But world enough and time
I just finished watching Terminator 3. The ending was surprisingly dysphoric for a Hollywood movie and on the whole, I liked it much more than I thought possible. But then again, I'm far too susceptible to post-apocalyptic images. They worm inside my head, regardless of the source material and get their nasty, scratching claws right into my subconscious--all of my most vivid and detailed nightmares are post-apocalyptic, or at least feature strong themes of alienation and disenfranchisement. I think this is because I watched the Terminator movies, the Alien movies* and started reading Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles all before I stopped internalizing everything I saw or read. When I was younger (as in, till I was about 14 or so) I was continually petrified by the fictions I consumed. If something was even remotely frightening, then I would be subjected to nightmares about it. I'm the only person I know who was still scared shitless by those stupid write-by-numbers Goosebumps books when they were more than 10 years old.
My theory on it is that it took me longer than everyone else to develop the 'it's not real' filter. I just accepted every situation and occurrence as things which were distinctly possible, not so much in the sense that they could happen to me, but that what I was viewing was viewing was a reality into which I could be easily be subsumed (C.S Lewis, you bastard, this is at least partly your fault). Or to put it another way, I didn't really sense to barrier between myself and the fictional world, and therefore ended up taking everything I saw into myself unquestioningly and was thus unable to watch so much as an episode of Doctor Who without running out of the room in terror (only to come creeping right back in. My masochistic tendencies were formed young, it seems.)
All of which, to haul myself around to my original point, means that the things I read or watched before I finally grew out of this tendency all seem that much more real and possible than anything I've read or watched since. Hence my immediate identification with a film that, viewed objectively, was little more than an extended chase scene intercut with hackneyed dialogue. And, now that I think about it, this also might be why I find reading all these detailed opinions about the LotR movies so...disquieting. Because I don't react to these movies with my critical faculties in any way engaged--I loved the books before I had critical faculties, and to some extent that ease of acceptance got translated to how I view the films. Having people pull these films apart seems to me to deny their reality and I'm still too attached to the story of Sam and Frodo to end my submersion into their world so easily.
* I would argue that while you wouldn't really classify the first Alien film as post-apocalyptic, the second one, which was the one I watched repeatedly, has all of the themes and imagery of a post-apocalyptic film while admittedly still having the 'safety net' of untouched Earth floating in the background.
My theory on it is that it took me longer than everyone else to develop the 'it's not real' filter. I just accepted every situation and occurrence as things which were distinctly possible, not so much in the sense that they could happen to me, but that what I was viewing was viewing was a reality into which I could be easily be subsumed (C.S Lewis, you bastard, this is at least partly your fault). Or to put it another way, I didn't really sense to barrier between myself and the fictional world, and therefore ended up taking everything I saw into myself unquestioningly and was thus unable to watch so much as an episode of Doctor Who without running out of the room in terror (only to come creeping right back in. My masochistic tendencies were formed young, it seems.)
All of which, to haul myself around to my original point, means that the things I read or watched before I finally grew out of this tendency all seem that much more real and possible than anything I've read or watched since. Hence my immediate identification with a film that, viewed objectively, was little more than an extended chase scene intercut with hackneyed dialogue. And, now that I think about it, this also might be why I find reading all these detailed opinions about the LotR movies so...disquieting. Because I don't react to these movies with my critical faculties in any way engaged--I loved the books before I had critical faculties, and to some extent that ease of acceptance got translated to how I view the films. Having people pull these films apart seems to me to deny their reality and I'm still too attached to the story of Sam and Frodo to end my submersion into their world so easily.
* I would argue that while you wouldn't really classify the first Alien film as post-apocalyptic, the second one, which was the one I watched repeatedly, has all of the themes and imagery of a post-apocalyptic film while admittedly still having the 'safety net' of untouched Earth floating in the background.