monkey tricks

What I learnt from Disney

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 23:56:04 -0400

Before I had children I osmosed from the left-leaning universe that Disney movies were evil. There was something inherently evil about princesses and the stereotype of the prince rescuing fair maids. There was something exploitative about a large, world dominating corporation that sucked money out of families via emotional manipulation. There was something wrong with Walt and his cryogen head and his evil movie empire.

Then I watched them as an adult and I realised that mostly they were just nice. I had read fairy tales as a child - the Red Shoes, Hansel and Gretel, the Little Mermaid, the Little Match Girl and the horrific Bluebeard. All with unhappy endings, important moral lessons on vanity, sacrifice without reward, poverty and marrying serial killers. These stories didn’t seem terrible at the time, as I read them with a child’s mind. It is only looking back on them as an adult that they seem so monstrous.

The stories did give a clue to the randomness of the world, the meanness of some people and the idea that revenge could and should be exacted. It wasn’t a cotton wool world of if I just try hard enough I will be rewarded. Although I like both the fantastical nature of these stories and their raw humanness, a movie version for children clearly needs to be tempered. Parents were unlikely to take their children to watch a movie that ended with Snow White making her step-mother dance to her death in heated iron shoes, or the mermaid having to endure the pain of razors in her legs while mutely watching her Prince marry someone else.

A slightly twee sincerity isn’t necessarily be evil. Even though the Disney movies are neatly tied up with true love and happy endings they don’t necessarily lack depth. As in most stories, something has gone wrong to create the story and initiate conflict. Many of the Disney tales start with the mother having died, which in previous times would have been a common enough scenario. This creates a moral universe, yes a simplistic one, but one nonetheless.

Some thinkers are fond of telling us how necessary books are, literature and the novel in particular, are to the creation of a moral universe, but I have found with my daughter that movies and music have been more important in helping her develop a complex emotional understanding. Children’s books these days are so very sanitised and lack emotional complexity let alone the grittiness of ordinary lives.

But it is the fantastical nature of the Disney and other movies (I think of movies as diverse as Nanny McPhee, Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, the Sound of Music, Pocahontas) that brings out the wonder in my daughter. They don’t sanitise but take the ordinary and make it extraordinary, vanity becomes grotesque, and badness malevolence. And it is this fantastical quality that elicits the questions from my daughter that her story books never do.

I struggle with my answers, to provide an honest but age appropriate response, “the mother died because she was very sick…They are trying to hurt them because they want their land and the gold underneath…Some people believe a person’s spirit goes into the trees and animals when they die…Alice thinks it is a dream but she is remembering she has been here before…The Red Queen was either born bad or turned bad later on…”

I know also, that although there are movies that are very much about right time right age, that my daughter looks and listens with a child’s mind. She doesn’t fully understand the motivations and emotional world of adults and so she doesn’t see what we see in these tales. Some movies are too scary and harmful, and we don’t watch those. But a whole range of other stories are too bland and not fantastical enough to generate any response at all.

Sensitive gene makes you more adapted to external environment

Tue, 01 May 2012 01:26:22 -0400

Sensitive gene makes you more adapted to external environment:

Rather than make us more sensitive (eg less resilient, or more anxious), the ‘sensitive gene’ in conjunction with warm parenting makes us more likely to be more resilient than those with the so-called ‘resilience gene’. But combine the sensitive gene with poor parenting, and we are more likely to have mental health issues. Listen to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind talking to thinkers in neurobiology about personality, genes and whether you are a robust dandelion or a wilting orchid. Does it mean you are more adaptable if you have a genetic predisposition to being ‘sensitive’?

"To idealize is also a form of suffering."

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:29:45 -0500

"To idealize is also a form of suffering.":

From Julian Hibbard’s book, Schematics: a love story. Via Brainpickings.

Definition of human through the ages

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:27:03 -0500

Definition of human through the ages:

Via brainpickings.org

The philosophical zombie

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:19:22 -0500

The philosophical zombie:

What is the mind and being conscious? How can the philosophical zombie - the use of a zombie as a thought experiment - tell us about what it is to be human. Natasha Mitchell on Radio National’s All in the Mind talks to thinkers and scientists about human consciousness.

You're just fucked up!

