The other day I watched "Drop", the new suspense film. It's actually a pretty good movie all around, but this isn't a movie review (this will contain spoilers though).
Within the first few minutes of the movie, you begin to know a couple characters. The wife, the ex-husband, the child, and...the meter reader. The meter reader. What the fuck is a meter reader?
Apparently, they work for utility companies. They go around checking people's houses for their usage of common utilities like gas, water, and etc. so that the company makes sure they're getting billed correctly. Now, maybe this is a class signifier, but I've never heard of such a job before. Never once mentioned to me, either in passing or in conversation. Except in ACO.
My first brain-deteriorated thought was "Holy shit, like in ACO!" Where Alex jokes "No time for the in-and-out, love, I've just come to read the meter!" I know this by heart because I watch that scene nearly every other day. Makes me smile. I always thought that a "meter reader" was either an old-timey thing, a British thing, or both at the same time. I never looked deeper into it because I figured it was a one off joke. But now, after that relatively miniscule scene in "Drop", I understood the joke more. My man...he's funny, isn't he?
But it just got me thinking, even well after the movie ended and the sun had set. If this is such a common job, why have I never heard of it before? I've lived in an apartment for my whole life, so I probably would've never had to deal with a meter reader.
"It's literally not a big deal", I thought to myself, "It isn't that deep. Go to bed. You're trying to make connections that don't exist."
The meter reader, in the movie, ends up being in on the whole murder scandal. He's a criminal. No time for the in-and-out because he's keeping the wife's child and sister as hostages. He gets shot by the wife in the end, at least.
"Meter reader", I thought, staring at nothing in particular in my room, "That reminds me of..."
Frequencies, the electromagnetic kind. Reading a utility meter is no different. You read what's conjured up by whatever you're trying to tap into.
Strings. You pull on the strings to get the information you want. You tug, something tugs back.
Sweet dreams. That song...is popping up a lot in my life, and for whatever reason, it popped up in my mind yet again while thinking of everything else. It's a popular song, sure, but it's overplayed incessantly in my life. Radio, stores, doctor's office, places I shouldn't be hearing it so often. It's popular, but it's also from the 80s. It's not even my favorite song of Eurythmics. I like Missionary Man a hell of a lot more. Plays on the wording get overplayed often in my life. You ever hear "Dream Baby" by Roy Orbinson? I wouldn't blame you if you hadn't, but I hear it nearly every other day in the same instances. Again, not my favorite song of his. And it doesn't help when I got a small sample of "Sweet Dreams are Made of This" in my order from Hexxennacht.
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| tfw sweet dreams by eurthymics playing for the ten billionth time |
Dreams. They are portals into some other realm, whether you believe in the woo-woo side of it or not. If you're not the one actively conscious and doing the thinking of whatever you're dreaming of, then who is?
In the Eurthymics' music video for Sweet Dreams, it's played out like how you'd experience a dream. Hazy, things not really making sense, almost hallucinatory visuals. But in the end, we see Annie (Lennox, the frontwoman) turn off her bedside lamp, as if she really is about to have sweet dreams, but the very last shot is of a book with the cover and title matching the single's cover. Nobody ever talks about this part. I'm assuming it's just another way of making the video seem surrealistic, but that's when my brain starts to go haywire as if it hadn't already.
I suppose you could call it a fourth wall break. This happens a lot in media, especially in the more modern age, usually in attempt to be humorous. In my lens, it's when a media becomes self-aware. I could cite numerous examples of this, but since we all know what the blog is themed after, I'll talk about the one example I know best.
To love a character that literally talks to you from its own media is a strange, harrowing experience. I'm aware that I'm not the only person in the world who had read or watched ACO, that Alex is a first-person narrator and talks to the reader, not just me, but I really do mean it when I say that I feel like he's interacting with me directly. It's as if we're the only two that get whatever connection is going on. It's kind of like making a vague post online (for a modern ex: a tweet that says "i have a crush on oomf") and you know exactly who it's talking about. There's a connection shared, even if the person isn't outright saying your name or looking back into your eyes. You feel that "click" on a level deeper than what you're already on. There's a shared self-awareness. If you know, you know.
Things start to get a little weird when that connection goes outside the bounds of the original media, like in my scenario. I know that Drop has nothing actually to do with ACO, neither do meter readers, or Eurythmics. After rereading all that I've written, I think I come off a little schizophrenic or perhaps in the midst of a psychotic break. I'm not, I can assure that, and I don't think it has anything to do with "apophenia", which is a symptom of those disorders. But, if I may pose such a question, what really is the difference between apophenia and a genuine synchronicity? To others, it may seem like things don't correlate, but to me, it does.
When the connection goes outside of the media, I know it's a synchronicity because it "feels" funny. After the meter reader bit in the movie, it felt like the movie just paused for a second, like it was intentionally putting emphasis on that part. And, yes, it's probably because he's one of the guys involved. It's foreshadowing. But foreshadowing, I believe, is a form of that same fourth wall break. It's their universe showing us that it's self-aware. Like, "Look at this guy! No, like, really look at him."
Let me put it simply: often times, I feel like I am not real. Not in the sense that I can't die or that I'm dissociated from myself, but I feel like I'm a character. And the thought that maybe I am in another universe, or maybe I am in this one and I don't know it, deeply unsettles me. Because then that means that nothing is coincidental, that whenever I see things sync up, it does entail something. Omens, synchronicities, coincidences...it's all foreshadowing, just in the real life we experience. It unsettles me to know that I'm maybe being watched or observed in some other universe, and it gets even more unsettling when the universe just confirms that belief when I don't ask it to.
I'm not the only "conscious" person in the world. My friends and family are real, the relationships I have are real, all my senses are real, and everyone else unrelated to me in this big world has those same real experiences. But that's the point - they're all real to us as they present themselves. If you told a fictional character that their world isn't real and is a fictious, non-living idea, how do you think they'd react? They'd tell you the exact same things I did. There would be denial.
I don't know what my story is about, much less my real purpose, but I know I'm not alone. There are people that love me whether I can see them or not, and that keeps me going. Maybe they also think I'm crazy, maybe they wish I'd be getting help, maybe they think I'm cool, I don't know. They probably want me to write something a bit more interesting than whatever the hell this post is. An incoherent, babbling filler article at best. I'll never know what lies beyond what I can see with my own two eyes. But when I close my eyes, on the inside, I see him. And he's staring right back at me.
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