Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
By Belynda, August 25th, 2009 in Other | 3 Comments
Tags: adulthood, beige, cartoons, drug use, mania, ponyo, psychology, work-life balance
Our recent trip to the movie theatre to see Miyuzaki’s newest flick “Ponyo” has restarted a conversation that began back in July concerning what kids watch growing up, and why everyone is now on psychotropic drugs. Bear with me, it’s going to be a rough ride. First, a review of Ponyo.
Ponyo, the story of a tiny little fish person who becomes friends with a human boy named Sosuke, is the latest movie from the creator of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and (my personal favorite) Howl’s Moving Castle. Miyuzaki is known for his whimsical stories, and Ponyo was no exception to his signature style. It was great!
The first thing to know about going to see a Miyuzaki movie is that, if you are over the age of say… six… you should be high. Very, very high. Dangerously inebriated, even. Actually, picture the kind of drug saturation that typically results in thinking for the rest of your life that you’re a glass of OJ and that you’ll die if you tip over. Miyuzaki movies make very little sense to anyone who believes in the laws of gravity or chronology. If you can let go of those few trifles, you’re in for a treat. Ponyo is not the best animation I’ve ever seen, much less the most creative story, but it was still beautiful and fun. It’s a strange mix of ecological morality tale and strange child-like love story. At moments during the story, mainly when Ponyo turns into something resembling a chicken while running on the heads of magically-created fish that are the result of an unfortunate spill of rainbow-colored magic potions, you begin to think that maybe the girl at the concession stand put a tab or two of acid in the bottom of your tank of Sierra Mist. Don’t worry. You’re not in fact drugged (although as I mentioned before, it would be helpful.) This is just the way Miyuzaki does things. Style points!
During the movie of course, the grade school crowd stared at the multi-colored screen with rapt attention, completely accepting of the fact that a fish turned into a little girl and that toy boats turn into real boats, and that love really can turn you into something beautiful (it’s a long story…) They have no problem with the fact that reality checks out, and they let the spectacle of sparklies and craziness happen. They’re used to it, because of course all of their Saturday morning animated entertainment is equally as psychedelic and ridiculous.
So here’s the conversation Ed and I had after watching a morning of Saturday shows with his small cousins in Michigan… why are we surprised when small children who are raised on a diet of bombastic shows with no tether on reality, then grow up to smoke dope and drop acid and drink heavily?
After seeing a few hours of children’s programming, the two-bit armchair psych theory is this: Children, after formative years filled with the magical and impossible, grow into adults who desire these things in a world that is, for the most part, as bleak as gravel and sawdust. We go to offices every day that have beige printers, beige desks, beige eco-friendly recycled copy paper, bare whiteboards and grey, pitiful coffee that is not hot. Superheroes do not burst through brick walls and save boobular double-crossing evil-guy-groupies. Telekinetic-monkey-spiral-galaxy-invaders with robot arms do not try to steal platinum cockroaches from high schools filled with kids with x-men powers. (Hey, it’s pretty close to what we saw. I can’t remember the title. I just remember that it was electric colored and had spanish accents.) When none of these things happen at our dogshit-boring offices, in effect the world has welshed on the bet it made with us when we were knee-high to a midget and were being pickled with visions of two-dimensional splendor and jiggly men in red suits who brought us the items of our wildest desire.
So most adults do drugs. Heavily. And we drink. Heavily. It’s actually surprising in a way that office-dwellers don’t unanimously live in a Brave New Worldish chemical stupor from 5:15pm on Friday until they crack the door to their office the following Monday morning. It’s only a matter of our Freudian super-ego telling us to cut the shit and play the game that keeps us to three or four martinis and a hugging date with our toilets at 3am on Saturday, so we can recover sufficiently on Sunday to be reasonably functional for the start of a new negative feedback loop on Monday morning.
Could it be that if we were fed something a little more tame in our formative years, we might not spend our adult years (not to mention millions of dollars of dispensable income) trying to replace the euphoria of our youth? I don’t know, but I’d like to think so.
