CINEMATIC SINS: DEAD POETS SOCIETY AND "ASSUMING THE POSITION"

Ethan Hawke as prettyboy prep school crybaby

The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's upcoming publication, tentatively titled Demon in the Rough

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Film is like music in its ability to transfix and captivate its audience. Both the visual and the aural are mediums through which a hypnotic effect can take hold, causing the participant in the medium to “lose himself” temporarily and engage entirely with that which what spills into his ears and assails his eyes.

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SELF-HARM

Robin Williams in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" (1996)

by Andy Nowicki

The materialist conception of reality posits as self-evident the non-existence of the human soul. To materialists, a living being is a meat puppet controlled by no hidden hand; it merely flops about pitifully on its arbitrarily-constructed stage, until such time when events conspire to cause its demise.

In the materialistic conception, a creature like man simply has no enduring imperative beyond a desperate—and ultimately futile- drive for self-preservation. Notions of an afterlife and an eternal destiny are simply delusions he has sold himself to give his paltry existence the illusion of meaning. The very complexity of his consciousness has, in fact, become his curse. The reality of death, meanwhile, can only strike terror into his heart, and he strains miserably to avoid it. Pain, too, is something he cannot abide, for pain is a reminder of his mortality. Pleasure, conversely, is the main distraction that he craves, but it is an ever-fleeting one, which brings increasingly diminishing returns, given the constantly obtruding reminders of his approaching extinction.