On Saturday night, I watched a movie I had already watched, thinking I hadn't watched it.
However, the same thing happened with a TV show about a week ago. Is this the first sign of Alzheimer's setting in? (It runs in my family, unfortunately.)
The movie was The Final Girls, which I chose as my Saturday night viewing. Parts of it felt familiar, but I thought that was because I had watched a YouTuber talk about it, since I remember someone analyzing its story beats.
The question should have been "Why would I watch a YouTuber discuss a movie I had never seen?", which would have been a good question indeed. But hey, I was tired.
In fact it was the second half of my Saturday night viewing, started at 10:20 and chosen for its 91-minute running time. For the first part of the evening, my wife and I had watched the first half of my Audient Bollywood movie for May, which I will tell you about in the next few days. It's 185 minutes long, hence splitting it in half over two nights.
By rights I should have just watched an episode of The Walking Dead, the only TV show I am watching without her at the moment, as I am steadily slogging my way through about four seasons ago. But I guess I had that "cinematic craving." You know what I mean.
I also paused to nap a couple times. I can imagine the first time I watched the movie -- which turns out to have been October 12, 2018 -- was under similar sleepy circumstances, where the movie went in one ear and out the other. I wouldn't be surprised if I watch it a third time down the road given my only partial retention of what happened while I was nodding off.
I can't remember the last time this has happened to me with a movie, if it ever has. Surely it would have happened before, but I don't remember the experience. (Maybe that's part of the problem, heh heh.)
Strangely, it happens to my wife with some frequency, with her favorite artistic medium: novels. More than once she has read her way well into a book before realizing she had already read it, and in fact, we joke about owning two copies of this one random, inscrutable, stream-of-consciousness Scottish book called How Late It Was, How Late because she bought it twice -- not only having forgotten she read it, but having forgotten how much she disliked it.
This undoubtedly seems worse than watching the same 90-minute movie twice, except my wife's brain is not wired the same way mine is. I have that collector's mentality, that list-maker's mentality. Each movie I add to my movie collection lodges its way into a compartment in my brain that is specifically designed to keep track of such things. My wife has no such compartment and therefore I expect less retention than I expect of myself. (Of course, I don't "expect" anything from my wife at all on this front -- it's her business.)
The weird thing is that I was actually inclined to go a full star higher on The Final Girls in 2022 than I was in 2018. Just before I went to add the movie in Letterboxd, I was hit by a suspicion that I was going to see a star rating appear when I called up the movie, meaning I had previously ranked it. Indeed this happened, and my judgment in 2018 had been 2.5 stars. I was going to give it 3.5 stars this time, though I can't really tell you why -- I guess maybe its self-referential nature just worked a little bit better for me this time. The reality is probably smack dab in the middle at three stars.
The really weird thing is that this just happened with a TV show also.
My wife and I went to start watching the final season of Better Call Saul, however, she accidentally picked the first episode from last season rather than the first episode from this new one. Although some parts of the episode seemed familiar, it wasn't until we got to the end, and it dropped us back into the episode menu, that we realized that a full season's worth of episodes had already been released, and the titles of those episodes were all titles I recognized. So somehow we watched the whole episode without realizing that a season's worth of events were not accounted for in the plot.
Hey, I suppose when I really do get Alzheimer's, they can just show me Raising Arizona on repeat, and I'll keep discovering it as though it were the very first time.
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