I found myself quite firmly planted on memory lane recently. I had reason to go hunting for the old TV series Family from the 1970s (trying to figure out whether its theme song was memorable, if you must know), and I found that the entire run, pilot to finale, is available on YouTube. Now, I'm not one who normally binge watches in the Netflix Era. In fact, thus far I have managed to avoid that particular marathon entertainment. I have until now, that is. I'm not too far into it yet. I've watched the first six episodes so far, and I've noticed several things about them that have me determined to go through it start to finish. The most noticeable thing that grabbed me in the beginning was the sound. Conversations developed slowly and the scenes had that peculiar thing that many films from the late 70s had: silence. It was eerie, not being manipulated into feeling what the director wanted with mood-setting musical cues. At first I thought it had been re-recorded in a studio to achieve the utter stillness of the sound, until a scene in the fifth episode, with the two male leads shifting in their leather chairs as they spoke, making the ubiquitous farting noises that come with that motion. I decided then it was recorded live and left unaltered. It was a little disconcerting, at first, watching something so totally quiet. It reminded me of John Carpenter horror movies of the same time period. If you have ever watched The Fog, Halloween, or The Thing, you know that the silence is as much a terrifying character as the actual boogeymen. After a while the slow, quiet cadence became familiar, and I was absorbed in the family dynamics, particularly of the teenage son who seemed to float between growth-spurt hunger and a near-constant existential crisis about whether he would ever finish his novel and become a real writer. (Naturally I identified with him on that.)
After the fifth episode, everything changed. The oldest daughter was recast, tiny pre-adolescent Kristy McNichol shot up in height and her voice changed, and someone got to the director and sound editor and changed the whole feel of the series. Suddenly the trite musical cues were there, and the dialogue was zippier. I felt betrayed. It left me wondering about noise and silence in my life. I struggle with it constantly. I usually have the television on, just for the background noise. I've been known occasionally to sleep with it on, but only if I'm napping during the day. It helps drown out the sound of my tinnitus, and that comforts me. But sometimes I wonder whether the tinnitus would fade away on its own if I could stand total stillness, like I can feel when I study these films from forty years ago. There was only one phone in a household then, usually just one television, and it wasn't on all day. Computers weren't always plugged in, chargers weren't hanging off of every wall. Central air conditioners weren't chugging through cycles all day and night. The sources of constant electronic whine, like I hear every hour of every day, were absent. But at the same time, houses themselves made so much more noise, and the creaks and rattles were a kind of music in their own way. Houses then were not nearly so "tight" as they are now. Insulation was lacking. Floors sounded hollow when you walked on them, but doors sounded solid. I find myself missing the sound of the spring on the screen door from my old house in Oklahoma, whenever I hear the hydraulic hiss of a storm door closing now. I want so much to have a big, old farmhouse, something built a hundred years ago, just to have some of those sounds back. But though we have a contract on the condo, and are moving forward with the sale, old farmhouses are not coming on the market. At least, not in my price range. And if one did, the competition for it would be fierce. I don't have the kind of cash to throw around that it would take to land one. So I'm stuck watching this peek into 1976 on the Internet, and trying to pry loose my auditory memories from my childhood. They are in there, if I dig deep enough.
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