Save Your Humanity: Experiencing Film (Part 1)

Don't let the machinery tell you what to feel

This semester, I am teaching a horror film class (again). This is the first in a series of posts about that process. Throughout the semester, I will reflect on the experience of the films and essays we discuss. This week, I write about mindset when approaching art.

A Heartfelt Letter to my Film Students:

The thought of working with you this semester has me bursting with excitement, like Kane in Alien when the chestbursting creature explodes from his torso.

Appropriate. This is a horror film class, after all.

Photo by Noom Peerapong on Unsplash

For our viewing pleasure, I've curated twenty or so movies that I hope will entertain us, disturb us, and make us see the world in ways we haven't before.

In short, what I hope to give you this semester is the gift of experiencing. That may sound quaint or even pointless, but I assure you it is not. Actual experience is becoming extinct in our lifetime, right here, right now, right before our eyes, which are being blinded by the blue light of our screens.

Now, by nature I tend to under-promise and tamp expectations down, dirt-level. But at the moment in which we are currently alive (or maybe undead?), I think our class may be the most important thing in the world. In the three hours a week we'll spend together in this shady room, we have the chance to experience art. That may sound like nothing much at all, but it can liberate you if you let it.

So much of life outside this room has been twisted into machinery. Work lives are controlled by the dual-engines of profit and HR policy. And everything else is controlled by algorithms.

So you hated math in school? Joke's on you. Your whole life is run by equations that tell you what to do with every last drop of your liquid free-time. If this, then that. If that, then this. It's all pre-ordained and Silicon Valley is run by dedicated Calvinists. They are fundamentalists following the letter of the algorithm rather than the King James Bible.

And we are under their thumb. They tell us who to date, what "content" to consume, and what we're supposed to think about that content. Want to know what to watch in order to be on the "right side of history?" Have no fear; the algorithm will make sure you know.

This is all very efficient, yes. But it is cold and it is heartless and it treats you like a machine and if you do not resist it, you will be turned into a bot that exists to serve the great machine that lives behind the curtain gnawing on your bones. I want the time and space we share to be as free from the machine as possible. So as you watch these movies, think about them, and come together to discuss them, I have only three requests -- everything else is gravy.

First, please keep the machines out of our space. If there are moments when we can use them as tools, I'll let you know. Until then, be here, and here alone, for the 75 minutes we have. Don’t let them make a tool out of you. Not here.

Second, please protect your experience with the movies we watch. Don't give yourself away to the machine. What I mean is this: don't ruin your experience by watching some YouTuber tell you what to think about whatever we're watching. I have no interest in your ability to mimic the hottest or most righteous takes, so bringing the opinions of others into class won't do you any good. I want to hear about your experience, even if it's confusion. Tell me what confused you and we'll dive into the movie from there. Don't let other people steal your chance for a new experience. Take advantage of these precious few moments outside the control of the machine. Those people aren't real anyway.

And finally, please tell me what you experienced and what your felt and what you thought. Don't give me your evaluation of the movies. Taste is subjective and it usually comes from some cog or another of the machine anyway.

Remember how all the smartest people said that John Carpenter's The Thing was trash? Don't be idiots like those people. If you think a performance is "bad," step back from that a second and ask, "what is the impact or significance of this outlandish piece of stylized acting?" There is plenty of time outside this space for opinionating.

In fact, it's all just opinionating. Sharp elbows inside the machine. And a life lived like that will eventually burn you to a cinder.

Here, together, let us make a space for experiencing.