First Contact: The Alien Absurdist

My first week on the job is coming to an early end because we get Good Friday off, and I’ve already booked most of that day with appointments for all the business I couldn’t take care of because of the long hours.  This blog is a good way to figure out why I like this job so much, and the movie business in particular, because it forces me to put into words the previously wordless, but deep, nearly subconscious pleasure I take in certain aspects of this life.

So it has come to my awareness that over the years I have developed a great fondness for absurdity.  Something in me takes over when I see an absurd scenario and I become an alien observer, looking at the action with the mind-set of someone outside of it all and seeing it without any preconceptions.  Looking through this lens, I find a strange, Kafka-esque humor in everything I see.

For example, we are doing a B camera set-up for a shot of a toy car convertible with a doll “driving” it across a living room floor.  In my “alien observer” mode I see this absurdist scene: Several people are sitting in chairs of a living room that exists only inside a darkened warehouse.  One person is fiddling intently with a pair of (empty) shoes, another is poring over a Blackberry and arguing, apparently with herself, and a man is crouched on the floor with a control box of some kind, laughing at two men who are sitting on a low-riding cart with huge, solid metal wheels that is moving slowly back and forth along a small track like the demented engine car for an invisible tiny train.

The conversations are just as strange.  “Fiona (the doll’s name) looks like she’s nodding off.  Make her sit up straight.”  A hand comes in and pushes the doll more upright, but she slides back down. “Dammit, she’s high, isn’t she?”  Someone else scolds: “She shouldn’t be driving in that condition.”  From the back of the living room I hear the sing- song muttering of one of the camera men: “Out of focus, out of eye line, out of foooocus…”  Is anyone listening to him?  I can’t tell.

And right now I’m not completely detached from the scene, because I’ve got to crawl into the area of the wood floor in front of Fiona’s convertible with some weird concoction to blend in the scratch marks.  On my way out, I’m told to “grab that piece of blue tape over there.”  Then someone else sings out in the tune of the song: “Just walk away, Renee!” and cackles at their own joke.

Like I haven’t heard that one before.

But it’s hard to leave the set of such lovely insanity, so I hover in the background awaiting my next call for help, once again an alien observer in the dark behind the camera.