Immersion and the Urge to Flinch

Today promises to be an at-home sort of Saturday, with movies and some writing and a good bit of reading to boot; one of those days you eat cold leftovers and sit by yourself and enjoy the way the sun sets. The movie store didn't have what I was looking for (inspiration to get Netflix finally, at least), but I did wind up with a classic movie, whose plotline happens to revolve rather tightly around incest. And this got me to thinking, which means it got me to posting...

Given my proclivities, conversations turn to books and films pretty quickly—compatibility in friends and lovers is, after all, one part chemistry and two parts complaining about the same things—and something I have been noticing of late in these conversations is some variation on this sentence: "I've learned to just hide through the violence in movies".

I mean no offense to the people who say this, but I do not get this attitude. Not the attitude of violence or grimness or terrible behavior affecting them—that's called "still being human". What I don't understand is the capacity to divorce oneself from the proceedings on the page or screen; to flip past something or fast-forward through it or to hide behind one's significant other until it is over.

To me, all entertainment is a ritual of change. When I open the book or hit Play or enter the gallery, it is a surrender of control; a tacit contract that I will go wherever it is the work is attempting to take me, and will not attempt to take back control until after the journey is over. It is, if you will, a low-impact legal hallucinogen, a chance to experience the world through a fresh pair of eyes.

And what an artist wants to show us is not always pleasant. The world isn't always like a handjob from a magical princess; sometimes animals get tortured and babies die in the cradle and people give their one true love AIDS. And so, too, sometimes art is about this dirtier, uglier side of the human condition; and sometimes art has to take you through that place to show you the wonders of it.

To reject this wholly is not something I would do, but it is something I would understand. Not everyone views it the way I do, and not everyone needs their entertainment to be transformative; and certainly, sometimes the darkness came to them without the courtesy of being contained by two covers or a screen. But to me, partially rejecting something, filtering one's experience of it...this is like putting on sneakers and not tying the shoelaces, or not draining pasta before you add sauce to it: something fundamental is being removed that renders what could be a deeper or more useful experience merely somewhat functional.

This is not to say I exult in the terrible; to me, the terrible is and should be just another implement in the artist's toolkit, not the entirety of brush, paint, and canvas. I hate the torture porn genre as much as the next person with a working stomach, because it has nothing to say except "Look at all this gore!"

This is not to say, either, that these moments do not affect me—they very much do. But I consider movies that make me wince and cringe and curl up to be every bit as powerful and useful to my experience as movies that make me laugh, or cry, or surge with adrenalin. They are all emotional outbursts; they are all facets of our existence in this crazy little strip of time.

So I'll keep listening to "Polly" by Nirvana, and "Samson" by Regina Spektor; and I'll keep watching the man get his limbs sawed off in Watchmen and Junior Roark get castrated in Sin City, and read vivid descriptions of torture and chewing off one's own fingernail. Because as much as I may wince and mewl, I think that these things are as valuable as love; and I don't want to end life feeling like I came at it with blinders. And when these things happen on screen I'll let people hide behind me; but I will never, ever understand it.