’t visibly depressed, didn’t coin the term FML, didn’t bring the party down with sad talk or by sulking in some corner. It was the opposite – the outside version often overcompensated on all these points, and it was exactly this pressure to keep up that charade – for no one other than myself – that was so exhausting. I preferred to stay in my globe, and shake those tranquil but lonely nights up a little by bringing friendly voices into my chosen reality. I passed up on many a high school party and Stratumseind night to live vicariously through Central Perk’s regulars. At times, I enjoyed whatever they were getting up to much more than actually experiencing similar things myself – because it required no physical or mental strain. I could breathe freely through their lives when I felt suffocated by the happenings in my own.
I’ll always be thankful to Bing, Tribbiani, Buffay and the Gellers for having been there for me; for making me feel less alone as I drifted off to sleep and when I woke, many hours later, to their stories automatically rewinding for when I next needed them. In fact, this was my favourite moment on that very first night at home with them, the night when this ritual of comfort began: waking up, snuggled up like a burrito on the couch in my room, feeling as though I had been swaddled to sleep by their voices and the repetitiveness of the intro song sneaking its way into my consciousness every twenty minutes or so; as though I had never really been alone. Not in my situation, not while I slept the world away.
I sat with that closing scene of Leave the World Behind and the imagery of the fully stocked DVD cupboard for a few days after. That’s when Arlo’s Charlie came to mind again. If he hadn’t had Dale Cooper to remind him of the power of dreams, of the possibility of escaping a Black Lodge of one’s own creation, would he have just disappeared deeper into the bottle? Would Rose have been able to stay as calm and unafraid of the world ending had it not been for the distraction of the burning will-Ross-and-Rachel-or-won’t-they-question occupying her mind? If I hadn’t had the familiarity of Chandler, Monica and Phoebe’s voices around me on those weekends alone at home, would I have gotten as lost in my depression as Nadine Hurley did in her obsession with silent drape runners? We may have been too quick to get rid of our cassettes, our videos, our DVDs. When the time comes – and I’m pretty sure it will – access to these relics will be a luxury few of us will be privy to. And that’s as grim a thought as the initial phase of having to sit in our own misery.
*
In We’re in Love, Lucy Dacus sings:
Some October in the future, I'll run out of trash TV
And I'll be feeling lonely, so I'll walk to karaoke
Sing the song you wrote about me, never once checking the words
I hope that no one sings along, I hope that I'm not a regular
I know Dacus is talking about entirely different circumstances here, a moment of healing, when she is ready to move on from numbing her heartbreak with whatever she refers to as trash TV, and belting it all out in the form of song instead. In the slightly tragic environment of a karaoke bar, where drunken expressions and confessions of love and hurt often become the butt of the joke – hence the hope of not becoming a regular. But in the context of this article, of an imagined – or inevitable – future void of any form of TV and film, I believe we’re all going to become regulars at makeshift karaoke bars: campfire and busking sessions, where we’ll sing the songs that shaped us in our past lives, from memory. And perhaps, in getting lost in others’ renditions of We’re in Love or Hurt, we’ll achieve a form of escapism we formerly accomplished only when comfortably numbed by flickering screens. Somehow, I doubt it though. Playing this future out in its purest and most romantic form, I believe we might find ourselves robbed of the cinematic experience, but gifted the freedom Janis Joplin spoke of: when we all allow ourselves to listen and feel whatever it is we need to feel. Because there truly will be nothing left to lose.
[1] Children with behavioural problems/maladjusted children
