Dec 10, 2008 00:44
As a child, I had several irrational fears, such as my belief that digging holes might somehow release Satan from Hell and destroy the world. But one of the strangest ones was my paranoid fear that people were secretly following me around with cameras, recording my embarrassing moments, and playing them on some secret tv show. >_> When the film The Truman Show was released, I was pretty shocked by how similar it was.
So I found this article in this week's The Week really interesting:
That modern-day scourge, reality television, has spawned its very own psychosis, says the Associated Press. A growing number of people with mental illness have the delusion that they're being stalked by reality TV cameras. Dr. Joel Gold of New York's Bellevue Hospital calls it the "Truman syndrome" after the Jim Carrey movie "The Truman Show," in which every person in the lead character's life is an actor and every moment is being broadcast to an unseen audience. In one case, a man walked into a government building and asked officials to arrest the people who were filming him without his consent. In another, a patient believed he was a contestant on a secret game show and that everyone and everything he experienced was a part of that show. A third patient became convinced that he was living in the computer-generated virtual reality depicted in the film "The Matrix." Psychiatrists say it's not that reality TV or films are causing people to become mentally ill; they're just providing a new template for delusional people who might, at some other time, have insisted that the CIA was monitoring their thoughts.
So while I am insane, I can take solace in the fact that there are others who are at least as insane as I am. :)
And speaking of insanity, Bleach 198 was pretty fun. Way too much time spent on recaps and the Byakuya stuff was kind of blah, but it got really good as soon as Ashisogi came out. I LOVED the music that started playing, and the little crying baby sound effect. Szayel's horror as his body deteriorated, with Mayuri just standing there smiling, and that final POV shot(GULP) - great sadistic fun. :D