the idiot 2003 — an explainer, sort of

the idiot 2003 is, apparently, a film. it is also the year i last successfully changed a lightbulb on the first attempt without involving 911 or my mother, which feels worth marking, in writing, for the record.

writing this from my desk on a wednesday at 4:18pm. the boss is at a vendor lunch that started thirty minutes early, which gives me a window of unusual generosity. dave is on speaker in the background, low volume, on hold with an insurance carrier. let’s go.

so. i typed those four characters into a search bar this morning expecting, frankly, a meme. what i got, instead, is a russian television mini-series. ten parts. nearly ten hours. dostoevsky. a man named prince myshkin who comes back from switzerland after being treated for a mental illness and walks straight into a fortune, two complicated women, a murder, and a great deal of weather.

i did not know. most of you did not either. it is a minor entry in a catalogue of films called the idiot — counting the kurosawa, the soviet one from the late fifties, the bortko one we are discussing, and the elif batuman novel that keeps appearing in my searches because the algorithm does not respect categories.

the idiot 2003: a russian television mini-series directed by vladimir bortko, ten episodes long, based on the dostoevsky novel of the same name. prince myshkin returns from switzerland, inherits money, falls in with two women, watches a friend lose the plot. it carries an 8.3 on the relevant film database, which is higher than most of my own opinions about myself.

THE IDIOT 2003. IS. NOT. A FILM. IT IS A TV SHOW.

what the idiot 2003 actually is, once you stop guessing

here is the part that i find quietly satisfying: it is not a movie at all. it is a mini-series. ten episodes. you can verify this on the relevant film database entry for the bortko adaptation, which lists the runtime as roughly nine hours and fifty minutes if you watch every episode in a row, which nobody i know has done, including me, including dostoevsky.

the protagonist is prince myshkin, the idiot of the title. he is called that not because he puts forks in microwaves — that’s a separate post — but because he is too kind for the room. he believes people. he assumes the best. he asks questions sincerely. in nineteenth century russia, as in present-day open-plan offices, this is reliably mistaken for low intelligence — which is, by the way, not what the word actually means, but is what people use it for.

carla passed my desk this morning on her way back from the printer with a stack of pages still warm — i could feel the heat off them — and she paused for two and a half seconds to glance at my screen, see the title of this draft, and say, without breaking stride: “is that a documentary.” then she kept walking. carla on a wednesday is economical.

why a film with that title is, structurally, my problem

the year is, for me, a personal benchmark. not because i was a different person then — i wasn’t, i was already this, the version of me that buys yoga mats — but because of one verifiable accomplishment. in 2003 i changed a lightbulb on the first try. no extra trips. no calls to my mother. no emergency service involved. the bulb went in. it lit up. it stayed lit. i was, for one clean evening, briefly competent.

i have not, in the intervening twenty-three years, repeated the feat. one time, i changed the wrong bulb in the wrong room and didn’t notice until two days later when i walked into a bathroom wall. that apartment is now a memory. but the apartment of 2003 — the small one, kitchen that vibrated when the upstairs neighbor walked, radiator that hissed in three keys — that’s where the bulb worked.

the dave call, briefly, because it is happening behind me

dave is on speaker, four feet away, on hold with an insurance carrier. he has been on hold for nineteen minutes. the hold music is a saxophone version of a song that was, in its original form, already medium. dave thinks saxophones are “the wine glass of instruments,” which is a phrase he uses too often, considering he does not own a wine glass.

he is here because he claims his car is making a noise that the policy does or does not cover, depending on whether the noise is mechanical or “behavioral.” those are his categories. he keeps miming a hanging gesture at the speakerphone. i keep nodding.

the monday call, as part of the overall record

my mom called on monday. she always does. more reliable than rent, more reliable than weather. i said something stupid, which she registered with the small pause that is, for her, the equivalent of a full diagnostic.

i said i was thinking about getting another yoga mat. she said “another.” i said yes. she said “you have three.” i said one is in storage. she said “you do not have storage, you have a couch.” she was right; the third yoga mat lives under that couch and has, by now, achieved the kind of geological permanence usually reserved for small mountains. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

the call ended at 6:04pm, which is four minutes past the rule that sundays should end at 6 PM, a hot take i have been quietly carrying for years. those four extra minutes were her saying, without saying, “and another thing.”

what the idiot 2003 has in common with the lightbulb

both succeeded quietly. no parade. the bortko mini-series sits on a database with an 8.3 next to it and a list of episodes most people will never click on. the bulb sat in a fixture in an apartment i no longer rent, and it lit up reliably for several months until i moved out.

what they have in common is the absence of a witness. nobody filmed me, on a step-stool that wobbled less than expected, doing one thing correctly. there’s just my account, written from a desk on a wednesday morning, by a man who is the only available source. that’s the texture of most people’s lives. the thing happened, you remember it, nobody else does, and there’s no document.

findings, by which i mean three short sentences and a shrug

one. it is a russian tv mini-series, ten parts, dostoevsky, well-reviewed by the people who watch ten-hour russian tv mini-series. for the source novel and the character of myshkin, see the post about idiot, the word, properly defined. the elif batuman novel by the same name is a different beast; i wrote about that one, and i still have not read it. and if you are looking for the karl pilkington show with a similar-sounding title, that’s a separate cluster entirely.

two. 2003 is the last year i changed a lightbulb correctly, and i bring this up because the year keeps showing up in my life the way certain phone numbers do — not often, but with weight.

three. minor things deserve more credit. a mini-series with a small audience. a lightbulb in a small kitchen. a monday call that ran four minutes long. shrug.

dave just hung up. the carrier wants a written statement about the noise. he is going to dictate it to me at lunch. i will edit it.

if you came looking for a review of the bortko mini-series, this was not that. if you came for the spongebob bit, that’s a different post. if you came because of the year 2003 and the small private things you remember from it, you and i are, briefly, the same person.

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