The Movie

The Movie

IMAX is the movie-goers extreme. You go into a huge domed room and sit mere yards away from an awesome curved screen that extends from roof to ceiling. Staring straight ahead, your peripheral vision cannot extend past the screen’s lateral limits.

Sometimes the seats actually move – jerking, rocking, twitching from side to side, all to create the impression that you are “really there.” Really where? Not watching a movie but IN the movie as a participant.

You sit down in the comfortable seats designed to make your body forget where it is, and the lights dim. Sounds emerge from every direction, surrounding you with another cue that what is emerging is no mere representation but reality itself.

Suddenly the entire screen fills with lighted images as far as the eye can see and you suddenly are sucked into a world of illusion as convincing as man’s inventive capacities can make it.

You are diving into the depths of ocean, flying above the clouds, witnessing scenes from across the universe – and it is all totally believable.

Finally the house lights come on again and you are jolted, either with relief or regret, back into ordinary mundane, pedestrian life. Or is it back to another movie experience - camoflauged as ordinary mundane, pedestrian life?

We are persuaded that events we witness are really happening – that what we see, hear and otherwise experience is actuality. It is truth, that with which we should identify, and to which we should react as though completely real.

But is it so? The testimony of wisdom is: this depends on you, the viewer.

The degree of identification with life's grand "movie," of being sucked and suckered in without resistance to its plot, is totally variable according to the awareness of each person.

There are those for whom nothing happening in the phenomenal world has persuasive power. They have seen through it as one sees through the scrim, that transparent cloth upon which theatre images are projected.

Called “evil” in some cultures, “Maya” in others, this world of seeming is convincing in the extreme and most movie goers will never question its ultimate reality.

Until, perhaps, the suffering it produces drives them to such desperation that a tear in the insubstantiality opens, allowing a view beyond it.

It is easy to enjoy the movie when the story is fun and exciting. Who would want to leave the theatre then?

But when it turns ugly, that is when patrons start looking for the exit.