Not Just a Movie: Scar Tissue
PART 7 IN AN 8-PART SERIES
"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."
—Alfred Hitchcock
I fear pitchforks. And I blame my babysitter.
I was about 5 years old when it happened. My babysitter was supposed to be watching me. She was. But she was also watching television—specifically, a horror flick called The Other, which I sat up and watched with her.
I don’t know whether I grasped the plot at the time. My memories are smudged and silent, like a nightmare: A boy’s mother being pushed down a flight of stairs … the same mother, paralyzed, dribbling soup or porridge out of her mouth … a boy, jumping from a hayloft … onto a pitchfork.
To this day, I can’t walk past a pitchfork in Home Depot without thinking of that scene—or, really, how I remember that scene. I can picture the hay, the pitchfork, even the angle of the camera with more clarity than my fifth birthday party or my kindergarten teacher. A bit of my innocence drained out of me that night. And I still have the scar tissue to prove it.
Dark Pictures
For many of us, our first real scare came from watching a movie we shouldn’t have been watching. Most of us first encountered sexual titillation in cinematic images, too. Entertainment Weekly recently asked its online readers what R-rated movies they saw too young. When I copied the responses—most of which were only a sentence or two long—the document ran 37 pages.
"When I was 12, my dad thought I was old enough to watch The Exorcist!" one reader wrote. "At 31, I still have nightmares and still can’t see a picture of [Linda] Blair without having a fit."
"When I was 11 I went to a girl friend’s house for a big sleepover party and the host’s mom rented us several movies including The Accused," wrote another. "You know, the one where Jodie Foster gets viciously GANG RAPED?? A little much for a sixth grader, perhaps?"
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: It’s not just children, though, who have to watch what they watch. There’s no age limit for discernment, and adults should be just as vigilant with their own film-watching choices as they are with their kids’.
Lessons From the Front
But sometimes we still end up watching films we know we shouldn’t have ever started. Sometimes we honestly don’t know how bad a film is until we’re in the middle of it. And sometimes our editor just assigns them to us. So I thought I’d pass along a few things that we here at Plugged In rely on to minimize the emotional and psychological impact of films that, for one reason or another, have been lobbed into our laps:
We research. Rarely do any of us go into a movie unprepared for what we might see. When I saw Saw IV, I was under no illusion that it was a movie about home improvement. When I saw Superbad, I’d already unearthed quite a bit about its ethical standards. We read interviews, study up on directors and get an idea of intended audiences. Sure, we can still be surprised after we sit down in the theater … but blindsided? Rarely.
We take notes. The note-taking process is a boon. The mere process of jotting down instances of nudity or profanity or violent carnage helps provide emotional distance between me and the screen: It transforms me from passive movie sponge into active movie observer—a state in which I’m constantly reminded that I’m at work, not play.
We process. I’m not just paid to write about movies. I’m paid to think about them. So I do, a lot. Most of the films I see I have to drive an hour or two to attend an advance screening. That gives me quality time on the back end to think about what I’ve seen. The next morning I talk about the film with my editor. But I actually do most of my processing as I physically write my review: The mere act of putting thought to paper (computer screen) helps me to process. Sometimes, I don’t even know for sure if I liked a movie or not until I’ve written 90% of the review.
We pray. It’ll sound trite to some, overly spiritual to others. But it’s the truth. Praying for God’s protection from undue influence is a powerful tool in the Plugged In bag.
Unkindest Cuts of All
Even when we take all possible precautions, though, we can still get hurt.
We all have different sensitivities when it comes to film, and I’m particularly sensitive to gore: Not splatterfests like Saw, particularly, but scenes in which realistic, often likable people come to presumably painful ends. I had a hard time sleeping after seeing Mr. Brooks, a film that featured Kevin Costner as a serial killer. And Mirrors, a supernatural horror film starring Kiefer Sutherland, gave me nightmares. I’m sure a good psychologist could explain to me why these films—not particularly well-made offerings—cut me as they did. Is it possible that, even now, I subconsciously associate films like these, filled with metal and blood and innocent people in peril, with The Other, that bane of my 5-year-old existence?
Do the cuts linger that long?
Our psyches are amazing things. We heal, in a way. I certainly didn’t react the same way to Mirrors as I did to The Other. I’m older now, more jaded. I know what to expect. I know how to process. And maybe because I’ve seen lots of bad, bad movies, the cuts—when I get them—don’t go quite so deep.
That’s a mixed blessing, to be sure. Because it’s the scar tissue I’ve developed—tough and mottled—that deflects some of the worst and keeps the cuts from going so deep. Most moviegoers probably have their share. But many might not know that scar tissue carries its own set of problems. Accumulate enough of it, and you stop feeling. It’s why moviemakers must constantly up the onscreen ante—why violence seems to get more extreme with each passing year, why the sex scenes seem that much more risqué. Why we’ve counted upwards of 400 f-words in a single two-hour film. When movies push the proverbial envelope, they’re really simply trying to cut through our scar tissue—to find a nerve in there, somewhere.
And that, when I think about it, is much more frightening than any pitchfork found anywhere on a movie screen.
In Part 8 of "Not Just a Movie," movies can be used for good, too, just in case you might have forgotten.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8