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:23:18 -0400

You're just fucked up!:

Depression is an over used term and we pathologise ordinary and every day unhappinesses. For most people, we’re just a bit fucked up, argues Professor Jon Jureidini. Hear him speak at the Festival of Ideas, via ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind program.

Women and depression - over diagnosed?

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:09:29 -0400

Women and depression - over diagnosed?

On Madness

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 01:48:00 -0400

Madness is not something to be trifled with. I looked in on it once. Thoughts of Joss Whedon’s Reavers going over and over and over and over in my brain as though rather than my skin cracking and a monster emerging I would put on the skin of another and change from the expected vision of soft nurturing motherhood into something raging and monstrous.

The sadness, the desperateness of the sadness! Needing to lock my self up, wanting to cut myself open where the alien baby had come from, as though that would take me back to before the birth.

And I hadn’t lost control, if losing control is not knowing that something was wrong. I knew enough to know something was wrong, that I was going somewhere I didn’t want to go, I could see it there, in me. It was my mind. It was screaming.

I managed enough to sound the warnings, get the support, get my parents and husband to look after my child so I could retreat, keep away, be swamped. And I don’t remember a lot else after that until the drugs kicked in.

The sertraline was flattening, which for a time was what I needed. I would protect myself and my children. I would take any deadening drug they would give me. I needed to flatten and to die a little on the inside for a time.

It put all my everyday ordinary neuroses into perspective. The idea now that my ordinary everyday neuroses needed treating is laughable. The idea that naturopathy, or meditation could prevent or alleviate madness is ridiculous. Even the idea that we have self control.

Of course we are in control of ourselves everyday in an ordinary sense. But under these type of circumstances, or when a person becomes monstrous as a result of postnatal depression, one can’t just get a grip. A grip on what? A grip on a phantom. One cannot think your way out of, cognitively repair, a self as it morphs into a monster. We are a lot less in control of this slippery thing called a self than we think.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of those that think we should give expression to every thought and emotion. That would be to create another type of monster - an infantile, narcissistic, indulgent monster. The veneer of civility is there after all for a reason. It protects us from pure, unmediated selves. But the idea that we have ultimate control over, can shape, mould and construct something called a self is a conceit, one of the many humans perpetuate to cover the fragility of existence.

Yes life, an ordinary, everyday life has pain. Lot’s of it. And countless everyday disappointments and sadnesses. Tears, even those of self pity, should be shed. A normal range of emotions, even neuroses and anxieties should be experienced and should not be treated. But madness, screaming, wearing, fragmenting madness is not something be trifled with.

Gutsy girl longboarders carving up the mountains

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:56:33 -0400

Gutsy girl longboarders carving up the mountains:

I don’t know anything about these girls but I like this vid. I hope my daughter grows up to be as unselfconsciously and simply comfortable looking. There is no arrogance. There is no overly sexualised posing. There is no infantalisation. There is no trying to match up to a bunch of blokes either. It’s just a bunch of young women hanging out together, doing something they love and showing some guts, as they ride forest roads on their longboards.

The evil reign of the pink princess

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:54:34 -0400

The evil reign of the pink princess

The absurdity of being

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:17:12 -0400

Human life is absurd. It’s absurdity arises from human fraility. Our ability to reflect on our actions and to make conscious decisions give us the appearance of being different to and above other animals. It makes us appear smarter than we are. The gap between our ability to make sensible decisions and the fact that we so rarely do creates an ongoing sensation of absurdity.

Human being’s seek meaning for their existence. The constant way these webs of meaning can be undone, disproved, reformulated creates a gap between our desire for existence to have sense and purpose, and our inability to actually create and sustain these beliefs or meanings.

We can keep making and remaking meanings and ourselves in a constant movement of chatter and activity until we might, like in the dance of the red shoes, twirl ourselves to death.

We can like Nietzche’s ‘superman’ stand on the edge of the abyss of nothingness and scream in fury and remake ourselves time and time again despite our knowledge and our actual selves, or creep into a ball of nihilism and despair at the utter nothingness of human existence.

