In the opening scene of the new Doctor Who there is an extended scene where the Doctor flies over central London hanging from the TARDIS which is, in turn, hanging from a helicopter.
Shots take in the financial district, the London Eye and Tower Bridge.
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| This is how your reality is constructured |
This establishing set of images prefaces everything that is to come. For these purposes, London is reliable and regularly yoked.
I actually work right on the South Bank, and so I can attest that film crews are nearly as common as pigeons round there. Everybody wants a shot of the City somewhere in their picture. What is more striking is how these film crews are treated; that is, they are treated with the kind of automatic deference with which we usually treat police forensic teams or paramedics. Areas are cordoned off. People hurry by or try and gawp surreptitiously. The whole atmosphere is of an emergency. Partly this is due to the fact that they need to caputre light but wait a minute: need? Whose need? Who decided it was a need?
In order to understand why this is, I think we need to ask a more fundamental question first.
What, when one comes right to it, is the city actually for today?
We use, as a species, vast amounts of power to heat and light large urban spaces which, as with central London, are all but empty at night. When they are not empty, the growth of the Internet makes it increasingly doubtful that their purpose is justified at all.
Before, the justification for building, say, a skyscraper was that one needed:
- A large area where clerks and typists could operate a bureaucracy.
- A mail room
- An area where filing could be stored; some sort of archive
All three of these purposes are now completely defunct. What is not dealt with by the Cloud is handled by computers as small as our hands or smaller. And yet, the seeming necessity for a large central space remains, a collective focus for the collective will of all the employees who are trying to encourage profit.
I have an idea of how we can answer my question. To my knowledge nobody else has answered it in this way.
The city is necessary for what it signifies: indeed, it is itself the ARCH signifier in the sense that it provides the grammar whereby other signals make sense. In order to establish meaning, humans seem to need an architecture which makes a permanent impression.
The maintenance of these areas, then, is completely cut off from its original purpose. Where there were good practical reasons to build with turrets, or to build over fifty floors, throughout human history, those reasons are now totally subordinate, if not outright extinct in relation to this new purpose: the fabrication of Image.
Cities structure and give coherence to the sorts of things which people do when gathered in large groups.
So why the deference to the activity of film crews? Why are the streets of, say, Brooklyn so awash with film crews that it is becoming a source of complaint for residents.
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| Psychic defence unit in the field |
I believe that human beings, if deprived of psychic reassurance, begin to fall apart. Our lives need meaningful events in order to not seem futile. Clearly not everybody can physically fit into even the largest open spaces, so actions taken within those spaces need to be photographed and broadcast as a matter of public safety.
People are reliant on the City not now for its original purpose but for the impression that we require that life there is in progress, moving forwards and not endlessly recurring.
"But I need to go to the city to meet clients."
Yes you do, because if your clients met you anywhere else you would not seem real to them. They would regard you as an audience member, and so would you. The symbolic reality is so much more important to you than you think you already know. All your pragmatic reasons for working in the City are flimsy justifications for the real deal: because the Big City is where it's at. Everywhere else isn't. Well, almost everywhere.
Like they say in "Breathless":
"If you don't like the sea... or the mountains... or the big city... then get stuffed"
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| Step 1: Accept that Paris is what is performing here, THROUGH the Actors. |
