Reality without Reality

When motion pictures first became available to the public the simple thrill (perhaps voyeuristically so) of seeing someone doing farm chores was enough to hold an audience spellbound. A century later the often used phrase "it's just a movie" we use to comfort our children, and sometimes ourselves, would sound crazy to the movies first patrons. Their sheer sense of awe was justified by the fact they, along with the rest of humanity, were witnessing the development of the God-like power to see reality without the reality being there. Unimagined dangers were tamed like a cage lion. We have to ask how did moving from a truly "what you see it is what you get world" to a "what you see isn't really there world" affect the minds of movie goers?

With the rare exception of creatures who evolved and live almost exclusively in the dark, sight and therefore image has played a huge role in the way we relate to our world. In the brain's development sight told us what was good to eat, certain foods of bright colors are good to eat and others of darker colors will kill you and sight helped us survive, I.E. big things with fangs and claws are to be strictly avoided. Sight in this way has always told us what is real, "Seeing is believing," and in a world where we as frail creatures owe our ability to evolve by the use of tools and technology to sight, any disconnect for the mind between what is seen and what is real should, so to speak, strip a few gears.

Now granted even the early movie goer realized what they were seeing was or had been real at one time, the original fascination coming from the ability to see what you hadn't been present to originally witness. "It's only a movie" was born out of the fact that a movie could be so affecting to our senses. From the damsel in distress being tied to the railroad tracks to the horrors of men dying on a beach in a war movie we react to the image on the screen with shock, sorrow, tears or joy depending on what is shown to us. The term used most often to describe the spell we fall under when watching a movie is "suspension of disbelief," but I prefer a term used by those who study the effects of computer virtual reality on people. They speak of people entering into a state of "rapture." This state of being transported or carried away, for me, better describes the state we enter into when we watch a movie. I've always joked that a good movie suspends a persons bodily functions as evidenced by the ritual dancing done in lines at the restroom doors after the movie is over. This is only half jest. All of us have had the experience of suddenly after a particularly engrossing movie realizing we have repressed to the back of our minds the incessant call of nature in lieu of the seemingly far more important image before us. Given the fact sight is so important to our survival it is perhaps not surprising we should have such a strong reaction to images placed before us, but we know we are removed from the reality of the scenes hitting our eyes and yet we still slip into rapture. Instead of being driven away by the jarring discontinuity between surrounding and images the mind seems not only drawn to it, but to thrive on it.

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