A thought on Batman

Before he performs his heroic deeds, Batman stands with his head bowed at the edge of a building, any building, as if conceding defeat before his inevitable victory in the alley below.  An eternally unconquerable loneliness.  That is what we see in Batman, not man masking his identity to the outside, but a figure draped in his true self, hoping that some good can come from such sadness.

The Happy Sad Effect

I get this kind of good anxious feeling when things go well for me I realized.  As if bad things must be on the horizon because I'm somehow undeserving of what's going down.  However it's especially hard for me to be down whilst listening to this song:

   

    I know nothing else about this artist at the time this post is being written.  Kudos to Scott for showing me this.  Where does the term kudos come from?  I don't actually care that much.  

    

    Movies that are sad don't always make me sad.  This is for multiple reasons, each dependent on the film:

1.  The movie was garbage.

2.  The movie was too manipulative without earning it.  This is the equivalent of coming on too strong romantically (I don't know if that makes sense):  The score comes in to let you know that it's sad but frankly you're not invested enough in the characters yet to be affected by the events and reactions transpiring onscreen, and so it has failed to emotionally engage you.  This does not mean the movie was bad necessarily, and perhaps it was interesting or even funny, breezy, or charming, but if you're not able to be upset at all by what's going on, the film's potential effect is severely hampered.

3.  Failure to identify with the characters/main crisis.  This is an interesting one, because a sign of a really  great film is the director getting you to feel exactly what she/he wants, even if that emotion is somewhat irrational given the circumstance.  For instance, and people might deny this in order to seem more sane, but Hannibal Lector, a cannibal, is incredibly likable in the film The Silence of the Lambs.  The director did this on purpose, because it makes him eerier that you like him so much despite his previous actions.  How this relates to sad movies:  The more preposterous a thing the director tries to make sympathetic, the better the movie has to be in order for it to work.  Suppose there's a movie about a father that begins to crumble under the pressure of life and the end of the film results in him murdering his family.  I know, holy crap, how is THAT movie going to work?  What I'm saying is, that movie better have a tremendous director, or else the only thing the audience will be thinking is "that dad sucks, I hope he rots in prison and then burns in hell."  Obviously there's a point in which seemingly no emotion can be salvaged if the screenplay is awful, but regardless of this example, I hope that point makes sense.

4.  The movie is truly beautiful.  Some people will disagree with me, but sometimes I feel that a film, usually because of it's sadness (which succeeded in engaging the viewer emotionally), is so wonderful because of the depth of emotion and what that means and all the nuances and effects that can have on the viewer and so on.  That was a fruity sounding sentence, someday I'll be a better communicator.  What this means is that the beauty overpowers the feelings of being down, or more often they accompany these sad feelings, I don't know how to express that.  Whatever.  I'd use examples of movies that are like this but I don't wanna ruin them for those who haven't seen them.  

     I'd like to clarify that sadness and depression are not one and the same.  Sadness requires the emotion of sorrow, it is a tragic emotion, whereas depression is more synonymous with submission, overwhelmed, hopelessness.  

     

     Instead of taking advantage of the end of Daylight Savings Time (Daylight Losing Time?), I um, wrote this.  

Great Start

After finding out some pretty disheartening news yesterday, I've realized some rather hilarious things regarding the way people and I react to sadness and such.  I slept through my classes till one, and upon waking up, picked up an orange soda off the ground, drank from it, and promptly dropped it and spilled on the carpet.  Also an owl flew up to the window spouting the word "Loser," but he was long in the O's cause, um, he was an owl.

Formality dictates that when one asks "how are you?" in passing, you respond with "good!" or "good, how are you?"  So when people asked me I either lied or told them the truth, the latter of which just catches people off guard.  It's the funniest when it's someone that you really don't know well.  

"How are you?"

"I've been better."

"Oh."

Hilarioius.  In the future maybe stick with what's up if you don't want to get deep, world.  I'm being rather prickly, in reality people reacted pretty compassionately and so it turns out that some folks are okay, but the idea of that gets me.  

I think I'll probably share music pretty often since I want anyone reading this to feel like this had some substance at least.  So here's a song my friend showed me the other day: 

Listen to the harmonies and also the prettiness.  Both are important aspects of the song.  But seriously so are the lyrics, which I haven't delved into yet but some of the snippets are pretty enticing.  Hooray for songwriting.