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something I think about a lot is how long fictional narratives take, diegetically. my mind always goes to big blockbuster action films because they feel so big, but really, if you step back, their stories are so small.
how many days actually pass in Star Wars (1977)? maybe two or three? somewhere, Luke's story, beginning with his departure from Tatooine and ending with the destruction of the Death Star, might be recorded as something that happened "between September 16th and 20th."
the events of Die Hard (1988) span a few hours. we would read about them in the newspaper as a "tense standoff yesterday evening that ended at midnight." somewhere, they're summarized in a few dull paragraphs of a police report nobody would find remarkable. to john mcclane, they were certainly memorable, but to the rest of the characters in the movie, nothing happened. they stood around for three hours drinking coffee, then some people came out and they all went home. those characters told their families "crazy night, we really thought something was gonna happen."
The events of Alien and Terminator and all the Star Trek films also span a couple days each, at most. to us, it's impossible to imagine "before" and "after" existing in the contexts of those universes. nothing was written before or after, so we see this world only in terms of one dramatic event that occurred. that's how stories work, but all stories, not just fictional ones.
i think about this a lot because the longer I'm alive, the more remarkable I find it that our experiences can seem so small and meaningless to others.
in so many cases, the things in your life that affected you most, when described, come out of your mouth so limp and pale that you wonder why you ever cared about them. something that was an ongoing nightmare for you, for years, turns into some flaccid sentence like "yeah i was in a bad living situation for a while." and even as it leaves your mouth you're going "they actually understand me worse now than if I'd said nothing."
the importance of an experience is defined by the emotional weight it carries, and that emotion is absolute, it's defined when it happens, and it isn't scaled to the rest of the world, but to you, however big your world is at the time. when it's happening, your universe can get so small that something seemingly petty can eclipse it, and then when your consciousness expands to encompass the world around you again, the emotion grows with it, and maybe eclipses things that happened on a much larger absolute scale.
something that lasts only a few minutes can affect you as much as something that went on for years, and in either case it can be so simple in nature and so small in actual size that there really isn't anything to say about it. it probably does have a date and a time. it happened on the 11th of april, between 3 PM and 3:30 PM. other people were buying hamburgers a couple blocks away at the time. it was tuesday.
it's really weird that one of the most poignant things i've ever heard in my life is a line from M. fucking Bison in the street fighter movie.
