Movies

Having just finished my film studies paper yesterday, I can finally look forward to watching some movies again. Movies have always been important to me, but they've kind of disappeared from my radar over the last semester of bustle (along with live music, television, and reading). I went to the Art Theater probably 20 times last year, whereas this semester I've only been two or three. My figures for Netflix don't look much better. This decline in my traditional movie-watching has had some very strange side effects.

For one thing, it's simply harder to talk to people. At the beginning of the year there was an unspoken pact for all the seniors to never mention college in polite conversation -- if it was going to happen, it would be in hushed tones behind closed doors. This pact, for me at least, lasted less than a month into the Common App process. I've always thought of myself as the kind of person who would never be boring or pretentious enough to talk about schools, even at Uni, but I was quickly proven wrong. While no one really likes college talk, our outside lives often feel so withered that a casual conversation can end up circling the drain until someone tosses in the "so, top 3?" life raft. By now we've even learned to enjoy it. Like an Amish person talking about sex, it feels both uncomfortable, immoral, and unsatisfying -- all of which makes it just a little bit titillating. I don't usually blush and giggle after talking about college, but I might as well.

Still, the lack of conversation material isn't a problem confined to movies. I used to spend a lot of time talking about movies, but even people who didn't step inside a theater or turn on Netflix last year have been feeling the effects (I don't know any of these people, but just take my word for it). However, there have been some weirder effects that I blame specifically on the lack of film in my life. For one thing, my dreams have been much less vivid. I've always dreamed in a very "filmed" way, with lots of pans and zooms and scene changes, but lately that's been happening less and less. Most of my dreams now, when I dream, involve some kind of embarrassing or confusing school sequence, with very little cinematography. The reason I can blame this on movies is because when I have found the time to watch movies -- especially very visually stimulating ones -- I've had intense dreams based very clearly on those movies. For example, when I re-watched Spirited Away a few months ago, I had several dreams in a row of flying and working for demons. When I watched Aguirre, The Wrath of God, I lived in the jungle and got yelled at. I don't know why exactly movies have this kind of effect on my sleep, but they clearly do. And what's worse, I always sleep better when I dream, so my loss of dreaming has felt like a pretty big blow to my productivity.

Dreams aside, I've noticed some differences in my waking life as well. I've always been a fairly visual person, but that's been slipping away lately. Especially last year I would often be able to just look at something for several minutes and appreciate what a good shot (or, when I was drawing more, sketch) it would be. That's almost completely gone now. I've lost a lot of patience for visual beauty, which could be either because I don't have much of a framework to compare it to, or simply because having lost the practice sitting still for two and a half hours at a time has messed with my attention span.

If dropping movies from my diet has had such a bad effect on me, why haven't I just pushed some time aside in my schedule and work through my Netflix list? If you asked me this question out of the blue I would probably answer that there's just no time to push aside for it, but that isn't totally honest. Although I am pretty busy, I still usually have 2+ hours of free time on the weekends that could easily be spent on the couch. However, that free time almost all gets compressed into the pre-homework ritual, in which I open up a blog post or college essay and then spend several hours pretending to do it while clicking aimlessly and eating food. As pointless as this period is, I've tricked my brain into doing it by arguing that it almost constitutes work, and that I can't work without it (which is not true). Every individual task is very short, and I tell myself it will be the last before I get cracking. By contrast, committing 2 hours to a single task right from the start feels incredibly irresponsible, even if it might actually be relaxing enough to get me to work again when I finished. Unfortunately I can't see this changing this semester, which brings us back to the start: I can't wait for break, when I'll be able to redevelop my movie-watching habit for the less strenuous spring. With any luck, I'll be dreaming normally again by March.