Cinematic Concerns

Short excerpt from the novel "The Book Of Joe" by Jonathan Tropper.

"That day mattered," Wayne says emphatically. "There were plenty of other days that mattered too, but not nearly as many as there should have been. I've thought about it a lot. What makes a day like that matter so much, and why there are so many less of them as we get older."

"And what's the answer?" I ask.

"It's simple, really. We were doing what we wanted to do, instead of what we expected ourselves to do. I'm here to tell you that at the end of the day, which is where I currently reside, nothing else matters but the things that truly matter. This is nothing you didn't know before, but even though you know it, it doesn't mean you really know it. Because if you really knew it, you'd act on it, man. Shit, if I could go back now ..."

His voice trails off, and he's quiet for so long that I think for a moment that he's fallen asleep, but then he leans forward and takes a deep breath. "I am now going to invoke a cartoon character," he announces solemnly.

"You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"

"Yeah."

"Well," he sayd. "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter."

He rolls onto his back, pulling up the blankets. "I need to get some rest," he says. "Come and see me tomorrow if you can."

"You bet," I say, getting up to leave as I consider the merits of what Wayne has just said. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe he's just stoned out of his gourd.

"Joe," he says. "Remember what happens to the coyote when he doesn't run off the cliff."

"What happens?"

Wayne's smile is crooked and ever so slightly crazed. "A fucking piano falls on him."

A young man who was estranged from his father finds out one day that his father is dying. He takes a train and hurries back to his hometown, playing out in his mind what he would say – how he would say sorry. All their past arguments have long shifted to the edges of his memory, and all he thinks of now is that he is his father's son.

Then, while he is still on the train, a relative calls him to inform him that his father has passed on. The young man, now distraught, plays out in his head what he wanted to say to his father, and it slowly sinks in that he is never going to be able to do that, ever. Not thinking straight, he types out an SMS and sends it to his father's handphone – "I'm sorry, Dad".

Two minutes later, he receives a reply: "Too late for that isn't it you little shit."

Then proceed to lay down your Oscar votes in this ballot.

First, find out how many of the movies you have seen here.



You can see the vote results so far here. (UPDATE: Hmm, turns out it is access-protected. Request permission and I'll enable you.)

Most people have the impression that they simply see what is there and do so merely by opening their eyes and looking. A group of psychologists at Harvard performed a rather disturbing experiment to prove that this isn't the case. They showed a video of basketball players passing the ball and asked people to count the number of passes made by the team wearing either the white or the black uniforms. In the middle of the video, one of two strange things happened. Either a woman with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla costume unexpectedly walked through the center of the action, remaining clearly visible for about five seconds. The subjects of the experiment were asked afterward if they noticed anything odd. 35% of the observers failed to notice the woman with the umbrella, even though her presence was obvious to anyone not engaged in the counting task.

A control group of people who were not counting passes easily saw the woman with the umbrella because when they were asked to look at the screen, it was with the attitude: What's up? What might I see there? It was an attitude open to an unfamiliar world, accepting of whatever was there. There was no model and there were no expectations. The order "Tell me what you see" produces curiosity. The order "Count the passes" produces a closed system, a narrowing of attention directed at a particular task, which fills up working memory. ... The demands of the task use up scarce brain resources. It is a magic trick in that it creates a model that directs your attention away from something obvious that the magician (the researcher) is going to do right before your eyes. ... Under the right circumstances, working memory can't be distracted from its task. Such a closed attitude can prevent new perceptions from being incorporated into the model. Such a closed attitude can kill you.

Psychologists who study survivors ... conclude that the most successful are open to the changing nature of their environment.

... But what's most surprising in the experiment at Harvard is that an even larger number of people (56%) didn't notice the gorilla.

Excerpt from "Deep Survival", by Laurence Gonzales.