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I finished the final episode of "River" starring Stellan Skarsgard. Loved it. I am not sure about how re-watchable it is, whether it is something I would like to see another dozen times in my life, but I cannot remember the last time a show made me cry like that. It is a detective show, but it does come with a twist. Although the concept of seeing the dead is not exactly original, even overdone, it is subtly done. This is not Patricia Arquette's "Medium".
One of the hooks was the way they treated the issue of his talking to people who were not there. He had to seek counselling for being a nutter, a mumbler, for having voices in his head and talking to them. It reminded me when I had a somewhat serious issue with that, my original Hallway Dialogues. I was struck by the realization that, although I still have the occasional Hallway Dialogue, it is nothing like the ones I had in the early to middle 90s. Those dialogues would put me in compromising positions, as I was caught a number of times in full conversation and in full gesticulation mode, though no one else could see my interlocutors. My first thought, thinking about it now, was that it was my entrance into the blogosphere that put an end to that, but it occurred to me that it actually ended before then. When did it stop? Is it possible that it ended when Jack and I had that fight on Thanksgiving of 1996 and I actually talking to Dr. G. on the phone? Did the reality of that real voice blow out the need to create those voices in my head? It is a pat answer, but I am skeptical. I wonder if I just got tired of it. Maybe those dialogues were played out. I have no idea. I wonder if I just lost my imaginative power as I got to my thirtieth birthday. I feel some regret about it, as those dialogues at least gave me something to write about, like a kind of dream, a waking dream, but, on the other hand, it is not good to give people an easy reason to dismiss you as mentally unhinged.
Rereading the above, I gave the wrong idea about the show, as being more about talking with the dead than with his actually just having 'voices' - the visual as well as the audio. I think it is pretty clear that these 'others' are indeed his own projections. It's definitely not like "Medium". It's just that the people who made it into his 'hallway dialogues' are dead. Each brain is its own universe, and some of us just have a different way of trying to put it all together and make sense of things. In this detective's case, it was a good way, a special way - the power of television and fantasy.
One of the hooks was the way they treated the issue of his talking to people who were not there. He had to seek counselling for being a nutter, a mumbler, for having voices in his head and talking to them. It reminded me when I had a somewhat serious issue with that, my original Hallway Dialogues. I was struck by the realization that, although I still have the occasional Hallway Dialogue, it is nothing like the ones I had in the early to middle 90s. Those dialogues would put me in compromising positions, as I was caught a number of times in full conversation and in full gesticulation mode, though no one else could see my interlocutors. My first thought, thinking about it now, was that it was my entrance into the blogosphere that put an end to that, but it occurred to me that it actually ended before then. When did it stop? Is it possible that it ended when Jack and I had that fight on Thanksgiving of 1996 and I actually talking to Dr. G. on the phone? Did the reality of that real voice blow out the need to create those voices in my head? It is a pat answer, but I am skeptical. I wonder if I just got tired of it. Maybe those dialogues were played out. I have no idea. I wonder if I just lost my imaginative power as I got to my thirtieth birthday. I feel some regret about it, as those dialogues at least gave me something to write about, like a kind of dream, a waking dream, but, on the other hand, it is not good to give people an easy reason to dismiss you as mentally unhinged.
Rereading the above, I gave the wrong idea about the show, as being more about talking with the dead than with his actually just having 'voices' - the visual as well as the audio. I think it is pretty clear that these 'others' are indeed his own projections. It's definitely not like "Medium". It's just that the people who made it into his 'hallway dialogues' are dead. Each brain is its own universe, and some of us just have a different way of trying to put it all together and make sense of things. In this detective's case, it was a good way, a special way - the power of television and fantasy.
