Aporia

Pauline Kael, from her “Notes on 280 Movies” in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, quoted by Falling and Laughing. Do you think that cinema and television have amplified this problem: the occupation of our imaginations by fantasies? James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was written in 1939. Mitty is a tragicomic character inattentive to his weakly-lived and mundane life, preferring the vivid and meaningful heroics of his fantasy world. Don’t we all? A primary struggle: to redirect my mind whenever it starts to enact its hideous, vain little dreams.

It is commonly proposed that the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic media, and now videogames, amplifies the human tendency to reside in self-satisfying fantasy rather than attempt to shape reality, overcome, transcend, find beauty and meaning in the scrum of the real, and so on. I wonder, though, if the media make as much difference as we suppose; it has always been the case that we fly from mediocrity into dreams; it has always been the case that fantasy –self-aggrandizing, self-confirming, self-mythologizing- is our best opiate. Back to books you can go; back to oral storytelling; the kids always pretended not to be turning into their parents.

But I do note, in my own life, that when I watch a certain sort of movies or play video games to excess, it soon occurs that my dreams are taken over, my automatic reveries replaced. This excellent quote from Marshall McLuhan, posted by Carvalhais relates:

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men heterogeneously trained to be individuals.

Our trained individualism exists within narrow parameters; we vary, but drawing on the same sources for our consolatory daydreams perhaps not so greatly. Our community is organized around shared, mediated myths and stories. Everyone is a Mitty, and his community is those Mittys whose fantasies are informed by the same sources and have the same shape. We bump into one another walking down the street pretending to be: in a music video, in a videogame combat zone, in a romantic comedy, in a ‘human interest’ piece on the news, in a documentary, in a…