If the eyes are the windows to the soul do you ever consider how odd it is you can never really close those windows? You can draw the shades over them from time to time, but you can’t close them. The breeze is always blowing its way through those windows bringing with it whatever bits and pieces it has picked up along the way. You’d think that something as valuable as a soul would be better protected. As a matter of fact, there are people out there who know how vulnerable your soul is. These people have made it their personal mission to attack your eyes, to get at your soul. They want to change you down at the most fundamental level. I know this because I’m one of those people. The experience that started my journey towards being one of those people started around the age of three on a dusty old carpet in front of a television.
It sounds scary doesn’t it, this idea that strangers can creep into the place you call home and redecorate. Maybe they’ll even destroy a few things while they’re in there, who knows? Do you believe me yet? Let me give you an example on the extreme end of the spectrum. The tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001 just recently passed. Those of us who weren’t still running around in diapers at the time can recount exactly where we were when we heard the news. I was a freshman in high school at the time. I was getting off the bus when the radio station DJs started talking about how a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I assumed it was a small single engine craft, as someone recently had gotten lost in the fog and done that very thing. So I chuckled to myself, nothing a broom and dust pan couldn’t fix. It was when I saw it that the depth of the situation actually hit me. So now I ask if there had been no media coverage, if for some unknown reason every camera in the world stopped working at that very moment, would we still care as much? Would that tragedy have marked us the way it did? Are you just as capable of being horrified by an artist’s sketch of what happened as you are seeing it in real-time?
I’m a Digital Media Arts major, film production specifically. More importantly I’m a storyteller, and without story there’s just no point to what I do. My job is to take images and press them up against each other. The human mind is wired to constantly find meaning in everything it takes in. All it takes is a single glimpse and whatever message I’ve meant for you will have been delivered. From there it’s up to you to translate. Of course, I can’t force you to look at these images. That’s about as comfortable as a baseball bat to the eyes. No, I need you to be open and receptive to what I’m transmitting, even if you don’t know you’re open and receptive. So I have to hide my intent, wrap it in a guise of entertainment or beauty. I do this by adding a story. It doesn’t have to be a story in the literal sense of beginning, middle, and end. It can be a perpetual story, one of mood and feeling. A single frame can tell a story. A piece of fine-art hanging in a museum tells a story. Maybe I’m making this sound bad, like some kind of optical terrorism. I’m actually just passing along what has been done to me.
I sometimes wonder what these generations of people who’ve only known DVD think of VHS tapes. Those big bricks of black plastic had half the quality and a fraction of the functionality of a DVD. Do they look at them like I would look at an 8-Track tape, with laughing novelty and a sense of technological superiority? When I was a kid VHS was all we had. Well, I won’t bore you with debate of VHS versus Beta, or why the image quality is worth having to change the record sized laser disk halfway through the movie. Let’s just say that for normal people VHS was the only option, and I had a small collection at my disposal. I’ve never had any restrictions on what I could watch. If the tape was there I could play it. I’d usually gravitate towards the films more meant for my age range because the adult stuff just seemed so strange and boring. That didn’t stop me from having a number of R-rated favorites. From the age of three and up it has been nothing but an endless stream of unfiltered images. I remember the house we lived in, the cabinet we kept the tapes in, and the dusty carpet and I’d watch them from. I sometimes wonder what my parents were thinking letting such a young kid dive head first into the entertainment deep end. Maybe they just liked how quiet it made things in the house. Going to a Christian college I often forget that most the people here didn’t have the same freedom I did. They are just now getting to see what I’ve seen, and I find it so odd. It also makes me laugh when I hear about students and parents freaking out over the adult content being shown, as if it’ll make us all a bunch of murdering swearing sexual deviants. I get their logic. If I leave a lily by my window the sun and warmth will bring it to bloom, but should cold or pollution come in through the window the lily will wilt. However, I am not a plant. The only effects I can say came from my time alone with a cabinet full of images is the fact that my sense of humor has been broadened to the point that I can find something funny during even the darkest of times, and that I, unfortunately at times, have an easier time communicating visually than with words. I probably should have gone outside a little more often, and to this day the smell of a VHS tape drums up a bundle of memories. I can’t regret being a direct product of our culture. I can sit here and contemplate just who I would’ve been, how my lily would have grown, had I not been exposed to such things so early. In the end I am who I am, and I’m looking to help influence who you are as well.
Your title reminds me of the first few lines of The Departed, "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me."
ReplyDeleteAnyway,
I love this! Great thoughts and you tell it in such a beautifully simple way! I'm one of those people who were sheltered as a child. The only VHS tapes we owned were Disney movies. I didn't have the freedom that you had. I wonder what I would be like if I had that freedom? Would my values be different? Would I have a totally different outlook on life? How much of me would have been effected?
I don't think your values would have changed, just have become broader. But don't get me wrong, movies only let you absorb a small portion of culture. It's experiencing the real world that will really change you.
ReplyDeleteWhat I really want to communicate with this is that movies don't make a bad person. In fact, being a bad person doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. I know that doesn't make sense, but it continues what we've talked about in class and is something I'll touch on in the next one of these things I do.