Tuesday, June 08, 2004
In the shallows
I hate leaving stories hanging half-told. So I'm going to try my best to catch Shallow Hal on the way hom... err back to the UK. (It gets confusing living between two countries after a while, when they both start becoming "home")
Shallow Hal is about this ordinary looking bloke with a slight pot belly, who was (for some reason) traumatised by his father's dying words when he was little. Ravaged by cancer, and, of course rendered senseless by sedatives, his father tells him pearls of wisdom as he dies : always go for beautiful girls, settle for nothing less. Big titties will stand you in good stead. (heh)
So years later this poor kid has grown up and selectively deleted away his father's memory (Eh? I'da been proud to be in his shoes. damn!) and only dates beautiful women, who of course, dump him. (since he's got the figure and complexion of a slightly anaemic buddha, and a rather too in-your-face personality. yknow the type. loud mouthed, opiniated, often unsubstantiated, some of them choose pink as their backgrounds. cough.)
One day, coincidentally enough (funny how Reel life is filled with coincidences, unlike real life which is filled with... anticoincidences. predictability so tangible you could beat yourself to death over the head with it.) he gets stranded in a lift with a self-help guru, who after the initial eeergh! (he's so shallow!) reaction, actually gets to know the little guy a bit better and decides to help him. A brief period of hypnosis later, Hal is set loose on the world seeing only the "inner beauty" of people.
Cue funny scenes with ultra fat 300 pound girl meeting Hal, who sees her as a supermodel with a waif thin figure (and can never reconcile how her dresses are always so much bigger than her. And in the sex scene, how her G string goes from slightly larger than pinhead sized to lamppost-wrap.) and discovers her beautiful, kind, sweet and generous nature.
Freeze cam.
I dunno about you, but I didn't like this one bit. To trade one form of "lie" (or truth) for the other... is no victory at all. Hal didn't actually see the girls for what they were... he saw illusions. A woman is more than the size of her bust, or the curve of her hips.
She is also more than the depth of her mind and the warmth of her soul.
She's everything, rolled into one.
Imagine how the girl would have felt, if she could have seen herself through Hal's eyes -- he didn't see her for what she really Looked like. He could hear her for who she sounded to be.
It's hard for me to empathise, since I've never been remotely fat. But unlike someone I used to know, who used to say horrible things (and mean them) like fat people shouldn't be allowed to go to the beach, or to wear swimwear, and that they should "know their limitations"... well, I think fat people ARE people too. With their own rights, feelings, and their own perceptions of self-image. If I was the girl, and I had a brief ten second glimpse into Hal's mind, I think I would back off in a hurry. Psycho, nutter. Nevermind that he was the only warmth, the only interested guy in ages...
But then again, 1) I've never been fat, 2) I've never been female, and 3) different strokes, different folks.
So who am I to even begin to try to empathise, eh?
My take home message, I guess is that Reality to me is more about Reality, than perception. I need to see the Truth.
The ex used to write that perception was greater than reality.
I kept my silence, even though the world she perceived around her was not quite the world that I saw around us.
I guess at the end of the day we don't really need the Matrix to be trapped in a lie. We have it all already, inside our own heads.
*****
I'm pretty happy at the way my blog loads quickly now. Yay me. Nevermind that people at 640x480 can't view it right. At least it doesn't take half an hour to appear on screen. :)
Shallow Hal is about this ordinary looking bloke with a slight pot belly, who was (for some reason) traumatised by his father's dying words when he was little. Ravaged by cancer, and, of course rendered senseless by sedatives, his father tells him pearls of wisdom as he dies : always go for beautiful girls, settle for nothing less. Big titties will stand you in good stead. (heh)
So years later this poor kid has grown up and selectively deleted away his father's memory (Eh? I'da been proud to be in his shoes. damn!) and only dates beautiful women, who of course, dump him. (since he's got the figure and complexion of a slightly anaemic buddha, and a rather too in-your-face personality. yknow the type. loud mouthed, opiniated, often unsubstantiated, some of them choose pink as their backgrounds. cough.)
One day, coincidentally enough (funny how Reel life is filled with coincidences, unlike real life which is filled with... anticoincidences. predictability so tangible you could beat yourself to death over the head with it.) he gets stranded in a lift with a self-help guru, who after the initial eeergh! (he's so shallow!) reaction, actually gets to know the little guy a bit better and decides to help him. A brief period of hypnosis later, Hal is set loose on the world seeing only the "inner beauty" of people.
Cue funny scenes with ultra fat 300 pound girl meeting Hal, who sees her as a supermodel with a waif thin figure (and can never reconcile how her dresses are always so much bigger than her. And in the sex scene, how her G string goes from slightly larger than pinhead sized to lamppost-wrap.) and discovers her beautiful, kind, sweet and generous nature.
Freeze cam.
I dunno about you, but I didn't like this one bit. To trade one form of "lie" (or truth) for the other... is no victory at all. Hal didn't actually see the girls for what they were... he saw illusions. A woman is more than the size of her bust, or the curve of her hips.
She is also more than the depth of her mind and the warmth of her soul.
She's everything, rolled into one.
Imagine how the girl would have felt, if she could have seen herself through Hal's eyes -- he didn't see her for what she really Looked like. He could hear her for who she sounded to be.
It's hard for me to empathise, since I've never been remotely fat. But unlike someone I used to know, who used to say horrible things (and mean them) like fat people shouldn't be allowed to go to the beach, or to wear swimwear, and that they should "know their limitations"... well, I think fat people ARE people too. With their own rights, feelings, and their own perceptions of self-image. If I was the girl, and I had a brief ten second glimpse into Hal's mind, I think I would back off in a hurry. Psycho, nutter. Nevermind that he was the only warmth, the only interested guy in ages...
But then again, 1) I've never been fat, 2) I've never been female, and 3) different strokes, different folks.
So who am I to even begin to try to empathise, eh?
My take home message, I guess is that Reality to me is more about Reality, than perception. I need to see the Truth.
The ex used to write that perception was greater than reality.
I kept my silence, even though the world she perceived around her was not quite the world that I saw around us.
I guess at the end of the day we don't really need the Matrix to be trapped in a lie. We have it all already, inside our own heads.
*****
I'm pretty happy at the way my blog loads quickly now. Yay me. Nevermind that people at 640x480 can't view it right. At least it doesn't take half an hour to appear on screen. :)
