Screening Time

Watching worlds that never were from convalescent beds

Bette Davis and Paul Heinreid in Now Voyager (1942). In the film, Davis’s character spends time in a mental rehabilitation facility, (literally) foreshadowed here.

Diary of the Late Republic, #16

My 83-year-old mother recently took a fall (not her first, alas) and spent about a month in a rehab facility on Long Island. I believe it was reasonably good, though in my view not as cheerful as the last one in which she recuperated. Once you go past the lobby of this facility, you reach an open seating area with a large screen showing old movies, most of them black-and-white. The last time I went, I watched a woman in a wheelchair, likely well into her eighties, gazing raptly at an actor I believed to be Bette Davis. The formal dress and diction in such films are a clear indication of the gulf between then and now, though I suspect that at that moment it seemed smaller to this patient, even if she wasn’t alive when the movie was made. I’m sure the world of the late 1950s feels more accessible to me than my students, some of whom consider Seinfeld present-adjacent, though that contemporaneity is fading quickly. (I know, because I show episodes in my History class. I sometimes use an episode in which the plot turns on access to a payphone. They’ve heard of ’em, even if they’ve never actually used one.)

As visits to loved ones in such places usually do, the journey to my mother’s room involved walking down long hallways of partially ajar doors in which one could catch glimpses of residents, whether alone or with their families. In almost every case, a television was on. An old episode of Star-Trek; a local newscast; a low-budget, made-for-TV drama; a college basketball game—a veritable gallery of programming, but with a slightly musty quality: nobody was streaming on a laptop, and the cable package was obviously a limited one. Some residents were watching from chairs, while others manipulated a remote control from their beds. For still others, the TV functioned as silent wallpaper as groups of people conversed, such busy scenes punctuated by the occasional vacant room.

Imagining myself in such a situation—likely only a matter of time—I reckon it would be easy to believe that just beyond the walls of my room a shimmering television world teems with ageless life. (Actually, I sometimes feel this way when I watch promotions for shows when watching professional football games: it feels like there’s a really cool place called CBS or Fox, where Very Attractive People are always having a Very Good Time.) So watching TV from a hospital bed must feel like a dull ache. But at least it’s not a sharp pain, whether mental or physical, from which watching may provide some small relief.

The irony is that lives on the screen are largely make-believe, and even those that aren’t fictive are nevertheless performances played out on stages—newsrooms, talk-show sets, ballfields—that are highly stylized and temporary. The real drama, such as it is, unfolds in those rooms, not beyond them. The stories aren’t always reassuring; the endings aren’t always happy. The challenge is figuring out how to play our part—and finding the strength to do so.