Moments Not to Remember
At least not on videotape
by David Owen
RECENTLY I became the last person in America to cave in and buy a video camera. I did not buy it for the usual reasons. I am not going to use it to record birthday parties, school plays, or piano recitals. I am not going to do what a woman sitting next to me on an airplane did, which was to shoot two or three minutes of tape out her window while the plane took off from Atlanta, put her camera away, listlessly flip back and forth through Delta’s in-flight magazine while humming nasally for more than an hour, eat only the cookie on her lunch tray, sleep for about twenty minutes with her mouth all the way open, take her camera back out, and shoot two or three minutes of tape out her window while the plane landed in Hartford.
I bought my camera for three reasons only: first, to make one of those videotaped inventories of my house and all my valuable possessions, so that my insurance company will cheerfully pay my claim in full when my house (but not the videotape) is destroyed; second, to record my golf swing, in the hope of determining why I am such a crummy golfer; and third, to provide occasional amusement for my children, who are ten and seven years old. and whose sole criterion in judging human behavior is whether or not the behavior, if videotaped, would have a chance of being shown on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Why do people who lack such focused objectives buy video cameras? When my wife’s sister got married, a neighbor videotaped the reception, as a wedding gift. My wife and her other sister grabbed the first cassette as soon as it was full, and several of us took it inside to watch, even though the reception itself was still going on. Except for the parts featuring oneself, the tape was agonizingly dull. People who presumably had been saying interesting things stopped saying them as soon as the camera pointed at them, and began saying, “Don’t you dare point that thing at me!" or “Testing, testing” or “I can’t believe you’re taping me eating a piece of liver!” or “Party time!” or “Hey, Candid Camera.”
Do people actually watch the videotapes they make? A tape that takes two hours to film requires another two hours to watch, and no one whose life is worth taping has that much free time. Furthermore, a decision to record even a single event has mind-boggling implications. Once you have recorded your child’s fourth birthday party, how can you justify not recording his or her fifth? Taping even a single event forces you indelibly to divide the moments of your life into two nonoverlapping categories: those that are worthy of subsequent viewing and those that are not.
THE popularity of video cameras arises from a simple but potent misunderstanding. Somehow people have gotten the idea that they won’t mind being old so much if they can turn on the TV and see what they were like when they were young. This is not true. The best memories—the ones that actually do comfort people in their later years—are ones that have been allowed to evolve unhindered by documentary proof. When I feel weary and infirm, I often cheer myself up by thinking back on my days as the star of my junior high school football team. These thrilling recollections would be less compelling if they were accompanied by a videotape, which would show that I weighed eighty pounds and spent most of my time on the bench. Memory is better than a video camera, because, in addition to being free, it doesn’t work very well.
As for my own video camera, here’s what I’ve done so far: I haven’t made my inventory yet, because my house seems to be in no particular danger of being destroyed; I have videotaped my golf swing, but the results were so depressing that I have not only given up taping my swing but very nearly given up golf; I have spent about ten minutes videotaping my children, who were interested at first but became bored as soon as they realized that nothing hilarious—such as a cat flushing a toilet or a fat man breaking a diving board—was likely to happen at our house. Then I put my camera back in its case, and I haven’t touched it since.