One of the great things about October is that the Northern Hemisphere has tilted enough that I can open the home office shades without going blind from the sun.
Nice view, eh?
A busy week ahead: a haircut appointment, a wellness check at the doctor’s office, an early-morning photo visit to the air museum, and a book club meeting (which I’m hosting, so at least a day’s worth of house-cleaning as well).
A few friends and I chat about television shows and movies on a Facebook messenger group. One of us lives in Oslo, so we often get a heads up about European and Scandinavian series coming our way in the States. He said a weird thing last night and I literally lost sleep thinking about it. Talking about a German series called The Empress, he said he noticed how they hid electrical outlets. Why would they hide electrical outlets in a TV show? Was it edited for Norwegian audiences who might still hate Germans for occupying their country during WWII? Are German outlets even different from Norwegian ones?
First thing this morning I commented back, telling him how I watch plenty of German shows on streaming TV — Kleo, Babylon Berlin, Almost Fly — and see electrical outlets all the time. Then I looked up The Empress on IMDB and learned it’s a historical drama. Set in a time before indoor electricity. Oh. How embarrassing! That should have been the first thing I thought of.
It should have been, that is, because like our Norwegian friend I too look for goofs in historical shows. Did they dress like that then? Did they use phrases like “no problem” or “catch you later?” Did that building in the background even exist at that time? Why are all the old cars so perfect and shiny … surely in any street scene from the 1940s or whenever, wouldn’t most of them have been dented and dirty?
I’m probably not a lot of fun to watch TV with.
I have a tiny BA in film and theater from Humboldt State, of all the powerhouse media schools, and I look for anachronistic contrails and wristwatches too. I’d point these out to my son and he’d say ‘dad, it’s just a movie’. And I’d drone on about how if you see something advertised on teevee it is never something you actually need. I’d like to think I started my kids on the path of skepticism and doubting everything they see on screens big and small. But really I bored them and didn’t help them suspend disbelief, maybe one reason they moved far far away from me as soon as they could.
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