Animated Fish v. On-Screen Mutilation

"Oh God..."

"Oh no..."

"Oh why?"

"Oh God, no, why, my childhood!"

Pixar’s collective filmography is like an emotional theme park; this is widely held as an inescapable fact. Their films are marketed to kids, but they deal with all these deeply tragic subplots that, for some reason, I never see coming. And yet, every time I see a Pixar film, I’ve inevitably got two thick black streaks running down my face by the end of it. So either Pixar knows how to strike just the right balance between innocence and pathos to get its audience going, OR I wear way too much eyeliner.

In any case, I know I’m not alone. 

YouTube comments about the Toy Story 3 Furnace Scene

So we’re not monsters, right? We can all empathise, even if it’s with computer-animated fish. I remember this being a prevalent topic back in primary school, when my peers and I were being urged to develop our essay-writing skills; ‘desensitization in the media’. Back then, I thought the idea was a load of bollocks. It’s just TV, I thought, it’s not real life why would anyone get upset over this stuff? Clearly at the time I didn’t grasp how totally intertwined our everyday lives are with our varying forms of entertainment. We look up to characters from our favourite books and relate to characters from our favourite films and shows. Entertainment can so easily influence our perspectives and perpetuate cultural ideals – it’s both dangerous and wonderful.

As I said, we talked about desensitization at length in school, usually in the context of violence in the media. Amongst our teachers, it was generally agreed that violence had become normalized in a very dangerous way. They believed violent behaviour was so common in entertainment that we’d begun to shrug and move on when it happened in everyday life.

Now, I’m not saying they’re wrong. As a society, we totally have. But these violent films and shows are generally a case of art imitating life, and the kind of gruesome violence we’ve been seeing is nothing new and it’s not as a result of what we’re watching on a Friday night. The Romans had all kinds of crazy torture methods; they used to tie up their victims, slather them in honey and let them drift off to sea where they’d slowly rot and simultaneously be eaten alive by all manner of insects. 

And those guys didn’t even have TV. 

But I digress. What I’m getting at is that yes, the majority of us are totally desensitized to violence and emotional trauma in entertainment. We don’t scream at horror movies the way Hitchcock’s audiences might have, and we no longer groan and cover our eyes when Tarantino’s latest anti-hero skins and hacks at his enemies.

Except... I do.

As soon as that red corn syrup starts spraying around, I cringe and groan and bury my head into the nearest cushion. There’s a scene in Django Unchained where a man is ripped limb from limb by ravenous dogs. At least I think that’s what happened; I didn’t actually manage to watch that scene all the way through. Later on in the movie, Dr. Schultz (played by the magnificent Christoph Waltz) has a traumatic flashback to the incident, and he’s seen flinching and shaking - I can honestly say that that was my reaction, too. It’s even worse when kids die on-screen – I feel as heartbroken as if they were my own nieces or nephews. Looper totally took it out of me, as did Changeling.

So, why do I keep going to see these terribly violent movies? Well, because I appreciate that they don’t censor their stories. For the most part, the films in question don’t just throw in horror or violence or tragedy for the shock factor, they do it because otherwise the story would seem to be set in a weird Earth-like realm where everyone is protected by a magic anti-reality bubble. They do it because it’s a reflection of our world. I think Cher Horowitz said it best; “Even if you took out all the violent shows, you could still see the news. And so, until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news; there’s no point taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value!”

Ha! A semi-serious post and I get to reference 'Clueless'! It's the little things...

The idea for this piece originally came from a realization I had about my significant other. He’s rather stoic, and pretty much unflappable. He’d scoff at me for flinching at any horror movie, but when he watched Up for the first time, there was some definite choking up.

To be honest, I’m glad he identified with Carl and Ellie, and I’m really glad that I still can’t stop myself from forming attachments to the ever-illogical stock characters in gory slasher movies. Getting upset about a character’s misfortunes reminds me that awful, terrible things really do happen every day, and it makes me so relieved to know that I’m in no way desensitised.

So yeah, I cried a little when Marlin left Dory in Finding Nemo, and when Sully terrified little Boo in Monster’s Inc, and when Andy’s toys faced the furnace in Toy Story 3 and when Carl and Ellie found out they couldn’t conceive a baby in Up.

Pixar movies make me cry – thank God.

The Birds

It’s not that weird to be afraid of birds. Randy from My Name is Earl is afraid of birds. So is Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. And probably plenty of other non-fictional people, too. Ornithophobia is defined as “a type of specific phobia, an abnormal, irrational fear of birds.”

Does this seem like an irrational thing to be scared of?

Anyway, my fear is totally rational. My story begins in a similar fashion to that of Green from Pokémon Adventures. As a child, Green was kidnapped by a bird. When I was twelve, I was hunted by an African Hawk-Eagle.

http://www.wildlife-pictures-online.com/image-files/hawk-eagle_lc-3501.jpg

I lived in Tanzania at the time, and was spending the weekend at our family’s beach house in a little village called Kimbiji. This was, and is, my favourite place in the entire world. Our house was open plan, and sat on a cliff overlooking a private beach. While I still miss the place desperately, my biggest consolation is knowing that I really did appreciate what we had. So much so that I would spend long intervals standing by the cliff’s edge just taking in the view.

So one day, while all the grown-ups were lounging in the shade, I went about my ostentatious little routine, probably imagining I was in a movie or something. There I stood, hands on my hips, breathing in the sea air and smiling meaningfully to myself, when I heard a screech up above. Before I had time to look up, something swished by my head, and I felt talons scratching at my scalp, tugging at my hair.

I screamed and stupidly thumped at the wings beating beside my ears, but ultimately it was my dad’s shouts of “Go ’way! GO ’WAY!” that scared the horrible thing off. My dad is a bear-like Cork man, so I imagine the bird thought that I was someone else’s dinner, and this was all just a big misunderstanding. After that, I sought comfort with my big sister, who in a bizarre role reversal has actually suppressed this memory.

Couple this terrifying experience with my mother’s Hitchcock-inspired conviction that birds will, in fact, take over the world and you’ve got a perfectly rational fear of birds. Even after my near-death experience (melodramatic? Moi?), my phobia didn’t really manifest itself for a couple of years. And even when it did, it was pigeons rather than hawks that I found myself edging around in the street. Probably because you don’t get many African Hawk-Eagles on the streets of Dublin.

While my phobia is now borderline crippling, I can understand why it might be amusing to see a grown woman having to hold the hands of her boyfriend and friend as they lead her through park filled with pigeons. They are my personal pigeon-wranglers and I am not embarrassed. Well, not mortified anyway.

I tend to get some incredulous looks when people find out about my phobia. In these cases, I point out the following:

1. Pigeons are dirty. And most of them have those terrifying twisted claw-stumps.
2. They can turn their heads 360 degrees, which, if The Exorcist has taught us anything, is the calling card of Satan.
3. They have no sense of personal space and nobody like to be bitch-slapped by a pigeon wing.
4. They spread disease. They're known as flying rats for a reason.

In spite of all this, I do also appreciate that birds can be beautiful. Like this:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdnqAWm6pApVRrV1f6foTp_aufxEB7VMKDn4xYViEvPmvmR-3TGV65Kny2jj7AdwwqR8zaYjLBRB9Imgpr4rrtXh19lNeuTAG8CKaOq1HXJxwoKx79KzsURGBAZqG15PrpVs3A2dqr84Ml/s1600/5.jpg  

But they can also be disgusting. Like this:

I drew that masterpiece by the way. Enjoy!