You should know I don’t do horror. I learned my lesson early in life with respect to the power of images and how they mess with my head, so now I am fairly careful about what I deliberately allow access to my senses. This little movie, however, made it past my self-imposed censor. It’s about the kind of humor it uses.

Litlove has a post called Reading Dangeroulsy that speaks to the question of a person’s choice about whether to continue reading a book that he or she finds disturbing. Some time ago I posted on my decision making process about whether to watch the new movie Precious; the two things are related for me.  I still haven’t decided whether to watch Precious or not, but I do know that I will not go to watch it in the theatres — way too traumatic having to react not only to what’s on the screen but to other people’s reactions as well.

I feel more or less the same way about books as I do about movies. I so deeply admire an artist’s ability to render what it means to be human and to do it in ways that allow another to enter the world and experience it for a while. I admire this regardless of how delightful or horrifying the world thus created may be, but I also admire a person’s ability to actively choose the world in which he or she lives.

Of course this last choice has limits. If one chooses a world that has no bearing on the world in which the rest of us live, then, although it is a choice that many people make, it is a poor choice since other human beings are somewhat significant to the overall quality of life on the earth today. I also think people who choose to live in a world that has no empirical truth to it also make a poor choice. I mean it’s one thing to believe in the tooth fairy as a child or to believe that some human beings are not really human beings because they do something you don’t like, but it’s another to conscribe an adult life on the lines of such fantasies. I think these things because choosing to live as if other people don’t matter, or that the way the world actually is doesn’t matter, these choices touch us all, change us all.

To explain this further: it’s a bit like living with a family member who is crazy. They carry a disproportionate weight in the family. If you are the healthy one, what do you do in a situation where your mother (for example) is the crazy one?  You can’t escape the effects upon you, of course, but if you are to thrive in your own life you must make choices about how much caretaking you do.  If you don’t, you will be swamped under the weight of it. There are people so desperately needy that no amount of care will ever be enough, so emptying yourself out into their black well of agony will not suffice.

This is not to say one must abandon those who need help to survive, although there are occasions, I think, when this is actually the only real solution if one wants to survive. Most of the time, help can be given, succor provided, another’s life saved from the desolation of continuous suffering. But there must be limits set. There must be time set aside to save oneself from the fate of being sucked to death by the need of another.

This all goes to say that books, movies and people are all much the same. The same choices one must make about helping others, one must make with regard to entering the world of books and movies, in fact art in general. The mind reacts the same regardless of whether the input is coming from a dream, a mother, or an artist’s world, thus, we must make the same decisions.  

Some disruption in a day, some emotional disturbance is necessary for growth and change. Too much disturbance and the whole system crashes. This is the basic decision that must be made: where does the book/movie fit?  Is it helping me grow as a human being or is it going to make me crash?

Horror of all kinds tends to simply crash my various systems: I dream about the images; I cannot let the fear go and so it turns to rage. Because of this I choose not to do that to myself.  Importantly, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it is the slasher kind of horror, or the true horror of various on-going genocidal wars around the world. Having said that,  I see no redeeming qualities in the slasher kind of book or movie, although it is true that such killers exist. But really, what do people like this say about what it means to be human that a good book about mental illness does not say?  Movies and books about genocide, however, they tend to present history and actual social fact of great human import. How we deal with each other, how we come to do so brutally and cruelly, this is something we do need to understand, so there is some reason to see such a movie, read such a book. I think this is especially true if historical knowledge is not a person’s strength. This kind of exposure to the discomfiting, I would argue, does make one a better person. It is important to understand the world in which one actually lives; knowing about the world as it really is, that makes a person larger, bigger in mind and heart.

Even so, how much knowledge about a topic is necessary before more becomes wallowing? While horror is a truth about human life, so is humor, so is compassion. My favourite kinds of stories/art are the kinds that blend these things. They are the ones that teach me the most about what it means to be human. Of course they are harder for artists to create, and harder for readers to find. Nevertheless, even small forays into blending, as this little video exemplifies, can delight as well as enliven. 

There have been lots of satirical slasher movies, of course, but this one, this one is made by the Ronald McDonald suit. What it says about the human world that is the industrial/civilized world is thus made more than just a facile comment within a fictive genre. For this reason, this horror movie has quieted the censor and made it, in its entirety, into the annals that are Mary’s mind.

Anyway, whether to read or not, to watch or not, the decision should depend upon what you are trying to do and upon what you have already done. Is it an upset you need to help you hold more of the world? Or is it one that will make you less able to open up to what is actually present? Am I wallowing by watching yet another movie (reading another book) of this kind, or am I still able to learn something here? These are the questions I ask myself. If I can’t say it is going to help me, then I put it down. If I feel that I have been tricked by the artists and also don’t feel that it is going to help me, the book hits the wall or I walk out of the movie.