We rented some movies over the weekend so that we'd have something at the end of each day after making progress in Kayla's room. It's yellow now. Pictures coming when it's done. If nothing else, Amy's certain to post some. :-)
One of the movies was King Kong. Delightful film. At the same time adventure story, monster story, period piece, and social commentary. Even romance included. Now, I'm not sure I ever saw the original. Sure, I watched the King Kong cartoon in the mornings as a 70's kid, but that hardly counts.
Kong captured something in the film that I rarely see captured in a film. The other one that did it was Instinct.
Both movies deal in part with capturing wildness and breaking it. Both show what happens when you take something so purely free and cage/chain it. We are all still wild, at least some tiny part of us.
In Instinct, Cuba Gooding Jr's psychologist character takes Anthony Hopkins' anthropologist character Ethan Powell to a zoo to see live gorillas. The gorillas are sitting about lazily. Powell explains that it's been so long in a cage for the gorilla that he has forgotten that he was ever free. Now he just thinks freedom is something he dreamed once.
We are all caged by society. By its norms and expectations and taboos, by the money that drives it. We like to think we are free because we can gather to debate things, and print books and articles, and vote and have free speech. But our very days begin with an alarm clock telling us to get up.
Animals sleep and wake following day/night cycles. When they're tired they go to sleep or rest. When we're tired we still stay up because there's so much we "have" to do. We get up before we're ready because we "have" to.
Our society is built on rules. Some are enforced legally, some socially. Women can't leave the house without makeup. Just running to a store becomes a process. We drive to work, and how many laws affect just our commute. Not that those aren't necessary laws, but still.
We get in the car (that we have to have license plates on to drive, and village stickers to park). We buckle the seatbelts because that's a "primary enforcement activity" where we drive. We have speed limits, although that's one we seem to break freely, pretending to run free while we stay in our lane and supposedly use turn signals. We get to work and park between the lines.
Even the forest preserves have fences and marked boundaries. Everything in its spot, in its place. Our society puts things in neat boxes, and there are lines we can't see that mark where our yard ends and the neighbor's begins. There are even laws about mowing your lawn. I know because twice now I've gotten "citations" for letting my grass get long enough to seed. So instead of letting my grass get thicker naturally, by sprouting seeds to drop and grow, I cut it down before it gets that far just to go buy seeds that have been grown for me.
I can't even look out the window without seeing power lines. Every day I drive past forest preserves on the way to work. How I long to be able to just stop and run wild and free, even if just for a while. But is there any escape from our human zoo?
Posted by fictionman at July 5, 2006 07:24 AM | TrackBack (0)Yes there is liberation. We can't "escape" anything but we can transcend. So leave early one morning, (or several or every morning) and stop the car and go run in the woods. Pee on the ground. Hug a tree. Laugh out loud. Create a magical life for yourself. We are only prisoners of our own beliefs/attitudes. Freedom is an internal thing. Cultivate your inner world. The feeling of limitation is the work of the mind. Study Consciousness. Come to know what is really real. Your longing is a pull from your Self to your Self. Honor it.
Love ya
aunt B
If you were happy, you wouldn't even see the bars at the edge of the zoo.
Posted by: lindsay at August 1, 2006 10:07 PM