So...I should say something about these little diminutive paw prints in the snow...but the snow is gone and long gone are the animal tracks that left them and the animal...probably a busy raccoon wandering around in search of a seed or two. But no i am thinking more about something else...like movies. I love movies and watch them every night.
The paradox about movies however is that movies are providing the action and i am the one not moving...I am sitting still in a passive state...yet the movie is all over the screen bursting out of the container. This is interesting. My body is perfectly still and yet my mind is engaged in all kinds of action from the story on the screen. My brain is all over the place. I can not keep it still. It is feeling the emotions and watching the actions, whatever they may be in the film. I might be flying in a plane or speeding along in a racing car, or bouncing on the back of a wild camel ride. I could be chasing my lover down a busy street, or swimming in shark infested waters...my life for 120 minutes is guarantee not to be boring...and I am definitely busy....my mind is a buzz with activity.
Check it out. My mind is abuzz with activity, but not my body. My body is strapped in the cock pit, unmoving, immobile and not going anywhere. When you think about it movies put us in an abnormal state of being. One part of our body, our mind is busy and the other part of our body, the body itself is stone still. This certainly must have an effect on humans, in the past, in the present or in the future; it has to have an effect on humans.
Maybe we are like those raccoon paw prints...frozen in time on the snow...they tell us that something was there, but now is not there, and yet we know there was some kind of activity at one time. Those little paw prints are representation of activity, motion, the recorded movie of the animal.
On the other side of this paradox is the people who are in the film. Their bodies are in motion, but I think their minds are not in sink with the activity in the story. They are pretending to be what we see, but that is not really what their minds are about. They are like dislocated characters. There bodies are being used to tell a story...and their minds are irrelevant, except for the portion of their minds that are used for motion, or the expression of a few lines of prescripted words. These people take their real lives out of the context of their normal reality and give it up for a few fleeting moments on recorded film.
The audiences idea of these actors and actresses, certainly is not the same as the self concepts that the actors and actresses feel about themselves. We arrive at our conscious destination with bits and pieces of personalities and characters all split up into time, and film and pretense.
The effect of this has a social impact on the public viewers and the question is: who is responsible for the social impact or the consequences of our various interpretations of our perceptions of the story and the characters we veiw in the movies. A movie moves us...but how? What happens to all that filmed information that slides on through our brains? Where does it go and what happens to the experiences that we have watched while we were sitting still and our brains were engaged in all the motion on the screen?
Do we become different if we do not sit and watch a movie? What happens? Do we become the movie? Do we become active in our own stories and suddenly regard our own lives as important or more interesting than the action we watch on the screen? So if I stop watching movies, do I go watch something else? Or do I find an activity that now engages my brain and my body and makes me feel alive?
Movie watching is a passive sport, at least for our own bodies. If the movie has lots of action and our brains are feeding on all the stimulation it might be that we need a more exciting life style and perhaps we seek out visual entertainment that makes us feel more active, or alive, or vital or knowledgeable, or in the case of comedies...a happier person.
Some of us may have very ordinary and routine lives. Movies offer variety on many different need levels, such as a boon to our emotions, or an inspiration to our hearts, or other adventures of our brain contents, be whatever they may be. We should realize there are many more folks around that watch movies than perform in them. I dare say that some people are leading more active lives and from this concept we draw our social heros. We follow one or two people like shop lizards. The few represent the many by the rest of us. In this regard we fail to understand the greater variety all around us, and allow the few to dictate our desires, our fashions, our tastes, our lifestyles, our music, or our thinking and feeling.
Movies are fun, however we should not get lost in their content to the loss of our own wonderful lives. Our value in our own human worth is of utmost importance and hopefully we will remember who we are, after The End has flashed on the screen and the last film credits have been read. I still love movies, but I still need to move.
