I don't watch movies like 'Precious' for the same reason I don't go to the Holocaust Memorial. I can't compartmentalize the emotions, I can't get the distance right. The horror and the anger and the sadness and the fear becomes my own and I don't know how to leave it at the door and walk back out into my life. Extreme emotions change me the way that extreme pressure melts rock.
I lack something that other people seem to have. Is it a switch? I don't understand how people can watch realistic abuse and then go to the grocery store, out to dinner, home. I can't seem to tell myself that it isn't real, that it is Hollywood. Replica airplanes, fat suits, child actors. Wasps for other people are bees for me; I am stung and the barb stays with me, embedded.
I try not to feel too deeply. I exercise a lot. I try and get regular sleep. I don't drink too much now. I used to feel wildly. Enormous fluctuations from high to low. Unbridled happiness at times, passion, lust, euphoria. But I would also feel such sadness. There was no room inside my chest for all of my sadness so it spread and touched everything that I touched. And I made the people around me hurt and miserable. And then I got older. I aged out of my hysteria and my joy and my sadness. I aged out of my crazy self and into a stranger. A stranger that exercises and sleeps and doesn't drink too much.
I am an emotional creature, as Eve Ensler would say. I can feel the things you feel inside you. I feel things that are not even real, emotions created on a sound stage in California, in a music video, a commercial for coffee. I am afraid that this makes me crazy. Akin to hearing things that are not real, seeing things that don't exist. I feel insane as myself so I've traded for contained estrangement. I choose exercise and sleep. And I don't drink too much. I don't laugh too loud. I don't say the first thing that I think of. I don't watch PETA commercials. I don't make eye contact with the homeless. I don't read about the war. I don't look at pictures of the Gulf. I don't. I turn away. I turn off. I exercise. I sleep. I don't I don't I don't. I don't exist too much.
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1 comment:
I shall comment. This movie bothered me. That probably doesn't mean much coming from a person that watched Anti-Christ, but that wasn't a realistic film. "Precious" was and it wasn't even "inspired" by a true story. It was real stuff that actually happens and this guy just thought to make it a movie. I think the big picture is that we've grown to view, create or act out the worst, and that problem reaches to all the things you mentioned.
A movie like "Precious" is a good thing to avoid. And it is good to be guarded against the filth that's pedaled to us daily. On the other hand, we can't shut it out if there's something we can do to change it. I don't have a good answer for those things, but it's just a thought. Bothersome world we live in.
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