And I feel like I have met people like this. Perhaps, almost certainly, I have been like that. People who just aren’t quite there, and you feel this sense of anger because they are so distant. We are wired to feel connection, at least with people we see every day. When they can’t offer it, it feels like they are denying it, and that produces fearangershame. That, in turn, produces social anxiety and withdrawal, or can in people whose foundations are weak.
There is an horror movie playing around here called Midsommar. It is more or less about human sacrifice in contemporary Sweden. Since it is well known some part of our brains does not differentiate movies from reality–if we could not enter into that world, then we would not have the experience–then this experience must be something some people want. For whom is it intended? Who is the audience? What emotional traits are they likely to have?
It seems, reading the summary, that it is about a group of emotionally disconnected, largely dissociated people, all but one of whom are killed, and the last of whom finally feels some completion in watching their destruction. She allows herself access to the anger and violence inside of herself, which she had most likely kept hidden in her shell of a self and face.
I really can’t escape the conclusion that we are breeding monsters, with all these iPhones, with all this screen time, which lacks all the nuance of actual human connection. Anger and fear and shame are accumulating in people who lack the self awareness to realize it, and who find themselves expressing them vicariously by watching movies like Midsommar.
I watched the new Spider Man movie last night. It was OK, but I found it vaguely disturbing that MJ was fascinated by the Black Dahlia murder, where a woman was, as I recall the story, tortured, cut in half, and then the blood drained from her body and the body more or less placed on display. It’s a horrifying image. Peter Parker got her a glass black Dahlia flower.
Quentin Tarrntino’s new movie is about the Manson murders. Tarrentino, cinematically, consistently brings the “ultraviolence” of Anthony Burgess. It’s hard not to see him as a talented psychopath.
How, in such a world, do we reconnect with goodness? With true compassion, true empathy, true kindness, true understanding, true caring? These are my life questions. Asking them pays me no money, wins me no recognition, does not further my career in any way.
But I do have logic. I have always had logic. And my logic tells me these are intrinsically important questions. And my logic tells me that entering back into the flux of feeling will help me recover a very robust intuition which will take me much farther than logic ever could.