It's a very interesting thing, isn't it? When you get down to it, a film is just a bunch of people pretending to be other people, reciting very carefully worded lines and performing pre-set actions in an effort to tell a story, which is often (though, of course, not always) completely made-up.
And yet, even knowing this, we often find ourselves profoundly affected by movies. For example, the very end of Runaway Train that left me speechless. Or a movie like Apollo 13 that has me crying (no matter how many times I see it) at the end when the radio silence finally ends and the crew is okay.
How can this be? How is it that one can be left in awed silence, in tears, or with chills running down one's back, or -- well, you get the idea -- if we know that it's just a bunch of people playing a very complex game of make-believe?
I think it all comes down to human nature. Our brains -- the most advanced nervous system in any animal, allowing us conscious thought and emotion -- don't care that it's not actually happening. Our ability to see a story and be emotionally affected by it is one of the wonders of the human mind. It doesn't matter that Manny and Ranken and the train are all figments of our imagination, that they're just actors pretending to be a convict and a prison warden on a prop that's not actually going to kill them. It's a story, and those characters are brought to life by the actors and by our imaginations, allowing us to percieve them as real people in a real situation.
Stories are very powerful vehicles. That has always been my strongest suit as a teacher. I like to tell stories, and I do it well.
ReplyDeleteOf course, what you're really saying here is that humans are metaphor machines. We look for meaning everywhere. Ironic, then, that we are studying a philosophy that states there is no meaning anywhere.