The Scene

A film review as a scene of a group of friends watching the film as told in a style that recalls Kurt Vonnegut:

The three sat in the middle of a row, midway back from the screen. The film they watched was about a man who doesn’t understand himself and is unhappy. Desiring happiness, he observes his life to find out what’s wrong. He doesn’t find happiness, so he observes others observing him. He doesn’t find happiness there either, so he observes himself observing himself. Nothing. So he observes others observing him observing himself. And on and on.

The layers of observation build until he’s watching entire cities worth of people observing entire cities of people observing themselves and everyone else.

Then, after two hours and four minutes, the man dies.

When the film ended but before the credits did, they stood to leave. They guy noticed the girl with the short hair wore a furrowed-brow frown. He noticed the girl with the long hair looked peevish. He himself bore a kind of wry, mouth-half-open smile. They walked down the hall and out of the theater. They walked into the lobby and rode three sets of escalators.

They paused at the bottom.

The looks they wore after the escalators were the same as when they had just stood from the theater seats. They stayed that way for a long moment, not looking at each other and not looking at anything else either. Just staring into a middle distance, a seam in reality not populated by objects, but ideas, words and thoughts.

Being more or less precise people, they sought in that seam the right way of characterizing this film. This being's quest for understanding. This sad half thing who had spent his life being merely an observer, a fastidious chronicler of the minutia of life, as though by observing life in great enough detail he might learn how to live it. A voyeur of such relentless joylessness. An infinite regression of self-reference. A man frozen by thought. An inactive agent. A being that was, in fact, no kind of being at all.

After a long while, the guy spoke: “That was exhausting.”

More or less silently, they agreed that that was about all that could be said. The three parted ways without really saying proper goodbyes.

The film was by Charlie Kaufman.