There is a popular idea that our minds are like computer hard drives, continuously storing information from the moment we first draw breath, which would mean a person could conceivably remember any and every moment of their life. I don’t subscribe to this theory, as it assumes memory is a flawless, unblemished record when in truth memory is an odd, unreliable thing that is easy to warp, both by others and ourselves.
The computer brain theory also supposes that there is an objective reality that all “normal” beings perceive in the exact same way, another citation needed notion as far as I’m concerned. I’m more partial to the notion that consciousness is formed over time, and that in some way we reconstruct it at the dawn of every day. Think about the groggy strangeness you experience when you first wake up, how you need a few moments to remember where you are—a sensation that could be interpreted as your brain reforming the world as you have come to know it.
If consciousness is in fact a construct developed over a lifetime, the reason why our earliest memories are inaccessible is because our perception of the world as adults is so radically different than that of a baby. Infants haven’t yet formed their personal consciousness, and don’t understand there is a difference between themselves and the rest of the world. If we could recollect infancy it would likely be as basic sensory perceptions rather than the more complex visual/verbal nature of memories formed later. These “memories” would feel so bare and so strange to us they would seem almost alien.
For this reason, I’ve long been fascinated by memories I have of what I’ll call the Liminal Time of my earthly existence—preschool age, when I was learning language, learning what things outside myself were called, learning how to tell others what I was thinking, learning to recognize the very act of thinking and differentiate it from external actions like talking and walking. I have many memories of this time but they have an odd flavor, rich in surface detail yet with an undercurrent of strangeness as 3-to-4-year-old me struggled to understand where I was and what I was doing. The indoor playground at my preschool. A carpet store where I was dragged for one Saturday afternoon that felt like it was 9 years long. A promo for a local news story that scared me. A family party where aunts and uncles laughed at things I didn’t think were funny. I was just enough of the Me I would become to perceive and retain these sensations to this day, but I was also just enough Not Me for the memories to feel uncanny now.
Being who I am, television comprises a large number of these Liminal Time memories—usually not kids shows, but brief glimpses of grown-up programming that confounded me. Among these some of the most enduring are hazy recollections of a TV movie called The Electric Grandmother. The tale of a grieving family gifted the titular “relative,” it debuted in January of 1982, when I would have been firmly in my preschool era. I don’t know if I watched it then or was made to watch it later, perhaps in school. Though this would have been the Filmstrip Era (not yet supplanted by the TV With VCR On Wheels Era) I absolutely was made to watch afterschool specials and other TV offerings in the classroom.
Regardless, I was definitely aware of The Electric Grandmother‘s existence because I have distinct memories of certain scenes from it that both frightened and compelled Little Kid Me. In particular: a scene of the robotic grandmother siting in a rocking chair while she was plugged into a wall to recharge, and another scene where she is delivered to the family in some kind of shiny coffin. In pre-internet days, when these images would flit across my mind, I would wonder if The Electric Grandmother was an actual movie or something I’d only dreamt. I wanted to confirm the scenes that would poke my brain late at night or early in the morning were things I’d actually seen, but the feeling these images gave me were so unsettling I also feared encountering it again.
When I decided to do this TV project, The Electric Grandmother was high on my list of films to visit—or maybe revisit, I wasn’t quite sure. Yet I also had trepidations about watching it for the first time as an adult. I knew it would be an odd experience, and one I’d have trouble capturing in words due to the dreamlike nature of my memories. Having now watched it, I can definitively say yes, that experience was weird, on multiple levels and for multiple reasons.
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