Read this today in Defamer:

Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he’ll play an actor that can’t get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]

Which reminded me of the project I wanted to do last year, where I wanted to make a video that consisted of a Charlie Rose type interview with an actor, who plays me in a future biopic. Inspired by the appearance of Ed Harris on Charlie Rose when he was promoting Pollock, I basically wanted to do the same thing: interview, with clips from the film. Project didn’t get off the ground for different reasons: no money, no film equipment, too much of mind bender. But as I’ve said about another backburnered project (I have a very big stove with lots of backburners) no reason why I can’t do it in the future.

With Pitt’s movie coming out, and with my idea in mind, I’ve got to thinking about how our time has stopped moving forward, and become nothing more than a pool. Was it Derrida who wrote about this? I don’t know, who can understand him anyway? Time is always compared to a river, which is a very Western conception … time flows in a linear way. Other cultures throughout the world saw time in a cyclical nature, inspired by the regularity of the seasons. Myself, I experience a bit of both … time flows from a distant past, but as Mark Twain said, “Time doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme”, or the other saying I think about, “The more things change the more they stay the same”. Reading history can shock you into a feeling that despite lots of superficial advancements, human beings behave consistently. That’s human nature for you.

Reading the Dune novels in my early 20s though gave a me a sense for deep stretches of time. Those novels cover something like 5000 years, with the emperor Leto II having had a 3000 year reign, due to the spice and other intricacies of the storyline. It made me wonder what our world would be like had an Egyptian pharaoh achieved this type of longevity … imagine having some king who’d be around for 3000 years. In the Dune novels, there’s little cultural variation over these lengthy time periods, because of the status quo of long lived leaders. It helps make me aware that we’re only 2000 years away from the time of Christ, and we think that’s a big deal. But in reality, our species has been on the planet, and creating culture for 195,000 years. We are a very different type of human, but our history divided into centuries is actually pretty insignificant … and hence, we can see that just because social injustice has been around since the time of the Roman Empire, it’s not so much that they’re timeless problems, but that we happen to be very good procrastinators.

Our own time period encourages this procrastination by immersing us in ‘tradition traps’. Jared Diamond, in his book, Collaspe, describes how cultural stubbornness prevented the Norse from eating fish and working with the natives in Greenland, and hence, their colony collapsed. The tradition traps that we are in the midst of are held in place by advertising and all these mixed media messages – a news story on global warming and environmental degradation is followed by an SUV commercial or a TV show glamorizing a lifestyle that is inherently selfish and harmful. As much as we want to be happy in our lives and have a sort or relaxed approach to things, we don’t think that individually we matter too much, and that the sort of things we see happen in the workplace that are wrong, or the choices we make as to where to vacation, matter.

Stuck in a nostalgia loop of marketing, with previous decades being re-presented to us, with ‘greatest hits’ compilations and what not, which should be marketed, or presented, as form of history, are instead presented to us as a rebranded part of our present. In the past – in the 20th Century, the future was something that people envisioned, and planed for. They tried to guide the course of the stream. Today, for a variety of reasons beyond what I’ve already described, the future has been lost. The older generation – our establishment – have failed in the imagination of the future. Even the latest Star Trek show has fallen into re-using plots from the past franchises, and has recently been canceled. Why this generation has failed to lead, to imagine, is only because of the industry of management. John Ralston Saul is my intellectual hero because he really nailed this in the 1990s – how our society had overproduced managers, whose job it is to manage, not imagine. I also can’t help but think that this generation failed because they were blindsided by digitization. In the early 1990s, fax machines and interactive television were seen to be the wave of the future, and bam, along comes the World Wide Web and eBay, Amazon, and Google.

My recent Goodreads selections, documents from the future, show me that imagining the future hasn’t gone away. It’s only been underreported, underrepresented, because people who grew up with computers and watching science-fiction, and thinking about things in ways that reflect our experience of the late 20th Century, aren’t yet part of the establishment. Debates in this country on green-energy and gay marriage, seem pointless to us because we’ve been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. The sci-fi of the 1980s – the last real decade of imagination – inspired us to what our world might be like as 21st Century adults. It was a world of liberal values, inclusiveness, and one that alternated between a violent dystopia and a technological utopia. In 2005 we’ve gotten both.

The dreams for the future that got us this far are now out of gas. We’ve become self-referential. Brad Pitt playing himself is part of what this decade is about, but this was already present fifty years ago, when Richard Sherman’s character in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch referred to ‘the blond in the kitchen’ as maybe being Marilyn Monroe. Seeing that movie the other night was an example of the more things change… since our lives today are still about ‘kids today’ and television, and stress, counting calories, and summer’s being too hot. What has changed is the place of women in society, no longer so domesticated to be sent off to Maine for the holidays. Thank goodness for that. That movie is not as delightful as it once was because it isn’t fair to women. Hence, the more they stay the same, the more things change.

My own project came from a desire for context. To sort-of understand my place in current events – a chance to reproduce some of my favorite scenes in biopics, where a character has a radio on or the news or whatever, contextualizing the story in history. I often felt like my life had become cinematic in that way standing next to newspaper boxes in the month immediately after September 2001. I also wanted to play with the idea that we get it wrong whenever we make these biopics, because as a re-creation of the past, liberties are taken. So I wanted to make something that used the stereotypes of our time to engage in a simulacra, stuff like have the actor playing me wearing Tommy Hilfiger stuff even though I refuse to buy anything that’s Tommy. Trying to represent how this time might be envisioned by the future by using it’s most extreme examples. I mean, a film like Pollock that was set in the 1950s, had a very different use of time-period objects than did The Seven Year Itch which was actually made during that decade.

I was also inspired by the type of delightful mindbender like Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman wrote himself into the story. But I guess a reason I didn’t really pursue it was, A) I didn’t get the grant, and B) I have a hard enough time living as I am without trying to step outside of myself to turn myself into a character … and biopics always centre around ‘the great love story’ and there hasn’t been one for me yet, so such a project is premature. Nor have there been really dramatic things to ‘excerpt’ for Mr. Rose in the 22nd Century.