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Are we addicted to the drama of death?
The more I ponder the subject, the more I see that we as a culture are addicted to death. We cannot live without it. The assumption of death is our security blanket that keeps us from applying in-depth investigative techniques to figure out if people really, truly die when their body life ends.
I come to this conclusion after countless hours reading about the insights and adventures of people who have had classic near-death experiences (NDEs). When these people died, albeit temporarily, their conscious minds left their bodies.
Once they were resuscitated, they had awesome stories to tell, although they often encountered statements like, “Oh, that was just the drugs, dear.”
Addicted to death means that we are resisting the massive anecdotal evidence piling up (like here) that death is a transformation, not a termination. We like the mortality system as it is. We prefer our scary stories of pain and suffering.
And God said, "Let there be light in my movies!"
Recently I did a blog piece about same ol’ movie plots. I call them movies stuck in Idea Jail because they stay imprisoned in a philosophical jail cell. Avatar, for example, despite it taking place in 2154, plays a lot like Dances with Wolves. I remember chuckling when one of the characters said, “What’s wrong with this picture?” as if that expression had survived 150 years of new slang.
Here I want to explore some movies I would like to see.
I would like to see a romantic comedy (or even drama) where you have a smart female lead who is happily single. She doesn’t hunger for “one true love.” She has great self-esteem and an open heart. She isn’t angry at men and while she’s not monogamous, she has a deep spiritual connection with her God. Her sexual expression is intimately connected with her desire to channel love to heal the planet one heart at a time.
Idea Jail keeps the mind stuck in a death rut
(Disclaimer: It’s a good point here to say that if you haven’t seen Avatar and plan to, you may want to bypass this post until after you’ve seen it.)
Despite what this may seem like, this is not specifically criticism of blockbuster films like Avatar. They’re fine. Rather, as someone who has studied the media for decades, I am acutely aware that much of what I’d like to see in movies hasn’t made it to the big screen. I would love to see movies step out of Idea Jail and break new ground by overcoming stereotypes.
I recently wrote about the nature of conflict in drama, that creating dramas is usually about creating artificial conflicts for characters to deal with. I questioned the long-term impact of a movie-goes, TV-watcher, and book reader mentally digesting the subliminal messages that life is constant conflict.
Let’s talk about this from a law of attraction perspective. If our media does not give us positive, exciting visions, it does not help us create positive, exciting futures. It has been my long-held view that a great service the arts could perform is to provide positive visions that can inspire people. As it is, the formula is to sometimes show happy-ending triumph, but along the way characters are often beaten up something fierce. Avatar is a great example.
I'll take visionaries over snarks
Just fine, thanks.
I am an advocate of hope and change. I remember watching the special program put on by the Obama campaign just before the election. I was leaking tears at a phenomenal rate considering the activity I was involved in at the time: listening to some politician speak.
I can’t recall that a politician ever moved me to tears before Barack Obama did. And not just once. It was embarrassing how easily I succumbed to his message and charisma.
Hope and change resonates with me because I am creative and loving. I want to see diversity and harmony and innovation and inspiration in my country and on my planet.
Even before the election I realized that one of the reasons why I got so emotional during some of Barack Obama’s speeches was that there wasn’t much in all of Televisionland that spelled out visions of hope and (positive) change.
Many miracles don't make the news
This is going back to the basics. When you choose to watch the news, do you have any idea what you are implicitly agreeing to watch?
Essentially you are agreeing to watch what a small group of people have decided is in your public interest to watch. They decide what the news is.
Supposedly, the news we watch and read is about real life. It’s puffed up to be the truth, just the facts. We’re supposed to be more informed as a result of our exposure to it. But if you stop to look at what material you’re habitually ingesting in our news reports, how much of it works as important information to know?
It’s often suggested that not watching the news makes one a current affairs dunce. Other thinkers, especially like Wayne Dyer, suggest that passing on the nightly news improves a person’s mental health.
The gods may be lovers
The classic way for a civilization from outer space to conquer Planet Earth, as we’ve seen in countless movies and TV shows, is to use some ultra-modern form of Earthling-style barbarism. You know, shock and awe us with their ray guns of mass destruction. Blow us up real good.
I see that as same ol’ Earthling mentality dressed up in a different space suit. That was probably my biggest complaint with Star Trek. Technology had advanced at warp speed but humans and all those bad other beings had the same duke-it-out fight mentality we saw in Bonanza.
Why don’t we start thinking out of Idea Jail on this? Let’s conceive of a highly advanced race as perhaps having changed the game plan on visitations. Maybe they conquer (if you want to use that word) via pleasure principles.
Mental Poison Dispenser
As an aspiring novelist. I read my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose. Time and again the writing instructors say that if you want to write a best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.
Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a selling novelist, the industry demands that you make your protagonists squirm. Make ‘em suffer. Make ‘em miserable.
The flip side of that writing advice that I seldom see talked about is the psychological impact all that manufactured conflict has on readers. The same, of course, can be said for movie-goers and TV viewers because screenwriters work with the same advice to sell their screenplays.
Translation: the media that you ingest as an entertainment consumer has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer conflict. It is a formula built into the system.
Simple pleasures don't cost a paycheck
Over much of my life, my lifestyle has been material moderation. I’ve lived in nice but modest houses, driven nice but modest cars, and enjoyed comfortable but reasonably priced living.
Some of the time that was based on a deliberate choice that the high-paying staff writing jobs I had were great for producing income but bad for spiritual morale. I loved the money, but I dreaded going to work because I did not have any emotional involvement with the words i was writing. It was just a job.
Some of the time it was the economy, usually after just being laid off or trying to find work when there were few good jobs around. I found myself earning just enough money to get by, but not enough to splurge on a bunch of extras.
I generally found that much of the time when I was in the worst shape financially, I was not in the worst shape emotionally. In fact, some of those periods were more exciting and fulfilling than when the money flowed copiously.
TV sucks
I enjoyed watching This Emotional Life on PBS. It was a six-hour documentary on human emotions shown over three days.
In the second episode there was a scene where a young woman was being treated for severe depression. She was being given an evolved variation of the shock treatment that was made such a vision of evil in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. According to the documentary the technique has progressed greatly and it has been scientifically shown that this therapy actually stimulates the re-growth of brain cells in the part of the brain where depression has reduced brain cells.
But the thing that got to me was that when the young patient came home from the hospital after her therapy treatments, she would park herself in front of the TV and zone out.
Let’s make sure you got that. In front of the TV!
I was startled to see that and wondered why the medical community didn’t have some alternatives for people undergoing treatment for depression.
In the 1980s my sister was very much into rendering realistic works of art in colored pencil. She would travel around Northern California taking snapshots of great rock formations, which she would then draw. These were incredible pieces.
She took several drawings of rock formations to an art gallery for consideration. She was told that they were too sexually suggestive and therefore not suitable for showing in the gallery.
Talk about being locked up in Idea Jail.
A realistic portrait of natural rock formations available to anyone’s viewing pleasure in the park was too sexually explicit to hang on a wall?
