An Alternate Anatomy

One defining feature between here and home is the movie store. The relationship between Paris and the cinema is no secret so I was quite surprised to find out that the movie rental store is a rarity here. Instead there are movie banks. In functionality and use they are very similar to ATM machines. You navigate through choices on a screen to find the rental you want. After you choose your title, the machine distributes the film out of a slot. When you need to return your disc the slot opens, you place the disc inside, a computer scans it and your account is charged for the rental.

The system sounds pretty nice and when it works properly it is indeed. The owner cuts down on overhead by not having a large store and multiple employees. The customer benefits from the accessibility and its ease of use. For me the large drawback is the browse. I love to browse—record stores, book shops, and movie stores. There's an inherent pleasure in seeing the product and making your choice at your own leisure. The ATM style of movie rentals is a cold replacement that puts the onus on the shopper, requiring him or her to know what they want before they come. Suggestions or help are completely absent in the process (not to mention the promotional pleasures one can find in things like free beer Tuesdays at I Luv Video in Austin).

Another consumer drawback is cost. It is four euros to rent a film for 24 hours. A minute late with your return and the price jumps to ten euros! Being used to 75 cent late fees, this was quite a shock. I don't know if the punishment fits the “crime” but I guess it works. I see people renting movies all the time, myself included.

With the above rant, I assume that one can deduce that my abstinence from television has been compensated by movies. I've always been a big moviegoer but here the habit seems to have multiplied a bit. Part of it might just be the allure of cinema in Paris. This would at least account for my trips to the cinema but leaves the question of DVDs unanswered. It occurred to me that this half of the equation might come from living with a person who shares my pleasure in films. Which, of course, is a far cry from living with one television and three guys whose taste didn't always run concurrent with mine.

As a change of pace, Morgane and I had started watching Grey's Anatomy on DVD. I know, I know. As a male I'm not supposed to openly admit to this sort of thing but I got hooked on the show at the tail end of season two (spring of 06). As a result my late conversion I had never seen the first season nor the majority of season two.

I guess it's a good thing that only seasons one and two are available at the cinebank because I think my body has begun to reject the show. Through dreams my mind has been telling me it has OD'ed on Grey's. It's natural to dream about things in your life, or even things not in your life. They're just dreams, right? But there comes a point when they stop being “just dreams” and become something more, something too frequent, too disturbingly natural, too real.

I started dreaming dreams populated with the characters of the show inserted into my daily life. Worse than that, we were all cohabiting in a large house that was eerily similar to my childhood home (without getting too deep, I assume this was a representation of the hospital since it serves as their “home” on the show). Several nights running now I've had to deal with the Christina's sarcasm, the chief's fatherly advice, and Meredith's whining fluctuations of perspective. We ran out of episodes to watch a few days ago, so I'm hoping that they'll stop. In the mean time, I'm on the prowl for new cinematic distractions.