Raised on ideals

I've been having this recurring idea lately. It's about movies. Movies and television and books. Anything with a story in it.

People--not everyone, but many people--have stories they like to "lose themselves" in, to just read or watch and analyze or project themselves onto the characters or what have you. Sometimes fictional, sometimes non-fictional, sometimes it's a favorite book series, or a movie you could watch on loop until the end of time. You love to watch the characters move through their lives, watch them change their worlds and their worlds change them. And then at some point, you turn off the TV or slide your plastic-encased, tasseled bookmark back between the pages and go on with your life.

It's a release. It's a break from reality. Some people just like to immerse themselves in a world not their own. Some want a story and a world where everything important is given to you, and every dilemma is always resolved. And of course, there are plenty of us who want to "become" the characters in their story. The problem comes in when you need to break from your break. Reality intrudes, and your world goes from running off a script and captivating you at every turn to... well, whatever you were getting away from in the first place.

I'm a part of a generation raised on Disney films, adventures, happy endings and leaving the real world behind. We're fed story after story where every moment is suspenseful,the couple always ends up together, the hero dies to save the world, and the villain dies alone. We're fantasy junkies. As we get older our fantasy worlds grow deeper and more complex, but it all runs off a preordained script, with all but the most interesting parts cut out. Everything is surreal, and everything is captivating. Comparatively, reality is a letdown. And once we finish growing up, after decades of being taunted by ideal worlds, we're thrust into our own boring, flawed, and plotless one.

So what happens when people stop coming back from the fantasy?

Just because it happens all around you doesn't make it real. What happens when we reach a critical mass of "story exposure" and start altering or rejecting the reality before our eyes, just to make it fit? The people who lose themselves in their stories find themselves so desperate to cling to them that their own psyches start altering the world they see. The people who look for resolution and meaning in their stories break down in a world where resolution is never a promise and meaning isn't handed to you. And somewhere on the edges of both are the people broken by the sheer weight of the contrast between reality and fantasy, who would kill themselves either to end the torture of their dreams always out of reach or to escape a world that they know will never satisfy them.

I talked to a friend briefly about this at lunch a few days ago. She thought it was at least plausible.

I started writing a short story once based on this exchange, between the two main characters on an apartment rooftop:

"Someday, I want to jump."

"Why would you do a stupid thing like that?"

"Because I know that someday I'll feel so wonderful, so beautiful... so fantastic that I know if I try, I'll be able to fly."

"Well, what happens if you can't?"

"Then I'm not sure I'd want to survive the fall."

Something like that anyway. It's an illustration of this idea. What our hearts seek is not always something the world can give us, and so we try our best either to live without it or to create it, even if no one else can know. The story was meant to illustrate subjectivity and to disillusion people about the idea of reality. Part of the way through the story, she does jump, for just that reason, and the fall kills her. But through the course of the story, the other character understands her point of view more and more, and through knowing her and his interactions with two other characters, he reaches the same point she did, and the story ends with his first step off the same edge. It's left for the reader to determine what happened next, and what it means, illustrating subjective reality even outside of the story itself.

I should finish it. I guess it's kind of ironic that I study physics, a subject that falls apart without an objective reality, or a frame underlying all that we see.

I'm writing this so that I can remember it. I don't know when I will or won't remember something very well, I've forgotten things seconds after writing them or doing them. My memory is... strange.

Well, goodbye. Field Theory isn't exactly going to do itself.