Or we can as Jean Paul Satre suggests in Nausea continue on, seek and make occasional beauty in no real expectation other than that one person somewhere may gain pleasure from our scratchings. Or we can continue on and just accept and be open to those rare, often mundane and gentle moments of beauty that to describe would condemn one to tweeness, where the universe cracks open, just a little, for a minute, and light creeps in - a baby’s laugh, light through trees, a smile, the smell of a room that brings back memories, an unexpected stillness…

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time

Sometimes humankind makes some thing of beauty that sings of the...

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:48:26 -0500

Sometimes humankind makes some thing of beauty that sings of the fragility and persistence of humanity.

Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures

Testing the limits of the mind and body

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:39:54 -0400

Testing the limits of the mind and body:

In an interview with the Guardian, Marina Abramovic talks about the psychological and physical impact of her performances. These have involved whipping, cutting herself and inviting the viewing public to abuse her. Her most recent performance had people crying just from staring into her eyes in silence and stillness. Her art teaches us about the limits and strength of our physical and mental selves, and the limit in trusting others. Her recent performance shows the power of stillness and connection in a noisy, busy and abstracted existence.

Difference between mind and brain

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:34:08 -0400

Difference between mind and brain:

Two psychiatrists with quite different approaches discuss neuro plasticity and whether there is anything called a mind at all with All in the Mind’s Natasha Mitchell.

Male characters in a batch of recent films are punished for...

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:17:53 -0400

Male characters in a batch of recent films are punished for trangressing social norms. Seeking compromise and comfort is celebrated rather than permitting these individuals to live a different life.

Redemption isn’t possible via the radical stance of the outsider, who refuses the comforts of the herd and actively stands within the deeply painful life of the critic of everyday existence. Redemption is portrayed as only being available via committed relationships and by having children.

Jason Di Rosso, from ABC Radio National’s Movie Time interviews Christian Lorentzen, a New York based literary and film critic, on his critique of a number of films by Judd Apatow, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

What is it like to experience psychosis, to live it, and...

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 06:23:01 -0400

What is it like to experience psychosis, to live it, and incorporate it into your concept of self? Natasha Mitchell from ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind talks to Dr Paul Fearne, a philosopher and writer, who kept a diary during his first experiences with schizophrenia.

'Thick' and 'thin' stories of being

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:02:51 -0400

Odd, shaken, fallible creatures, we mostly face crises of confidence in two ways. We rebuild the walls of ideology, religion, progress, or strip ourselves of our accompaniments and attempt to stand unadorned before the abyss. We revert to ‘thick’ narratives of ourselves, building up a story of the specialness of being human or alternatively challenge us all to bear the ‘thin’ narrative of human existence being utterly meaningless. In the first instance we become isolated under a dome of prejudice and in the other we become equally impervious in the face of stark fear and our nakedness as humans: we grasp for pure reductionist biology or seek to wield unmoving pure power.

Living in a story-less void

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:01:00 -0400

We have consoled ourselves through the creation of meaning and ‘grand narratives ‘ about the purpose of our existence. We need some sort of story to get us through life. If it isn’t thickly woven cultural, religious or ideological tales, it is consumerist dreams of wealth and gadgetry or the idea that economically and scientifically we progress always towards a brighter future where disease and perhaps even ageing can be eliminated.

We do not live in a story-less void even if our story is that we do live in an ultimately purposeless and meaningless existence, driven by animal instinct and our genetic heritage. Technology, improvement through the application of science, fame and religion can give us a sense of permeability despite the obvious fragility of existence. We live with these contradictions. Human being’s sense of strength in adaptability, mitigating our knowledge of a short and frustrating life.

The combination of your parents genes on the day of conception makes you who you are

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:01:41 -0400

The combination of your parents genes on the day of conception makes you who you are

We're healthier but not happier

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:43:00 -0400

In the developed world, human life has never been longer or healthier. Life expectancy has slowly but steadily increased since the 1960s. World Bank World Development Indicators show that life expectancy is now at an average of about 80 years in Australia, the United Kingdom and USA. Advances in health care, lack of involvement in major wars, water safety and food security have contributed to this improved life expectancy. Progress in the sciences and the increased utilisation of technology have also contributed to a sense of continuous improvement in human life.

And yet the World Health Organisation has depression as the second leading cause of the disability across the world by 2020. People yearn for intimacy and community, for a time that seemed simpler, or hold on interminably to the idea that humanity will continue to improve itself and solve the problems it creates.