AD/HD related themes in movies...

[Stabile]

What movies have y’all seen that seem to present some aspect of the AD/HD perspective, and how is it presented? We don’t mean films directly addressing having/being AD/HD.

We’ll start it off in the next post, but first some background on what we mean:

Human communication depends on a stable common perception of reality; if we don’t know what another person is seeing, we really can’t talk about it effectively. There are several mechanisms that ensure both commonality and stability in every detail.

But life is change, if nothing else. There must also be ways to modify and extend that common perception despite the need for stability. When it comes to ideas that transcend the normal bounds, one of the most important is art.

As a social and cultural phenomenon, art exists to extend the common model of reality. On the individual level the artist is driven by a passion to communicate a perception that can’t be easily expressed in ordinary ways; it’s a quest for understanding.

We’re seeing more movies every year that address some theme related to how our ADDer perception of reality differs from the norm, usually presenting it as an extension rather than a discrete difference.

It seems like there’s a lot bottled up out there about what our differences really represent, and it‘s starting to leak out in major ways.

Does anyone else see it?

[Stabile]

Pleasantville. We just watched this again yesterday, and it gets better every time.

Tobey Maguire as Bud makes specific references to how his perception threatens the existing reality of the citizens of Pleasantville. The main theme is how he and everyone else wrestles with the implications and the moral questions that arise.

There are a lot of very cool lines, and the campy literary mechanism of the perception of color representing the threatening element is nice, too. It’s implicitly acknowledged as an extension of the existing black and white perception, and also as inevitable.

The scene near the end in the courtroom in which Jeff Daniel’s character pleads with the mayor to choose the colors that would be OK to paint with is particularly poignant. Just tell us how you want us to act, and we’ll do it. It would never work, of course, because it’s the perception of color itself that offends.

The official studio publicity tagline cracks us up, too: Pleasantville – It’s just around the corner.

[SB_UK]

Having quoted with alarming regularity from the Matrix, this would have to be my suggestion.

So .. this film did something that no other film will likely achieve, at least for me, it communicated a very basic truth.

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland. And, I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The most pertinent point I think that this quote alludes to relative to ADD, is the pain that is associated, both intrinsically and extrinsically -- and that last point is important -- both intrinsically and extrinsically, in delving into the rabbit hole of mind.
Whether one asks questions about the nature of reality, is immaterial to the taste of strawberry ice cream, but when strawberry ice cream ceases to do it for you ...

Tonight's film is Irreversible with Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci.
Knowing just a little about this film prior to watching it, I have a funny feeling that its non-linearity will be lined with ADD :-).

SB.

[SB_UK]

I listened to an interesting documentary recently and posted a link to it, to 'Stevo'.

In discussions between Britain's leading sculptor and one of America's leading scientists, the interrelationship was drawn between art reflecting our perception of reality, prior to science 'defining' that reality ie of art paving the way, laying the foundations, laying drainage lines for the scientific train (of thought).

The example - the Medieval two dimensional representations of reality in paint, the three dimensional perspective in the renaissance, the addition of the fourth dimension, of time or the timeless nature of love in the romantic period.

Art appears to be losing its formal structure with time, or at least, an easily definable structure and post-romantic, I would find it difficult to categorise art into its associated category.

Interestingly Anish Kapoor talked about a new art, of sculpture turned inwards where the start and the end are indistinguishable. I think he was describing his sculptures as 'Eschers' in three dimensional space.

Interestingly, it's almost as if art, ADD and pace of change (in knowledge and information) are bound together in a contract.

SB.

[Stabile]

Originally Posted by SB_UK

…it's almost as if art, ADD and pace of change (in knowledge and information) are bound together in a contract.

I like that…

The Matrix was one we thought of also, in particular the way the brothers Wachowski addressed the relationship of reality and illusion of reality. The interesting thing to us was the way they seemed to invert it, the outside in and the inside out.

The real illusion is that reality is out there. It’s not; it’s really in here, and real to boot; it’s no illusion in that sense. (This is tough stuff to talk about coherently.)

