cinema & arts as healing
“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.” ― C.S. Lewis
psychxspirit
Favorite Films
Cinema therapy is a form of therapeutic analysis; using the heightened emotionality and drama of media to better capture psychological sentiments and ideals we may not be able to verbalize or consciously muster. Visit http://www.cinematherapy.com for a better understanding! Click on the poster to watch the trailer!
There’s a great quote in the Town that I always think about when Ben Affleck is thinking about finally leaving Charlestown, the small corner of Boston that is his eternal life; simultaneously providing breath and suffocating him. A part of the world where you don’t get to get up and leave. We are privy to his thoughts as he laments, “every day people wake up and tell themselves they are going to change and 20 years goes by…” Lack of self-awareness? Lack of environmental supports to help facilitate change? Lack of any decent meaningful action plan that can take such a huge endeavor and break it into pieces that are accessible and practical? Change comes hard, I know this. It often comes as a result of loss and in all my shortcomings, I often think to myself, “if my dad passed away tomorrow, I wouldn’t come close to doing what I’m doing right now.” I am rewatching the Wire and one of my favorite characters Cutty had a scene where he was asked to take out a ‘corner’ and in that last moment of pulling the trigger, could not do it. He goes to Avon (the hood Godfather) and says “what was in me before, isn’t in me now” and one of Avon’s guys dismisses this excuse “he used to be a man at least” to which Avon replies “he still is a man.” That hit my soul. The conscious recognition of the obstacles it took for this brute, this former killer, this guy who gave up 15 years of his life for a street code to try and do better. I have been thinking about my obsession with movies; I have always thought about it. The narrative I have painted of myself; when I moved from NYC to Texas at 16, there was so much leisure time that I filled up my days with movies. That is true. But from a spiritual and psychological side; it was a compensation. My life in NYC was so brazen, so animated, so bizarre and adventurous. I think about all these tales I have and they were my Seasons 1-5.
It was a strange schism moving to Texas because it coincided with my loss of imagination, everything came to a standstill. The environment was rich; cows and green pastures like I had never seen but inherently so dull. The suburbs. The same houses for rows and rows, for miles and subdivisions across an entire city. Another brick in the wall. The law of compensation. A need to makeup for the adventures that once came so easily to us. We would leave our apartment door and before you know it, be whisked away on some spontaneous instinct. I can’t ever truly appreciate those moments and deep inside myself, my love for working with children and young people comes from those times. I guess if I’m continuing this line of psychoanalytical inquiry; films were a way for me to live on my adolescence. In the alleyways of NYC where we would brawl, shout at prostitutes fucking, throw shit at strangers or come up against another group of boys and either stand our ground or run (we always ran), there needed to be a compensation. And so I sought it on the magical screen; Gene Hackman running through the streets of NYC with his badge and crazed demeanor; a young De Niro and Keitel on the Mean Streets mustering their own macho Mafioso machinations , Norton in 25th Hour disgruntled with the plurality of NYC and the two faced hypocrisy of the city’s denizens, Tony looking out across the NYC skyline from Jersey trying to psychologically fortify his insecurities, Woody Allen amidst his neuroticism finding love (ever fleeting love), Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan interweaving their tales of love in the only city where characters pop up as spontaneously as a spring shower…. I sat in the lifeless suburban vestige of our dream home and I dreamt even bigger. The teenage and young adulthood projections of what my life could have been if I had stayed in Queens needing to be met by others… And I still return, time and time again, to project my individual & collective psyche so that this linear encapsulation can try to answer those fundamental questions of life, death and everything in-between.