Blinded and Released
My world was uniquely distorted one day in high school when I lost just one of my contact lenses. After about half an hour I was doing a reasonable job of not bumping into things, and once I had basic safety taken care of I started to notice odd side effects. Simple social pressures and the usual drama didn’t seem to bother me. I became completely fearless and walked right up to the most classically intimidating girl and started chatting her up like a pro. Without the cute girl panic squeezing my teenage brain like a vice, I was funny and charming. I spent the rest of the day experimenting with my newfound superpowers.
Stage lights had a similar magic for me in jr. high. Back stage it was hard to breathe and my legs kept vibrating wildly under my king’s robes. When at last I stumbled out from behind the curtain I turned to face the crowd of two thousand and was instantly blinded by hot yellow stage lights. I couldn’t see, and at that moment I couldn’t hear anyone either. I was completely alone on that huge wooden stage. I looked around, and there was nothing to fear. Slowly my lines started trickling in, and then pouring out through my mouth in spite of my brain. It was like I was in my bedroom alone in a towel, or daydreaming the whole thing. Again I was fearless.
There’s something wonderfully freeing about distorting our senses and taking a moment to look at the world in a different way. Errol Morris, a documentary filmmaker, built a device called the interrotron. He wanted to be able to look his subjects in the eye, and visa versa. The person being interviewed looks at a projected image of the person asking them questions and the camera is placed right behind the image so that it looks directly into the eyes of the subject. The effect is that the person being interviewed feels like they are looking right at the person they are talking to.
I saw him demonstrate this device at Sundance one year. Someone noticed that the image they had to talk to was in black and white, and asked him if he’d ever used color. It turns out that people respond better to a black and white image. In fact, the interviewer doesn’t even have to be in the same room, or even the same building. When interviewing Fred A. Leuchter, Morris was behind a screen. Leuchter was so willing to talk without stop that when Morris had to walk out to get water or food, he would sit patiently and start right where he left off when Morris returned. For some reason color didn’t have the same effect. Seeing the person react, in all the subtle ways humans do, was most important. Then, the abstraction from reality provided by the black and white video image offered some kind of layer of safety that allowed people to really open up.
Now that I’ve remembered all of this, I think the next time I’m in an uncomfortable situation I’m going to either take off my glasses, look into the sun, or stand upside down on my head.
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