The original film blew us away. It’s amazing to see people addressing ideas that depend on perception that we can’t have, in the classical understanding of it. To make the Matrix, you have to be able to see the un- and subconscious operation of the mind as easily as you can see the wind.

[SB_UK]

Skirting through the forum - another film dropped out - Memento.

Non-linearity and the line between illusion/reality, appears a theme that we see quite commonly these days.

Examples including the afore-mentioned, but also Total Recall - where the viewer is never too sure where we are following the ?bungled? attempt to return the protagonist from his slumber, the Wizard of Oz - where the reality withn forms the main body of the film and Abre Los Ojos.

Of course, Abre Los Ojos is a contributor to these pages too.

I wonder why he chose this name?

'Open your eyes, open your eyes, open your eyes'

SB.

[SB_UK]

From a site on art:

How can an three dimensional artist use two dimensions to show four dimensions. It seems impossible. ... Pablo Picassos works are not understood by most people. They seem strange at best, horrible and inartistic at the worst. His work seems like a hodge-podge of different views, barely forming a single picture. This is in fact the truth of the matter. Take his picture "Portrait de Nusch Eluard" for example. There are too many view points to count. Instead of having just one vanishing point there could easily be 20. For example, the ladys left eye seems to hint at a left profile as the angle of view. But he right eye suggests a frontal point of view. Even stranger are the four breasts he has given her. This gives way to at least two different views on this alone. Either each group of breasts, left pointing and right pointing, represent both breasts or each is really two views of the same breast. The Former requires two different view points, the latter requires four. Also curious is the table to her left. Not only can we see the front part of it but we can also see the back. This, again, requires more than one view point.

[img]
http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso132.html
[/img]

SB.

[speedo]

"The Aviator" is a great one. It is about Howard Hughes as a victim of OCD.

The movie is VERY long. I found it hard t osit through, but was worth the trouble.
I have wordewd in aerospace and in an engineeringf environment all of my life. Howard Hughes was considred to be a fantastic engineer who specialized in large, difficult "impossible" projects for the US government. Much of what he did is just now coming out, or still secret.

Me

[SB_UK]

Originally Posted by speedo

"The Aviator"

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:-)

SB.

[Stabile]

Total Recall was based on a Phillip K. Dick short story, I Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which I was amazed to recognize when we tuned in the movie one night on cable. It blew Kay away even more; I hadn’t seen the story since it was originally published, thirty or forty years before.

A lot of interesting films addressing this sort of thing are based on good or great literature, not only science fiction. We have a copy of Naked Lunch that gets better every time we watch it; Boroughs was clearly trying to deal with perceptions of himself and others that had no ordinary explanation at the time, scientific or otherwise.

[Stabile]

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[whiteraven]

This is an excedingly interesting thread. I hope you don't mind me posting with nothing to contribute. I haven't seen any of these movies, but I have made a list and plan on working my way through them. Thanks for this.

[SB_UK]

Hey Whiteraven,

There's an ASCII version of your avatar in the post directly above yours :-)
What a bizarre coincidence.

SB.

[Stabile]

Coincidence? I think not...

[speedo]

I especially liked "The Matrix". I work in tech, and it is a big hit with me and the people I work with. It depicts the embedding of the human spirit into technology as an extension of ourselves. I've noticed that many of the "better" terchnology people are so far over the edge into it that only others who work in the filed can relate to these people. It is a culture of its own, and a lot of these people are ADD or HFA, and are fantastic outside the box thinkers who appreciate this movie as a different way of looking at things.

Me

Originally Posted by Stabile

I like that…

The Matrix was one we thought of also, in particular the way the brothers Wachowski addressed the relationship of reality and illusion of reality. The interesting thing to us was the way they seemed to invert it, the outside in and the inside out.

The real illusion is that reality is out there. It’s not; it’s really in here, and real to boot; it’s no illusion in that sense. (This is tough stuff to talk about coherently.)

The original film blew us away. It’s amazing to see people addressing ideas that depend on perception that we can’t have, in the classical understanding of it. To make the Matrix, you have to be able to see the un- and subconscious operation of the mind as easily as you can see the wind.