Paprika by Satoshi Kon (2006) can be thought of as, I suppose, Inception before Inception. The film focusses on a device, the DC Mini, that allows people to view the dreams of others, and inevitably ends up in the wrong hands, the lines between reality and dream inevitably becoming blurred.
I went to see it alone one night a few weeks ago at Lyon’s Institut Lumière, the birthplace of cinema, which frequently hosts retrospective sessions (the theme of the past few weeks: Anime). The sun had just set as I had stepped back into my reality, and I got on the metro D to take me home. This particular metro line late at night can often be a jungle, filled with wild characters. If you were to tell me that there were people who lived aboard, I would not be surprised, and despite the relative emptiness there’s always uneasy movement as these characters drift back and forth, seat to seat, carriage to carriage, dodging the controllers, having conversations in hushed to explosive voices in unrecognizable languages.
One of these guys took his leave from pacing up and down the carriage to come sit next to me, brushing up against me as he did so. He turned to me, one eye visibly more open than the other, his mouth twisted into a crooked shape, smiling shadily, as he uttered “pardon, frère” - I had made the mistake of meeting his eye, and I saw his eyes glance down at my pockets. Let’s be honest, likely nothing would have come of it, but I put my hands into them almost immediately.
Hands in my pockets, staring at the ground under artificial light, listening to nothing except the ambient noise of my surroundings, passing through the folds of my brain without leaving a mark, I suddenly found myself in a memory from some time about ten years ago. I was working at a supermarket at the time, late one night, manning the self-service checkouts. As was typical, it was a quiet night, perhaps 11pm, and there were hardly any customers in our massive store, lit up by white LEDs, lined with the supermarket chains familiar green. No one there save for me and the supervisor, and she can’t have been any older than I am now. I was leaning against one of those registers, my hands in my pockets, staring blankly at the floor beneath me: light grey linoleum, flecked with darker grey dots, reflection from the white lights above. Spaced out, passing time, no thoughts in my mind.
“Take your hands out of your pockets” she said, snapping me out of my haze.
“What?” I replied. We got along well, her and I, and I was a little confused.
“It’s not a good look, leaning there with your hands in your pockets” she said, not looking up from her work, filling out the very miniscule amount of paperwork she was responsible for, as though it were holy writ.
I looked around. How massive and empty this store was cannot be overstated.
What can be overstated was the amount of power which she held. The service supervisor was the soft managerial role of the front-end department while the grown-ups were away. One of the regular plebeians like myself who had been selected to join an elite task force, responsible for making sure the other kids got their 15-minute break, handling the most annoying customers, and going back and forth from the aisles to collect various items.
More important than the extra one dollar and fifty seven cents an hour extra pay they earned, however, was that little bit of power. Being part of that clique, the ten or so of them (I, incredibly, joined that elite task force, an achievement that towers over all of my others) was a big deal. Who was and wasn’t allowed to join their ranks was out of their control, but it certainly was a hot topic of internal discussion: “Did you see that they’re giving M- a supervisor shift in two weeks while D- is away? It’s going to be awful, she’s so lazy, she has no idea what she’s doing” - despite the fact, of course, that in such a big organisation every single process is known and accounted for down to a tee, a mind-boggling number of contingencies in place, and so the actual impact that one 19 year old can have on the business proceedings of a large local branch of one of the biggest corporations in the country is functionally zero, by design.
Yet that title, Supervisor, instilled a sense of power that was felt by them and everyone “beneath” them. Even though all they truly possessed was a slight increase in hourly wage and a minor capacity to direct the movements of the rest of the little drones. But for us, the drones, we would feel the difference between who was supervising that night, even if the actual work was functionally identical, day in, day out. The difference arose due to the demeanour of the “superior”, did they talk to me like a human? Or were they quick to start throwing around their arbitrary power as soon as they took hold of it, such as by making you clean the checkout belts (which was, admittedly, very annoying).
You will never find more dictatorial wielders of power than those in branches of massive corporations. Because of their relative unimportance, they never rarely rock the boat enough to cause serious trouble - it’s functionally impossible to fire someone over incompetence or stupidity. And yet, by virtue of being given power with no actual responsibilities, they often wield it as though they are the master of this little world, yelling at their staff, or otherwise ordering them around, smiling to themselves when the paycheque rolls in, crediting them for their “manager” hours.
Here, in the graveyard of the unambitious, those who have not accepted their lot still seek to be some kind of Napoleon up and down the aisles of the supermarket, wearing their little name badge, making 15 year old employees cry, then bowing their head as soon as a customer expresses any kind of displeasure “yes sir, I’m sorry sir”. Perhaps it speaks to our human desire to exert some form of influence on the world.
That place was a massive part of my world for some 7 years, from ages 15 to 22. I was a sorry-looking kid when I started there, face covered with the worst acne you could possibly imagine, horrendously underweight, wearing thick glasses and braces. By the time I finished, I was nearly done with my first degree, and I had truly grown up walking up and down those aisles, spending countless 8-hour shifts standing at a register (they never once allowed us to sit, mind you).
On a night like that one where I’d been instructed to take my hands out of my pockets, I did some back-of-the-napkin maths and worked out I’d probably served over a million people.
But time goes on, and as the years passed and a distance grew between the supermarket and I, so too did my sensation of these power structures diminish. How could I ever be made to feel inhuman by some goober in a short sleeved collared shirt with a name badge?
And yet when it is your world, your 40 hours a week, they can feel like giants, if you don’t see it for what it is.
When I’d pop back in for a visit in the years that followed, I’d see old faces, and they’d light up, some even taking me around to see all the people who were still there, and we’d shake hands and chat and smile, and see each other as people rather than fellow drones. The last time I did so was a few months ago, my most recent trip back to Australia, my first time stepping foot in that place in over two years. And this time, I saw no one I recognised. None of the familiar faces, those men and women who had patrolled those aisles, filling shelves with chocolates and condoms, making jokes to their fellow employees like “hows it going today mate?” “Living the dream, living the dream”. For whatever reason, a deep sadness took a hold of me, as I realised that all traces of my years there had been washed away, and I had left no mark on this little part of my world.
Nothing left, except the memories that spring forward, as if pulled out of me like some dream-catching device from a 2000’s Japanese movie, on a subway on the other side of the world, and the words that I write, rewrite, rewrite.