I have a strange relationship with movies. Until I was about nineteen I went
once or twice a week with my buddies in Truro as an entertainment. Then I worked
for a few years as an usher at a playhouse in Halifax where I would watch the
same play ten to twenty times in a few weeks and all of a sudden I found my
ability to suspend my disbelief entirely gone. I would go to the movies and find
myself sitting in a room with 200 strangers aimed at a wall where images
flashed. It could be a classic at Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Theater or the
latest crap staring Molly Ringwald – no good: the arse was truly out of it. I
couldn’t get out of my head that people were paying to get emotionally jerked
around collectively. And so much of the experience of crisis, dramatic and often
violent events never experiencable by average folk. Surely something must stick
and displace parts of reality. The only movies I found as I got older that I
could not suffer this trauma were movies I saw before I had this experience or
movies that were so moronic, like The
Wedding Singer, that it didn’t matter – the point being that you were
supposed to giggle out loud to the point that you were aware of acting stupidly
in front of strangers. It all reminded me of Plato’s ban on fiction nicely
summarized here:
Ironically, Plato was no defender of liberty. In his
Republic, Plato states that in an ideal state, all fables would be censored to
protect the minds of the youth. Censors would reject and prohibit tales they
considered to be bad or misleading. Mothers and nurses would be permitted to
read only fables authorized by the republic. In this utopian state, Plato would
also censor those plays and other works which tell untruths of the gods. He
believed the only function of art was to aid in education and believed very
strongly what might be harmful to the young should be prohibited.
I
am not saying we should have censorship but certainly sympathize with the old
toga man. The pre-eminant role of “being entertained” as a principle of a free
and democractic populace then began to trouble. Like military expenditures on
nuclear warheads, money wasted on half of our entertainment could surely solve
37% of our country’s ills.
The condition may be passing as I enjoyed a normal healthy adult relationship
with Master
and Commander one weekend before Christmas and last night I watched a piece
of 1998 global fear schlock, Deep Impact [now in a way
caught in a pre-September 11th and even a pre-LOTR stasis (Ed.: as illustrated)] 
and, afterwards, suffered the obligatory
night of wondering how far a killer wave caused by a comet hitting the north
Atlantic would reach inland up the St. Lawrence. An appropriate response, I
assume – the safe but realistic experience of fear for my safety and that of my
young children. Slightly bothered sleep. Glad to be back on board as one of the
entertainable, I guess.