Total Viewer Experience
by Gauraa Shekhar
7 A.M.
My husband and I are sitting across the room from each other. We are both on our phones, two thumbs swiping up against greasy silence. There is a brief moment, and he won’t admit to it, but there’s a second where our eyes catch and we look away quickly, pretending it didn’t happen. Later, I get a DM from him saying, hey, wanna, like, do something?
I linger in the chat box for a minute or two, and then reluctantly type out a half-hearted, lowercase ‘s u r e’. I am unable to muster enough enthusiasm to include an exclamation point. The truth is, I don’t want to, like, do anything. I am always too-tired, too-anxious, and since a mysterious ache blossomed along my shoulder last week, too-pained. But I love my husband, so I put the phone down.
We then do what we always do, which is: spend the following half hour discussing various parameters of Something We Could Do before ascertaining there’s nothing really left to do but watch TV. My husband and I have been married for a little less than one year, the majority of which has been spent under quarantine. I imagine us growing old like this, in front of the TV set, as the couples we watch on TV often do, and it makes me sad. I think for a minute, Well, at least sports are cancelled. Then I wish I could take the thought back.
My husband is the kind of person who expects you to actually watch TV when you’re watching TV. He believes in the Total Viewer Experience (his favorite film is The Prestige), and he will ruthlessly hit pause if I pick up my phone to refresh my inbox. Under normal circumstances, I love this about him.
I am of the Laundry Folding Movie persuasion. Show me a comfort movie starring Greg Kinnear as Dad. Show me Paul Rudd and Courtney Love making out in a dingy bathroom stall. Show me Ryan Reynolds as an advertising agent with artfully framed Yo La Tengo posters on his wall. Any early aughts rom-com with a respectable B arc and a bad Bill Clinton body double—something easy and dumb but kind of enjoyable—I’ll take it! I’ll put it on in the background and make a sandwich to it!
We settle on (read: I guilt him into) watching 10 Things I Hate About You, a movie I haven’t seen since high school, but remember once loving. I find that I am still trying to preserve some element of ~ cool ~ in front of my husband, so I don’t tell him this movie is the reason I picked up a copy of The Feminine Mystique (and also why I’m still on the mailing list for one-hit-wonder Boston band Letters to Cleo).
Minutes into the opening credits—kitschy nineties font pixelating to “it’s been one week since you looked at me…”—we relax. Here’s Julia Styles playing an upper middle-class Riot grrl in Seattle. She likes indie rock, goes to poetry readings at feminist bookstores, and spends a decent chunk of time trying to convince her dad to let her go to Sarah Lawrence College. It checks out? Everyone at this school is rich—crisp fifty-dollar bills in pockets—except bad boy Heath Ledger, who looks too old to be playing a high school senior anyway. And which is sad to think about, since Heath Ledger died at twenty-eight.
Eventually, my husband and I manage a segue into Heath’s accent: is it Australian or English? I say, Well, he is Australian, so it would make sense that his accent is Australian, too. My husband disagrees. He argues that Ledger is British, and his accent has a strain of London to it. At no point do we consult the internet to find out. But it feels kind of nice to argue about nothing. Like we did last summer, over $5 shot-and-beer dive deals with our friends. Suddenly, we’re watching rich kids in fancy dresses at prom, swaying to Very White Bands, and we’re making fun of it all.
The next morning, I wake up at dawn, the pain in my shoulder continuing to bloom. I pace the length of our hallway, walk into walls, until I make it to the couch. The TV, still on, poses a question in the dark, one I don’t have the answer to: Who Is Watching?
