Cinephobia (2005)
Fear of music: melophobia. Fear of poetry: metrophobia. Fear of books: bibliophobia. But in all my searching I can’t find anything about the fear of films. How could compilers of phobia lists overlook the abject terror brought on by Dumb and Dumber? Books are frightening, too, but it’s easier to escape a book than a film. A book you can set down. Once eight dollars is forked over and your rear is seated in a theater, it’s hard to escape a film. You’re held captive, and sitting through until the bitter conclusion is inevitable.
While driving to the theater, I always wonder whether I really want to see the movie du jour badly enough to go through all the expense and trouble. Once I pull into the parking lot I don’t immediately enter the theater. I sit in the car for ten minutes, engaged in a deep philosophical soliloquy worthy of Hamlet. Up until the moment I buy my ticket, I still consider turning around and walking out. The ticket purchase is the point of no return. Then, and only then, am I resigned to stay in my seat and suffer through the ordeal. But even as the opening credits start, I wrestle with unwieldy existential questions, degenerating into nihilism: “Does it have any meaning?” I ask myself. “It’s only a string of images after all. It has no purpose. I have no purpose sitting here, do I? I have no meaning.”
Cripes, all this doubt and turmoil can’t stem merely from high box office prices and two hours of my life lost to a potentially bad movie. It can only come from some kind of fear. An irrational fear, right? What could possibly happen as a result of watching a harmless little flick?
Well, first of all, there’s a whole group of risks associated with failing to connect with the movie, with your fellow moviegoers in the theater, with the cinematic collective unconscious. Hating a film that was loved by all the critics and the entire population of the United States can be quite embarrassing, like walking around a Star Trek convention without any Klingon gear. Somehow this is more traumatic than liking a film that the critics panned. That phenomenon has always had an aura of populist “cool.” But you really begin to question your instincts when everyone except you was impressed. Though I’m not anti-movie musical, I never did understand what everyone saw in Chicago. I thought it made more sense left on the stage. And my experience with an indie film called Primer was especially jarring. A friend and I had gone to see it because of the nearly universal rave reviews from the critics. Neither of us are total slouches in the IQ department, but we left the movie so confounded by the convoluted plot that we sat in the car for a long time just shaking our heads and making strange squawking noises of disbelief. We double checked the reviews to make sure we hadn’t accidentally read the wrong ones. We hadn’t. That night I doubted both my intellectual powers and my understanding of my fellow film-watching creatures. A truly demoralizing failure to connect.
But matters could be worse: one can fail to connect with what even makes a film a film. I found this out after taking several courses for a minor in film studies. “Not to stick Elisabeth in a category,” said my professor one day, “but what she’s saying about High Noon reveals a literary sensibility, not a cinematic sensibility.” There I sat in the dark, mostly empty auditorium, excluded from the universe of film with my lousy literary sensibility. Take and shove my damn literary sensibility, I wanted to tell him. I want to connect instead with this mysterious and magical phenomenon known as the cinema.
Though connection failures are distressing, I think most of the worst risks of cinephobia are associated with successful connection with a film. Usually the movies I love most are the movies that repel me the most. As a result, in the past, I often bought the movies I loved on DVD and then never watched them. Once seated in a theater, money paid, there’s little way to escape the experience without looking foolish. But at home there are a thousand ready excuses not to watch a movie. Sometimes in years past, I spent an embarrassingly large percentage of my tiny income on DVDs, only to opt instead for the thrilling Friday night entertainment of doing the laundry and reorganizing my desk.
Successful connection can result in a certain kind of unwanted, or at least unbidden, inspiration. Once inspired, one has to go through the terror of being roused out of complacency toward awareness and action. I guess for some cinephobiacs, this kind of stimulation might come from political films or documentaries. But being the romantic that I am, I get motivated by big, sweeping epics with mythic themes. I recall watching Lawrence of Arabia for the first time around age fifteen. Afterwards, I stood in my backyard in small town southern Indiana, fists clenched, staring straight ahead, eyes glazed, mind on fire with the ambition to do something noble, all while chlorinating the swimming pool. I got some chlorine on my jeans and had to hurry into the house to wash it off. My brush with greatness had been foiled again.
Suffering from overwhelmed senses sometimes results from successful connection with a film. It’s a kind of over-connection and is a fairly plausible fear since it even has concrete and measurable physical effects. I often leave movie theaters with a headache from eye strain, or from being browbeaten by the digital audio. I left in that condition after Batman Begins, a virtuoso movie which was essentially about fear, and which used arhythmic visuals and a grating soundtrack to create a sense of discomfort and paranoia. It worked. After about an hour of gunfire, screaming, and fists hitting batsuits, I went to the bathroom just to massage my temples and have a break from the assault on my senses. By mistake I walked back into a different theater with a later showing, and experienced a nightmarish repeat of scenes I’d already had to suffer through once.
Though obviously the sound advances of recent years are a great leap forward, and most moviegoers (including me) are thrilled about it, I seem to be a little high strung. It’s like putting headphones on a Chihuahua and turning the volume up all the way. After awhile I’m physically exhausted by the sound. Then I just feel embarrassed and wimpy, like going to the movies should be some kind of gladiatorial feat of derring-do and I deserve to be annihilated for my lack of fortitude. Though I respect digital perfection and a good sound design, I’m happier sometimes to have lower quality in order to simply relax. That’s when I decide to go to a comfortably primitive drive-in with its distant screen and its sound filtered through viewers’ car radios.
Another well-known type of over-connection is the fear of losing oneself in the gulf of a work of art. I rarely cry as a result of life, but I cry very often in response to movies or books. My emotions run the whole gamut, from grief, to powerful desire, to utter outrage. Depending on the nature of a movie, I sometimes leave emotionally exhausted. And when I achieve especially successful connection, an empty feeling inevitably takes hold when the movie is over. I don’t need to elaborate on this kind of post-coital emptiness. We all know what it feels like to wake up from the dream.
Delving inwardly a little deeper, a movie may also have a powerful and anarchic effect on one’s inner creative life. Watching a film is not a passive experience. I become the experience, if the experience has won me over completely. And if I give myself over to it completely, I don’t know how much of my old self I’m ever going to get back. There may be a coup. A new actor that I find provocative might throw out an old character in my head or institute himself as the inspiration for a new character. A director may present a story so vividly that it establishes an entirely new paradigm that I feel compelled to build on for months or years. Or a thoughtfully explored idea may cause me to wrestle with, and try to answer, question after unanswerable question. While this upheaval is exciting, it’s also demanding and exhausting, and once it happens there’s no choice in the matter. I find that being moved to this degree is fairly rare, but as I prepare to enter a movie theater I always know it’s possible. When I come out again, my mind might have to work overtime and all my internal workings be rearranged. Once I’ve left the theater, nothing may ever be the same again.
Though this last risk is particularly challenging for me, I experience all of the different aforementioned fears at different times. The type of risk depends on the film. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m an idiot because I didn’t understand a movie, and other times I’m terrified of being engulfed by the lead actor’s charisma. These are not rational fears, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re useless fears.
Even though he hadn’t seen Batman Begins, Spinoza once said that fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. I guess I’m always hoping for connection when I experience a movie – or any type of art – but fearing that the connection will be so successful I’ll get lost in it. Maybe fear, rather than pure appreciation, is my best homage to movies, my highest compliment, my acknowledgement of the worthy risks involved in the attempt to connect. After all, I desperately love film. There’s a lot of fear in love.
