Movies – How do they move us?
I was having a great discussion with a few friends the other day. We had gotten on the topic of movies and the incredible power they have to influence our feelings and emotions. It’s incredible really. Think of those moments when you’ve really been drawn in to a movie. Usually you don’t even realize it, it kind of catches you off guard. You suddenly realize that you’ve been holding your breath for the last minute, or that you’re about to fall off the edge of your seat. It’s wild when you think about. We know going into a movie that we’re about to see fiction. There’s absolutely no illusion of reality here. We know this is fake. So you would think it shouldn’t be able to affect us so intensely. Yet time and time again, it does.
So we were throwing back and forth some ideas of why this might be, what it is about movies that makes us buy into them so easily. We came up with a few intriguing ideas, and one stood out as being very interesting and potentially pretty valid.
That Guy with the Hat on VH1
I don’t know if anyone out there actually spends a significant amount of their time watching VH1’s reality shows, but there’s one running right now called “The Pick Up Artist.” (I promise this will relate to the topic I started, just stick with me for a paragraph or two.) The show, if you haven’t seen it, features this guy who goes by the moniker “Mystery” and is apparently the guru on picking up women. They hand him a bunch of socially awkward 25 year old virgins and he teaches them his trade to varying degrees of success. The show is somewhere between hilarious, pathetic and oddly voyeuristic, and I’ll admit I’ve watched more than one episode. Some of the guys on there are the sort of car wreck you just can’t look away from.
Anyway, one of the concepts that “Mystery” introduces to his students is the idea of a “false disqualifier.” Baiscally, in the first few mintutes of approaching a beautiful woman, they are supposed to throw in some kind of comment that disqualifies them as a “potential partner.” It could be as simple as “you know why we’d never work? You’re way to nice for me.” The thought is that if you can get her not to think of you as potential she won’t feel threatened by your presence, and will relax her defenses, allowing you to flirt with her.
So the that’s the concept of a “false disqualifier.” Keep that in your mind, we’ll come back to it. You can forget the Mystery man in the fuzzy hat. We’re done with him.
Keeping Tabs on Reality
I have wild dreams. I mean wild. Long, involved, epic, intricate dreams that resemble movies written by cracked out new-age artsy types. I remember them often too, rarely is there a night where I don’t remember at least one dream. However, I almost never lucid dream. (Again, I promise I’ll tie this all together at the end. Just trust me.)
The thing is, I’ve always wanted to lucid dream. Who wouldn’t? Once you realize you’re dreaming you can pretty much go nuts, or even if you don’t have that “I can fly if I want” kind of control that some people have, you can at least fully appreciate the crazy things going on.
So a few weeks ago I decided to check out some literature on lucid dreaming and see if there are any techniques for inducing it, that kind of thing. Along with a few other resources, my search led me to a site called Dream Views. Now it didn’t take long for me to lose interest in trying to keep a dream journal and train myself to lucid dream, but there was one idea that stuck in my head. Reality checks.
A reality check is just that, a simple assessment of whether or not what’s going on around you at any given moment is “real.” According to the website, we do this naturally on occasion in everyday life. Most often when we’re surprised or when things don’t make sense. It’s as simple as thinking you heard someone say something odd and asking “wait, what?”
Dream Views reccomends training yourself to perform reality checks often as a great way to train yourself to lucid dream. For example, if you can get used to doing things like checking your watch to make sure that the time it shows makes sense with how long it’s been since lunch, checking to see if lights work, or looking at a sign twice to make sure it still says the same thing during your everyday life, you’ll start to do it in your dreams as well. This increases the chance that you’ll notice that something is up – like “hey, my watch says 2pm, but it’s dark out…” – and realize that you’re dreaming.
So how am I gonna relate Pick Up Artists and Lucid Dreaming to Movies?
This is the part where I exclaim “I’m so glad you asked!” even though you probably didn’t. But here’s the basic idea.
I think the screen is sort of a false disqualifier. When we sit down to watch a movie, we know from the get go that we’re not looking at anything real. We don’t feel any need to make judgements about what is real and what isn’t in a movie, because we know that none of it is. So we relax – that’s what we’re there to do after all, relax and enjoy – and we stop making reality checks. We drop all of our defenses and open ourselves up to whatever input is shot at us. We’re not going to actually believe the events on the screen are taking place, but while we’re watching that horror movie, we’ll let all the signals of fear, tension and anxiety right in, so that when that frightening face appears in the window we’re ready to jump out of our seats. Or we’ll get wrapped up in that love story and accept all of the passion, desire, joy and grief that’s being flashed at us so that when x has to leave y at the end we feel almost as heartbroken as the characters.
It’s that obvious realization that everything is fake that makes us drop our gaurds. If you look at it from that angle, its no wonder some movies can effect our emotions in such powerful ways.
