Fear, for me, is the primary emotion.
It is the sensation of anxiety flooding the mind when it confronts its first perceptions of the world. The sensation of temporality in flux; a tenuous existence.
It precedes love because love is a product of self-consciousness, projected outward, whereas fear is a product of mere consciousness.
We can find an underlying current of fear beneath all emotions, even the ones we consider the most noble ones.
You must love your self, or an idealized version of your self, to love another, but you fear otherness or the unknown, as an intuitive reaction.
Many would be offended by this preliminary sketching but it isn’t the crux of the topic here.
Schopenhauer commented in many of his wittings that life balances between fear and boredom; with the alleviation of one the other increases.
We see many symptoms of this simple formula all around us.
We live is a very sheltered and ordered environment.
An environment some have called Apollinian, or Alexandrian if I’m not mistaken, where the system minimizes the risks and costs of human activities, of existing, and asks, in return, for total obedience.
The price for safety is your freedom. The feminine ideal.
As a result our culture is characterized by ennui, bordering on passive aloofness.
This ennui forces many to seek stimulation, or an experience of living, in extreme hobbies and in extravagant displays and in exaggerated fantasies.
Our entire western culture is one of extremes. It’s method is one of distraction and continuous stimulation: food, entertainment, fantasy.
Thinking is bad; acting is good.
Quietness is boring.
This very environment we value because it protects us from a reality we have little experience with and so feel all the more afraid of. It is what makes us dissatisfied with simple sexual encounters, making sexual fantasies and pornographic inflation a part of our ‘civilized’ condition; it is what leads us to drugs and alcohol, or towards the pursuit of wealth or to games producing a fantasy world that triggers primordial fears and anxieties…and we are entertained by our experience of what our mind has evolved to cope with while we remain comfortably safe behind our screens, growing softer and more dissatisfied with every passing moment.
And we wonder…“What is missing?” finding some solace in imagined gods and Utopian ideals.
Some go a little further and engage in sports with a slight risk, offering them, and the spectator, the illusion that they’re in touch with a primal, more genuine world, our entire being has evolved to exist within.
Ultimate fighting championships and boxing and skydiving etc. lead us all the way to the edge but retain the safety of a system of rules and practices that are there to catch us if we fall or save us if we lose or heal us when we make a mistake.
The fighter enters the rink, displaying his machismo and prowess, feeling his blood churn with the ecstasy of a wildness he is sheltered against, knowing, in the back of his mind, that there’s a referee there ready to jump in and save him from the worse and that the rules prevent the ultimate cost due to a possible defeat.
Popular movies depict savagery violence, sometimes to the point of grotesque imagery, and we sit enthralled, afraid and yet attracted by the spectacle of a reality we are protected from.
In the metaphors we perceive deeper truths we would like to deny but cannot.
For instance the metaphor of the ‘living dead’ a symbol of the known being alien in its mindless need. Instinct unleashed from reason and cultural restraints.
Our neighbor becomes a monster we recognize, from his tattered clothes, but cannot relate back to the original. His face seems different; ugly.
The subconscious knows that much of civil behavior is but a farce hiding primal desires and egotistical need, and we are frightened by this; we know that there’s a small cork bottling up the beast.
Or the metaphor of the totally alien; the unknown, the otherness, threatening our peace of mind with its different values and desires.
Or the metaphor of the vampire, the enemy that lurks within. The known that is still unknown.
Weakness instinctively recognizing its vulnerability in relation to strength when and if cultural restraints or the cover of darkness cannot come to their aid.
Stupidity finding intelligence threatening and brutal but at the same time attractive and mysterious.
A similar effect was produced by the Hannibal Lecter character in Silence of the Lambs. The genius unrestricted by the morality of the masses, exploiting and ravaging their simplicity.
Many found the character irresistible, even if they were abhorred by his actions.
The genre of horror films, in general, is one that I never got into but I now find fascinating as a sociological phenomenon exposing many hidden existential anxieties and inegalitarian fears.
Can anyone else find any other correlations between mythological entities on film and the real world?