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Feb. 22nd, 2017 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionLegion 1.2
So he's abandoned himself to fantasy, which seems way better: a girlfriend (though untouchable), people telling him he is important, telling him he was never crazy but just more powerful and special than anyone realized - "the key to winning the war and other things." He's in a therapeutic oasis called Summerland, reminiscent of the summer scenes with his sister that seem to constitute his mental safe space (though senses that he is being hunted down by someone called The Eyes - someone who can see him, see the truth?).
He's asked by Melanie to concentrate on just one voice - i.e. engage with one, which his therapist had told him was inadvisable. The voice telling him everyone's been wrong about him. What's the biggest obstacle to believing this? Memories of his whole damn life. Which he and his helpers then try to rewrite.
The opening sequence, set to "Road to Nowhere" since he's leaving reality far behind, is very Apocalypse Now-y or Fugitive-ish, or rather is like some big budget popcorn movie imitating aspects of them, down to the narration. The made up girlfriend, whose half-baked powers were clearly inspired by Rogue from X-Men, has now been made a bit like Anna Paquin in the films, with highlights, pallidly red-headish makeup, a younger demeanor and "the gloves," which is likely setting up his gradual replacement of his father (whose face is left dark here) with Professor X. He's a blockbuster guy rather than a Jesus or Napoleon one, apparently.
Ptonomy is like Ptolemy but also autonomy and astronomy (he tip-of-the-tongues his father's job, astronomer) and metonymy, and a bit like mnemonic given his role. Your memory is not a place where "you're the boss," as he assures the protagonist.
The Babadookish book is not remotely plausible, obviously (his therapist: "and we both know who that angry boy was") and the danger of messing with childhood memories seems reflected in how the mother, right after being remembered and adored, is killed by the World's Angriest Boy in the World (a name suggesting both his extreme problems and the impossibility of successfully leaving reality to escape them). The implausibility of the book becomes a sticking point in the fantasy, in part because of the alternative explanation for what's happening that it ... metonymizes?
They confirm the replacement body aspect of the girlfriend's powers in the car scene. So she seriously switches minds with whoever she touches, then, instead of just the minds zapping back home later on, THE BODIES SWITCH PLACES. Even for a superhero power this is hilariously dumb. Though a good stand-in for how dumb all of them are when any thought's given to them, which one would have to either do or elaborately avoid doing once one tried to accept one's empowerment fantasy as real.
Is Lenny a previous untouchable girl + friend "voice" - on the schizophrenia level, anyway? Explains how she could be dead (replaced) but also not.
"You're. Not. Schizophrenic. You have powers. The things you see are real." But the memory he keeps coming back to is a moment with his therapist. His helpers want to work on this the most, presumably because the therapist's point about the book got through to David. They try to talk him into instead seeing it as the first moment his magic powers came about.
"Blue vapor" - a Breaking Bad homage, but presumably something further. Blue as the color of impossible roses, of distant objects one can hallucinate into what they aren't, of soothing placebos? Vapor seems clear enough. He's "supplemented" by self-medicating with flattering imaginings.
A dialogue recurrence is his being in "a safe place."
The MRI thing is probably about how he realizes his attempt to reinterpret his own psychology doesn't scan, anchored to some memory of having actually been put in one and told the results indicated proof of mental dysfunction. So he throws the scanner (honest self-assessment) out the window? If so, that may be a second layer to his refusal of reality: at the end of episode 1 he leaves the outer world, here he leaves inner consistency. He tries to pretend the problem is that the MRI awakens his telepathy - making him see/inhabit his sister (another voice?). But she's immediately treated as though crazy and seized by The Eyes. Who then just looks at her. Then utters the analysts's "Shall we begin?" Followed by the "tell me about your childhood" of the Dolby song, which is also anout being hooked up to a machine etc.
Is the 1960s/1970s-ness also supposed to suggest he's an X-Men fan? Or just more generally that he's stuck in his childhood, either because things hadn't yet fallen apart or because that's when they started to?
The facility seems to have just two stories, but he goes down in the elevator for a long time, doesn't he? "Descending," the computer voice says. Deeper into the memory "work" - the anti-therapy, the unreal "supplement" to a crappy reality.
Into power/escape-obsessed hobbying, that unpaid (in fact expensive) second career? The further the writers go into schizophrenia trappings the more I have trouble seeing connections to a "nerd" level, though there obviously is one. Is it offensive to use treatment noncompliance by the mentally ill as a metaphor when one's basically conducting a sympathetic critique of one sort of nerdhood? Maybe highlighting the former and keeping the latter merely suggested proved necessary for reasons of delicacy.
They're asking an awful lot of the female lead. The male one's affable-cum-sardonic blandness is much easier - his emotions get externalized most of the time, after all. And it fits that slightly angry, slightly humorous affect arrived at (cultivated?) by a lot of those guys.
By myself? Maybe I'm a variant or a near-miss or something. Julie was with a grand mal case before me (so had to sit through a lot of Stargate, Babylon 5, and Farscape) and I had one for a roommate - a childhood friend I'd gotten into nerd stuff when I loved it myself pre-puberty. I suspect I just checked (IQ-ed?) out thereafter and he didn't? Assuming immersion in literature, film and "premium" tv shows constitutes a more than cosmetically distinct phenomenon. Getting to be the one to understand them ... or to fantasize that you are, do ... that too can be addictive. Can attenuate the outer life.
