The Shining

this is an informal response to a film that i had to write , i still didnt read it so it might be kharabeesh jaaaj :) ,,,, but thought u might wana read it....

Journal 2, Jan 27
Yesterday I watched The Shining. I have seen it before last year. But yesterday after reading half of the reading for next week I felt an urge to watch a horror movie, and with horror I don’t mean the horror genre but something that will scare me; I wanted to feel scared by a film. And the perfect opportunity presented itself with my brother bringing a very bad move to watch. So there we were in a totally dark room watching The Shining.
When I watched t last year I remember being very scared for some reason. Maybe because it was very dark when I watched it and because I just moved in to Ottawa, I felt alone at home and in the city at all, that definitely increased the sense of danger while watching the film. So this year I’m watching it again. The fear was still there, but it was different . There were no surprises , but it was still scary. Two questions I asked myself, why do you watch it if it scares you , a question that maybe is asked constantly in academia. And how come I’m still scared when I watch the film again.
The first question is something I have thought about before and my personal answer to it is divide from other experiences of fear. I compared it to the experience of riding the rollercoaster, although it is quit different experience but there is a foundational similarity. I think in both experiences we want to experience fear and want to scare ourselves yet having the security and the assurance that there is nothing that is going to happen to us. When riding the rollercoaster we have an almost definite believe that it is safe. There is no risk involved, or at least we think so. When we decide to ride , there is a total confidence that the apparatus wont fail us and there is 100s of reasoning in our head why it will not fail : security , trust with the staff , the maintenance crew that we just saw checking all of the seats etc (I’m sure if there is a rollercoaster that doesn’t require a human operator that almost nobody would ride it , it will be very hard to assure people to give their lives to the machine without the presence of a human operator , even if that operator is in reality helpless if anything would go wrong and all what s/he does is pressing a button) . However, despite with all these assurance there is a percentage of doubt that keeps hiding in the corner of our mind: “what if the door breaks, oh , is it really closed , did they not close it properly ? oh , what am I doing here , why do I do that to myself”. These doubts get amplified in our head once we are in the ride where ur rationality fails momentarily (or maybe just a different kind of rationality takes over). This is combined of course with the thrill of the bodily experience of going in a fast moving vehicle, defying gravity, losing control to gravity, switching directions while moving, being suspended threatened to gravity etc,,, If once you are in the midst of the ride and you lose your faith that the machine wont fail you , then that’s real horror. For me, sometimes my mind keeps switching between the belief that I’m safe and that I’m not. The times that I was totally confident and there was very sure that this is nothing but a totally safe ride I was able to just enjoy the bodily experience. But this was for very few times and only was because the ride was reasonably familiar to me. The bodily experience MUST affect the mind. And that’s why it sends singles to the mind that I should be scared, the mind tries to understand why I should be and tells me “hey ur free falling, shouldn’t you be scared, I mean what if this seat breaks now isn’t that scary, shouldn’t you do something about it, put ur hands back in the seat and hold the chair, just in case”. If I was unable to settle these fears one way or another, the experience would be terrible and I would not get on one of these rides ever again. But only because you are able to deal with these fear and experience them that you are able to enjoy and even go again to the same ride.
So, is there is a sense of triumph over fear after you ride? Do we go to these rides to experience fear and us overcoming it? Or is it that we go and experience the fear feeling because of a sadomasochistic feeling inside of us. I think the first interpretation is more possible. Or maybe a mix of both answers. There might be a joy in experiencing fear by itself, but then that might contradict with most ways of defining fear as a negative emotion. For simplicity I will assume that the pleasure is a disassociated feeling than fear. The pleasure in these rids would be then in being able to overcome that fear. It is by experiencing fear that this challenge to fear can be achieved. One can apply a deconstructionist method to show how fear is needed in order to show that one is in control of his/her own fears. One can a similarity with kids , when they have to prove to each other that they are not afraid of something by doing it. And definitely the “scary” rides were a place to show who is afraid and who is not. Yet, this may be functioning differently for adults. It is a more of an internal question rather than challenge to others. And the fear has to be rationalized in order to be conquered. The experience of the ride is an experience of triumphing of the mind over the body; an exercise of mind controlling the body. The mind wins by defeating its own fears and controlling the responses of the body experience. It has to do this only by experiencing the fear the mind is trying to defeat, by experiencing the bodily reactions that dictate on it what to do. This time the mind wins. If it doesn’t, it won’t let you go again to that ride, or at least not for a while.
What about Cinema? Can this analysis be applied to the Cinema? (Let’s leave the larger category of fiction on the side for a while). There is an essential difference between the entertainment park ride and the cinema. One is focused more on the bodily physical experience (the ride) and while the cinema rotates around a visual experience. I used “focused” and “rotates around” because I know that both of these experiences depend on the interaction of sight and the physical experience. The ride is dependent on sight in achieving its fear (or horror). When the mind cannot handle the fear it orders the body to stop sending the signals of fear through the eyes, you shut your eyes and the fear is reduced considerably (but most probably not entirely). The cinema experience also is dependent on the setting (the dark room I watched the shining in) , sound , the empty room etc.. I will always remember that my first viewing of the shining was alone in a dark room. If I watched it in public in day light I don’t think that it will be scary at all. Having established the dependency of sight and the physical in both experiences, I still think that one is mainly visual and the other is physical. That is because the “main” source of the experience in one is the visual image (and sound) and in the other is the physical reallocation of the body in respect to the ground and other objects. To use the words of Mathematics, the image in cinema is the “necessarily but not sufficient condition” to scare you. The same thing can be applied to physicality in the ride. So where do we go with this difference between the two? Is the horror of cinema an experience of the mind rather than the body? Do we scare our selves in the cinema to control fears and experience them but without involving the body? … Maybe am not clear on the question. But am almost on the fifth page and I haven’t answered the second question I asked in the beginning of the entry nor even made the other point I was planning to write about. Maybe I should stop here and start another journal entry later on to deal with these questions while not being worried about writing too much. This is more fun than I expected. Should I re-read what I have written and edit it? My writing proved to be difficult to understand because when I think that I’m communicating what I’m thinking, in fact writing doesn’t really make sense. So maybe I should.