HORROR, VAMPIRES, ALIENS
THE MEANING OF WHAT’S HAPPENING ON THE SCREEN
MAY 20, 2011. Whatever else they do, movies allow people to sit in the dark and experience, from just enough safe distance, the lives of characters they would never inhabit on that other screen called Reality.
People want to feel what it’s like to be all sorts of strange creatures.
Ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, aliens, trolls, androids, wizards, lizards, space gods, tyrants, machines…
People want to feel that.
Objections are made about the effect on the culture. I’m not here, in this article, to argue about that.
I’m focusing on the brilliance of virtual experience.
The audience as actor, living out on the edge, investing tonnage of emotion, stepping into the shoes of weird desires that can’t be played out on the street.
This is theater.
Why do they have to get their juice from movies?
They want to be active and passive at the same time.
You could call this fear, but the fact remains: people want it both ways, simultaneously. There is a kick to it.
“I am and I’m not.” In the same moment.
This is not an aspect of human behavior that has been co-opted and classified by the pseudo-science of psychology. Not yet.
“I am, and I’m not.”
This is actually a state of being.
“I’m sucking the blood from the neck of some naïve idiot, and I’m also sitting in front of my flat-screen chewing a Snickers.”
O joy. O paradise.
How about this as a translation of that dual passive-active state?
I CAN IMAGINE, NO I CAN’T.
I CAN INHABIT ANOTHER LIFE, NO I CAN’T.
I’M AN ACTOR, NO I’M NOT.
The jolt of a car that bounces off three walls and then plunges out over a cliff into a ravine—I’m in the car screaming and dying, I’m the car itself, waiting for the first big crash on the way down, I’m the guy who was originally chasing the car shooting at it—what could be better?
Eventually, for a veteran fan of horror films, the inflicting of neck wounds and the drinking of blood and the burning of suburban homes is what he believes is the best thing he could imagine on his own, if the movies didn’t exist. When ten or 20 average annoying people are crushed under the foot of a giant toaster oven with the face of a medieval gargoyle, it’s a religious moment.
I’m buried in the movie, I’m killing idiots, and I’m eating Milk Duds, honey-clustered peanuts, and naturally, I’m taking my Ritalin. It’s heaven.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, movies have to keep upping the ante, to drag people into the theater. The killings have to be more grisly and sudden, the explosions have to be more intense, and now the glasses have to be 3-D. We’ve got IMAX 3-D. I guess in-the-round holograms are next.
“In the 1930s, in a movie, if you had an actress in a wheelchair and pushed her down a flight of stairs, people thought it was funny. Now it has to be a real woman really falling down stairs.”
Groucho Marx
I’ll take it a stepfurther. Horror movies are a rebellion against reality itself. Social, political, cultural, economic, and physical reality. And being able to play that out, even in virtual terms, is very satisfying to some people. Lots of people.
Taken to the full extreme…if millions of monsters and gargoyles and werewolves and vampires actually roamed the Earth, and if a hundred-year war ensued between them and population of the planet, and if the humans lost, what would be the upshot?
The monsters wold attack one another.
Why? For what?
What are they looking for?
They’re looking for whatever would remain after all reality was destroyed.
That’s their payday.
Not really control, not mastery over slaves, not manipulation.
They believe reality is a basic affront, and they want to wipe it out.
And they’re motivated.
What they couldn’t possibly realize in a million years is the creative version of what they’re feeling: reality is a ultimately product of mind, one work of art among an infinite possible number of works of art. This is the true spiritual tradition of planet Earth, the one that has been twisted and buried and concealed.
It’s not an accident that the most highly controlled large society on Earth, China, has sought to eradicate Tibet, the place where this tradition flourished for a brief time. The bottom-line reason for waging war against Tibet is subconsciously held, of course.
Why do humans find so many ways to refuse the power of their own imagination, which can make new worlds and supersede all rules and regulations that underpin this universe?
Because LOSING has its own attractions. It’s a mode of perception and feeling, and it’s another kind of art.
When people become profoundly sick and tired of that art, but are still addicted to it, they side with the monster. They want to smash every apparatus and system and marker of reality they can find.
Put that on the screen and they’ll love you for it. Set down a gorgeous white blank canvas in front of them, and they’ll do nothing. They’ll think about taking a blowtorch to it.
The world is a suspension bridge held up by the two ends: creation and destruction. All the people are milling around in the middle of the concrete road. They’re telling and listening to stories. Occasionally, a small number of people feel drawn to one end of the bridge or the other. Mostly, though, they tell and listen to stories. The ends of the bridge are covered in vines, which are religion’s attempt to obscure the naked forces.
Occasionally, someone in the middle of the bridge sets off a bomb. But it hasn’t disturbed the structure. Then stories about the bomber proliferate and morph. Large numbers of people sit entranced and listen to those stories. They feel there is something fundamentally wrong about the bridge, and so the prospect of blowing it up is appealing. And they’re right. Something about the bridge is a lie.
The two ends are actually attached, by giant cables, to something that floats in the sky.
Imagination.
One of its minor inventions was the pylons of creation and destruction. A whim on a summer afternoon.
JON RAPPOPORT
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