So he's abandoned himself to fantasy, which seems way better: a girlfriend (though untouchable), people telling him he is important, telling him he was never crazy but just more powerful and special than anyone realized - "the key to winning the war and other things." He's in a therapeutic oasis called Summerland, reminiscent of the summer scenes with his sister that seem to constitute his mental safe space (though senses that he is being hunted down by someone called The Eyes - someone who can see him, see the truth?).
He's asked by Melanie to concentrate on just one voice - i.e. engage with one, which his therapist had told him was inadvisable. The voice telling him everyone's been wrong about him. What's the biggest obstacle to believing this? Memories of his whole damn life. Which he and his helpers then try to rewrite.
The opening sequence, set to "Road to Nowhere" since he's leaving reality far behind, is very Apocalypse Now-y or Fugitive-ish, or rather is like some big budget popcorn movie imitating aspects of them, down to the narration. The made up girlfriend, whose half-baked powers were clearly inspired by Rogue from X-Men, has now been made a bit like Anna Paquin in the films, with highlights, pallidly red-headish makeup, a younger demeanor and "the gloves," which is likely setting up his gradual replacement of his father (whose face is left dark here) with Professor X. He's a blockbuster guy rather than a Jesus or Napoleon one, apparently.
Ptonomy is like Ptolemy but also autonomy and astronomy (he tip-of-the-tongues his father's job, astronomer) and metonymy, and a bit like mnemonic given his role. Your memory is not a place where "you're the boss," as he assures the protagonist.
The Babadookish book is not remotely plausible, obviously (his therapist: "and we both know who that angry boy was") and the danger of messing with childhood memories seems reflected in how the mother, right after being remembered and adored, is killed by the World's Angriest Boy in the World (a name suggesting both his extreme problems and the impossibility of successfully leaving reality to escape them). The implausibility of the book becomes a sticking point in the fantasy, in part because of the alternative explanation for what's happening that it ... metonymizes?
They confirm the replacement body aspect of the girlfriend's powers in the car scene. So she seriously switches minds with whoever she touches, then, instead of just the minds zapping back home later on, THE BODIES SWITCH PLACES. Even for a superhero power this is hilariously dumb. Though a good stand-in for how dumb all of them are when any thought's given to them, which one would have to either do or elaborately avoid doing once one tried to accept one's empowerment fantasy as real.
Is Lenny a previous untouchable girl + friend "voice" - on the schizophrenia level, anyway? Explains how she could be dead (replaced) but also not.
"You're. Not. Schizophrenic. You have powers. The things you see are real." But the memory he keeps coming back to is a moment with his therapist. His helpers want to work on this the most, presumably because the therapist's point about the book got through to David. They try to talk him into instead seeing it as the first moment his magic powers came about.
"Blue vapor" - a Breaking Bad homage, but presumably something further. Blue as the color of impossible roses, of distant objects one can hallucinate into what they aren't, of soothing placebos? Vapor seems clear enough. He's "supplemented" by self-medicating with flattering imaginings.
A dialogue recurrence is his being in "a safe place."
The MRI thing is probably about how he realizes his attempt to reinterpret his own psychology doesn't scan, anchored to some memory of having actually been put in one and told the results indicated proof of mental dysfunction. So he throws the scanner (honest self-assessment) out the window? If so, that may be a second layer to his refusal of reality: at the end of episode 1 he leaves the outer world, here he leaves inner consistency. He tries to pretend the problem is that the MRI awakens his telepathy - making him see/inhabit his sister (another voice?). But she's immediately treated as though crazy and seized by The Eyes. Who then just looks at her. Then utters the analysts's "Shall we begin?" Followed by the "tell me about your childhood" of the Dolby song, which is also anout being hooked up to a machine etc.
Is the 1960s/1970s-ness also supposed to suggest he's an X-Men fan? Or just more generally that he's stuck in his childhood, either because things hadn't yet fallen apart or because that's when they started to?
The facility seems to have just two stories, but he goes down in the elevator for a long time, doesn't he? "Descending," the computer voice says. Deeper into the memory "work" - the anti-therapy, the unreal "supplement" to a crappy reality.
Into power/escape-obsessed hobbying, that unpaid (in fact expensive) second career? The further the writers go into schizophrenia trappings the more I have trouble seeing connections to a "nerd" level, though there obviously is one. Is it offensive to use treatment noncompliance by the mentally ill as a metaphor when one's basically conducting a sympathetic critique of one sort of nerdhood? Maybe highlighting the former and keeping the latter merely suggested proved necessary for reasons of delicacy.
They're asking an awful lot of the female lead. The male one's affable-cum-sardonic blandness is much easier - his emotions get externalized most of the time, after all. And it fits that slightly angry, slightly humorous affect arrived at (cultivated?) by a lot of those guys.
By myself? Maybe I'm a variant or a near-miss or something. Julie was with a grand mal case before me (so had to sit through a lot of Stargate, Babylon 5, and Farscape) and I had one for a roommate - a childhood friend I'd gotten into nerd stuff when I loved it myself pre-puberty. I suspect I just checked (IQ-ed?) out thereafter and he didn't? Assuming immersion in literature, film and "premium" tv shows constitutes a more than cosmetically distinct phenomenon. Getting to be the one to understand them ... or to fantasize that you are, do ... that too can be addictive. Can attenuate the outer life.
