Distance the Close-Up: Remembering the Film Behind the Snapshot

By Grace Carpenter on January 9, 2014

Photo from wikimedia.org

The culture of #YOLO isn’t new. The actual phrase might be new, but it only re-packages the same Carpe Diem idea that “life is short” and that “this too shall pass.” It borrows the same fixation with temporality–the transience of life, the ever-slipping grains in the hourglass–that echoes through every Carpe Diem whisper in history. Hell, it’s even in Shakespeare: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act V, Scene V). The immediacy of the present moment isn’t new; it’s the pacing that’s new.

A human life has never lasted so long, nor seemed so short. Mass media has unified the world and brought each country into contact with almost every other; social media has knitted each individual life into an intimate web of communication; increased exposure and communication have drawn the kingdoms of the world into a global community. We have atlases at our fingertips, encyclopedias in our pockets, screens tattooed in our minds.

Not only are we now captured by the immediacy of the present moment, we are also getting lost in the vast universe to which we are increasingly exposed. We are torn between ourselves and the global community. We are simultaneously individual and universal.

And now Carpe Diem has shifted. It no longer means that every opportunity has a shelf time; it’s a fiery anthem to live with a vengeance. And I’m not talking about free-flying party culture. I’m talking about every pocket of campus society that has been gripped. It’s everywhere—pumping through the bass line at every frat party; echoing through the silence of every over-packed library, crammed with students who think their next exam is the end-all-be-all of their entire lives; papering the flyers handed out by every campus activist group that seems to think that the apocalypse is imminent and so we must solve every world issue before that happens. #YOLO has colored our generation with a desperation to not only live the present moment, but also to consume it. We want to take our power, to use every drop we can scrounge up, to never waste a single second, to leave our imprint on the world. We want to boom with the power of every preceding generation combined.

And who can blame us? Who doesn’t want to be noticed?

But the problem with consuming the moment is that it’s so easy to forget the sprawling grey backdrop on which it sits. We look at close-ups of human life–news reports of particular crimes or people; photographs of individual people at individual moments talking about individual aspects of their lives; articles about single conversations or sights—and allow these snapshots to color our holistic perspectives. But what about the rest of it? Sometimes striking the balance between the grand scheme and the minute details is a tricky one. It’s so easy to zoom in on the close-up, to study the snapshot; but every close-up belongs to a full portrait, and every snapshot is only a flicker in a long stream of film.

To capture a snapshot is either art or luck; to be inspired by a snapshot is a gift; but to absorb it is a challenge, and to appropriately locate it within a grander context is a skill. Just as planning the grand scheme, getting lost in the beautiful vastness of endless possibilities, causes us to forget the details, over-focusing on the details blinds us to the overarching context. No, the frat party might not ruin your life, but it might have some dire consequences. Yes, the upcoming exam might be important, but odds are it will not ruin your entire life. Yes, the world has a lot of issues, but the apocalypse probably isn’t imminent and global problems take a lot of time to solve, so you probably don’t have to suffocate yourself trying to recruit new world-problem-solvers today.

Learn to distance the close-up—to find a beautiful detail, to study and be inspired by it, but then to also step back and locate it within the millions of other moments you will see, feel, remember, and imagine. Don’t over-focus on the individual footsteps. After all, we are taking blind ballerina steps, wandering along a path we can’t see, chained to the mysterious conveyor belt of time. Our paths are, at best, an ever-growing accumulation of individual footfalls—innumerable and blurred—that we are making without certainty, armed only with the hope that they are gradually taking us somewhere we want to end up. Think about every individual step we take—the thousands of decisions and #YOLO moments—and think: how can we possibly hope to place every trembling foot perfectly?

Life is not defined by a moment, nor is it a single, indistinguishable mass. It is a collection of moments, each weighted with and colored by each of its neighboring moments. The key is to neither ignore nor consume every individual moment but to absorb every moment, coupled with and heightened by every other, and become a seamless conglomeration of snapshots and film. Only when we learn to not only define beautiful moments, but also weave them together—to shift our focus between the details and the entirety—will we be able to approach the perspective that encompasses both immediacy and longevity, the present and the future. A culture that simultaneously fixates on the immediate and the minute, and exposes us to the global and the universal, demands that we be open to both: losing sight of neither the grand nor the trivial, forgetting neither the good nor the bad; ever-watchful for the little things, but always remembering how they fit into the big ones.

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