By Belynda, May 24th, 2009 in Other | No Comments
Tags: alter egos, bafflement, constructed persona, cosplay, grabblin, lolcats, psychology, second life
A comment left on my last post by none other than Jason Scott got me thinking (thanks for stopping by, Jason! I feel a little starstruck!) While I agree with Jason’s point that justification of any activity is sort of useless, I’m still puzzled by the “why” of some of our activities in the first place, especially concerning online identity. Justifying what we like to someone else isn’t really necessary, true. I can spitball what people find entertaining, just as easily as they can spitball what I find entertaining. Ed, for instance, will never understand why I find LOLcats - or Sockington for that matter! - so amusing. I just do, because it’s retarded and funny and burns fifteen minutes of my workday here and there. He shakes his head and sort of gives me his silent, pitying “I know you’re really intelligent so I’ll just let this one slide” face. I’m okay with that. I’ll never understand how he can like horror movies. It’s a wash.
Hell, I am all for enjoying oneself, even in supremely strange ways such as grabblin’ and cosplay, that I will never understand and maybe shouldn’t… you’ll be happy to know that the person under that cosplay outfit? Is a dude. But hobbies, even the really weird ones, usually connect you to other people, even if they’re as delightfully fuckin’ offbeat as you are (Japan has a whole cosplay CONFERENCE… one event I will never visit for fear of being permanently freaked out by empty faces of fixed comic glee.) While the cosplay thing does border on my forthcoming contentions, at least these guys are getting out of the house.
Anyway. Got distracted, sorry. My whole contention is, there is a whole culture of self-effacement that is evolving with social media, massively multiplayer gaming, and the internet in general. I first started pondering this effacement a while ago when I tried out Second Life after hearing about it from a co-worker. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a “game” developed by Linden Labs - I’m not really sure why, but I think it had something to do with sucking the soul out of humanity. I could be wrong on this count. Anyway, Second Life is basically as it reads on the tin: It’s a virtual world with its own currency, society, etc. You basically wander around the virtual landscape, making your “avatar” interact with other “avatars” in a variety of ways (btw, link is NSFW). ::::shudder:::: Just to let you know, my Second Life experience lasted about twenty minutes. I made a person who looked pretty much exactly like me (okay, I might have given her way bigger jugs, but that’s a whole other story), wandered around flummoxed for a while, and eventually accepted a script from someone I didn’t know, which forced me to fly around the world with my head jammed up my own ass for a few. I finally got someone to fix me, just so I wouldn’t leave the world of Second Life with my face forever in my own pooper, but the glamour was lost.
It’s supposed to be real life, only pixely. And if you stop at Jason’s contention that it doesn’t matter what it is so long as you get pleasure out of it, then okay I guess you’re not hurting anyone. But I’m still baffled by this concept of creating a digital cocoon around yourself, and pretending to be someone else. Most people aren’t logging into Second Life to live a pixely version of their own life; They’re doing it to get completely the hell away from their real life. The same rule applies unfortunately for the majority of people who blog/tweet as their pets/fake celebrities/fictional characters, or MMO players who live and die by the travails of their 47th level Paladins with kick-ass-plus-5-against-orcs swords. It’s an all-consuming escape from being a regular person. Furthermore, these are activities that can take you away from other real people. The siren song of a preferable alter-life can be fairly intoxicating.
I know that there is a percentage of people who are completely normal, workaday average guys and gals like the “rest of us”, but the fact still remains that we are using technology to replace ourselves with things that don’t even exist, people that are created out of the minds of writers, anthropomorphized versions of our pets. The idea that you can be “anyone you want to be” on the internet is stunning to me, perhaps because I’ve never wanted to be anyone but myself. Even though the real me is shit at math, will probably never live in the UK as much as she direly wants to, and can burn rice like a champion, I’m okay with it. Our technology, however, seems to be giving people the ability to separate themselves from themselves in ways no one ever could have predicted. A few minds are looking at this with at least a small amount of concern for what it says about us as a society. Why are we so willing to give up on our real persona in favor of a constructed, “ideal” persona? In the end, it’s all well as long as nobody gets an eye poked out, but it doesn’t stop me from being utterly baffled.
