Kids, Movies and Death

Ahh... I want to see Hellboy II so bad...

My husband and I have very different movie tastes. I like big sweeping epics with big themes -- the bigger the better. I used to study and work in the fringes of the industry, so I also have a strong appreciation for cinematography and editing. Jodorowsky, Kurosawa, Tsui Hark, Herzog: those are my guys. Most American epics are just too stupid for me to enjoy (e.g. the Matrix with that stupid, stupid human battery idea... wouldn't it be a lot easier to just hook up a bunch of cows?), although I do love John Sayles and his delicate sociological style.

In the absence of intelligent epics, I'll settle for competent ones with lots of blood, explosions and pointy-toothed monsters.

On the other hand, the ideal movie for my husband is shot in black and white with cinema verite style. It's based in either Milwaukee or Lbubljana, Slovenia. It takes place over the span of a few days and follows several quirky characters in their monotonous daily routine as they go through an intensely private dysfunctional moment in a quietly painful sort of way. You might think something is going to happen, but it never does. Maybe someone goes fishing with their dog. The fish aren't biting. They look sadly down at the water. Freeze frame. Credits roll. I don't notice the credits because I fell asleep an hour ago.

But he liked the first Hellboy movie. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was the noir element? Anyway, I LOVE Guillermo del Toro and I'm totally pumped about Hellboy II. Luckily we have Nana to watch Sunny while my husband and I go see it together.

I'm so glad my mom and I live so close. Sunny really loves her too.

Sunny watched the Spiderwick Chronicles recently. I decided it was alright, despite the monster-related violence, because I'd heard it had good themes about family unity and dealing with loss.

He really enjoyed it and says he wants to watch it again. One thing he said sort of bothered me, though. He said that if Arthur Spiderwick turned to dust that would look cool... I told him it's not nice to wish for people to die, and he said that it would be OK because Spiderwick would just come back in the second movie.

It's hard to explain stuff like this to kids in a way they really understand, especially given the bad influence of video games. I did my best. I reminded him that in real life, people don't really come back after they die. Death is forever*.

It's not just kids that have a problem with that fact. We don't want to die, but we're fascinated with representations of death. We're compelled to watch and relive scenes of death over and over again in all aspects of human culture.

The clearest explanation I ever read on the subject was from Aristotle in 335 B.C.

Poetics, IV. The Origin and Development of Poetry

Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature.

When I first read that, it was a huge revelation for me. It answered a question I'd never even thought to ask before. Why do humans get such pleasure from representations of death and pain? Why do I love watching movies with exploding vampires and zombies?


* I'm still a Buddhist but reincarnation is a lot more complicated than just "coming back".