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Tangentially related to my post earlier this week about The Lifespan of a Fact, which is all about the essayist as unreliable narrator, I also wanted to make a minor observation about How I Met Your Mother (which my wife and I are still watching faithfully, accompanied by near-constant vocal insistence that "we just want to know who the mother is!"). You may recall that I had some serious nits to pick with the Wedding Bride episode of HIMYM (or I can link you to it) so I feel it's only fair to admit that I've come around on that particular installment. It's not one of my favorite episodes by any stretch, but I've greatly softened my attitude towards its illogical warts.
Because what I've come to realize is that Ted is an archetypal unreliable narrator. The inherent charm of the show is that it has a framing sequence set in the year 2030 and the action set in our present is one long, extended flashback. And in theory, future-Ted is telling a true story to his kids, because he really thinks it's important that they know where they came from (in the emotional context sense, since they both seem old enough to know how babies are made). BUT, Ted's a human being, not a history-recording robot. They've made running jokes about his deliberate self-censoring of the story (substituting "eating sandwiches" for "smoking weed") and on more than one occasion future-Ted has tripped himself up, conflating events and then later saying, "Wait, that's not right". All of which provides opportunities for both comedy and moderately innovative non-linear narratives, and all of which basically announce themselves as goofs.
The Wedding Bride episode employs a much more subtle device (or so I've convinced myself) in that Ted is neither bowdlerizing nor misremembering. When he says that The Wedding Bride became one of the top-grossing films of all time, I initially cried foul because rom-coms don't do that, ever, argh. But Ted is the one telling the story, and to him, that's how it felt. He was sensitive about the raw wounds the movie rubbed salt in, and it seemed like everyone in the world was talking about the movie, going to see it multiple times like Titanic, and declaring it an instant classic. All of which is an exaggeration, but far be it for me to deny someone some poetic license to convey a subjective experience. There's no overt winking within the episode to broadcast that this is Ted inventing his own reality as he retells his life story, but I think it still falls under the same heading.
And that came up again on HIMYM this week, where the story mainly focused on one of Marshall's court cases. The upshot was that Marshall was on the side of the angels, but the opposing counsel was winning the case with raw charisma rather than the relevant facts. But in the comedic escalation, opposing counsel was doing things which are completely inadmissible in the U.S. legal system. Bad writing devoid of fact-checking? Or just artistic expression of how frustrated Marshall (and Ted by proxy as his best friend) must have been feeling? I'm choosing to believe in the latter.
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Not only did 2001: A Space Odyssey require a large time investment to watch, but I also spent quite a while doing research on it afterwards as part of my overall mental processing. Clearly after all that I needed a bit of a light and effervescent brain-cleanser, so I jumped back into Smallville season 8. And after the deliberately sparse dialogue of 2001 (and the fact that very few commentaries on the film fail to point out that characteristic) my major response to gorging on some typical mid-season episodes of my favorite fantasy teen soap guilty pleasure was: Holy Rao these kids never shut up!
Going from the understated and underexplained to the oversimplified and over-the-top was a bit whiplash inducing, but it did emphasize to me once again that the target audience for Smallville really always was children. After more than 150 episodes it gets a little difficult to roll with all the histrionic highs and lows the characters go through; it's like, come on, the show hasn't been set in high school since season 5 started, aren't Clark and Lana and all the rest ever going to emotionally grow up already? But then again, much like early comic books themselves, there seems to be a built-in assumption that the audience isn't growing up along with the actors; it's turning over, with older kids moving on and younger kids tuning in, so the emotional pitch is still solidly adolescent.
Plus I'm a big believer in the neurological theory that human brains don't finish fully developing until age 25, and everybody younger than that is technically immature. I'm at the point now where Smallville as a whole was getting a bit long in the tooth, but the characters are only supposed to have aged to about 22 or 23 (since they were 14-year-old freshmen when the show debuted) so that's within reason. Smallville ran a total of ten seasons, which means the whole Clark Kent coming of age saga wraps up right about the time he's about to turn 25. I'd love to give them credit for doing that on purpose.
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The falafel joint on my office building's block opened this week, finally. I have yet to go there for lunch, though. My wife has instilled in me a healthy respect for waiting out a grace period to make sure any new restaurant can operate successfully without a horrific food poisoning incident or somesuch. But I've also realized that part of my earlier disappointment at the failure to open was because I consider falafel a summer food, stemming directly from the association with that long-ago summer job, I guess. Warm weather can't return soon enough! (Of course I say that every winter anyway, but still.)
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And finally, since this grab bag seems so very reflective (or outright backwards-looking) let's check in with my co-worker Mr. Gregarious, whom I still see from time to time. I shared an elevator with hm and a few other people the other day, and somehow a woman riding with us casually mentioned something about how she was going through a divorce. Mr. Gregarious kindly offered to answer any questions she might have because he's gone through a few of them himself. I don't remember if I voiced some earlier suspicions that in the time since his arrival in Rosslyn (when we were supply closet co-occupants) and frequent mentions of his wife and our move to the new office building in Crystal City he had dissolved the marriage, but that seems to be (unsurprising) confirmation.
In any event, he proceeded to start doling out advice immediately anyway, but at least it was brief and to the point: "Don't be a taker. And don't be a hater." Honestly, that is good advice for all of us, in every human interaction! And so I leave you with that.
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