Movies and Character
I think we all know this, but let’s get it out of the way first?
Catching a movie at the cinema is about the experience. Faded red carpet, musty air, big screen, wonky subtitles, deafening sound system, the smell of stale popcorn at the concessionaire, the long and roundabout route that leads from the hall to some forsaken corner of the shopping mall..
Then why do people watch movies together?
After a decade of not being (un)fortunate enough to frequent cinemas, and just being told that I can’t watch neither Bodyguards and Assassins nor Avatar, I’ve just had a minor epiphany: it’s because it’s a shared experience.
You don’t talk to each other, maintain (eye) contact, read body language (okay so this one’s a stretch), and do all the other socialising things in the cinema hall. Maybe you pass the popcorn, drink, and touchy feely a little bit.
But you watch it together. It’s something that, even if the movie’s so lukewarmly mediocre you don’t blast its mediocrity afterwards, and in fact you never mention it again, it’s a shared experience – the basis of some types of relationships.
Isn’t that the same basis for creating artificial hardship/stress through camps, under the guise of character building? It really doesn’t matter what you do, as long as a bunch of people get tekaned together, and it’s enough both to distinguish it and for them to remember it more strongly than their last tekan camp. Explains why it just keeps scaling up; fortunately for my sanity, I haven’t had the chance to discover whether it’s a linear or exponential growth yet.
I’m slow, I know.. humans are weird!
