Everything opens with a drone shot now.
Last Sunday, I tried watching several true crime documentaries on Netflix, and they all opened with a drone shot. And if they didn’t open with a drone shot — because claiming all of them did is hyperbolic — there was an unjustified drone shot sooner or later. I deeply resented these drone shots; I felt manipulated by these gimmicks that added nothing, when what I wanted was to dive deep into the darkest folds of the human soul, without aesthetic detours. So I ended up logging off from the decaying streaming platform and instead filled the emptiness of my Sunday evening with Match of the Day, fast-forwarding the Gary Lineker bits. At least here I needn’t engage my brain in order to watch. There might have been drone shots too but as I wasn’t really paying attention I can’t confirm or deny them.
Ironically, that I was annoyed by these documentaries made me reconsider my relationship with fiction. “If a genre that is (wrongly) associated with the depiction of truth manipulates you through the use of artifice, imagine what fiction can do to you...” — I speak between quotation marks to myself and this is what actually crossed my mind, as an overpaid footballer scored a volley somewhere in the north of England. And this is how I came to realise that I’ve been slowly drifting away from fiction. The last fiction book I actually finished reading is Le città invisibili, by Italo Calvino, more because I wanted to read Calvino in Italian than because I wanted to read fiction1. This was months ago.