What Doesn't Scare You Makes You Stronger

I wrote most of this post on my phone, half-asleep and hallucinatory on my flight to the West Coast.  Enjoy.  

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Anyone who's been on an airplane knows what a complete invasion of privacy it is.  Especially if you have the misfortune of getting the middle seat.  Any time the plane jostles, however slightly, and your arm brushes up against your neighbor's arm on the rest, all because he had the audacity to claim it when you were too distracted pulling your sweatshirt on.  I hope I don't come across as too socially phobic when I say this arm-hair-on-arm-hair feeling greatly disturbs me.

The flight to California is six hours long.  Needless to say, I have time to think.  Lord knows I'm not about to tune into whatever movie is currently playing, something that features Ewan McGregor and a mystical lake. (I make a mental note to look it up on IMDB by the end of this post.)  Lord also knows I'm not about to sleep.  Because the person who designed plane seats is probably related to at least one of the engineers of the Titanic, the lifeboats of which were probably more comfortable.  I'm listening to Mumford and Sons because it's familiar.  And because it's familiar, it's also calming.  Hopefully enough so that I fall asleep at some point, and yet still -- it's noise that will drown out the snoring of the old woman next to me.

Suddenly I realize: the many annoyances of air travel are nothing compared to the paralyzing fear many people have for it.  There are people out there who can't board a 747 without popping a few pills or downing a few gin and tonics at the airport bar.  Yet still, they ride.  Why?  

“Kids, Mommy's going to meet you at the Grand Canyon in about a week.  Of course she isn’t afraid of flying; she just never realized America has progressed beyond the Transcontinental Railroad, that’s all.” 

Or “Sorry, boss, I'm too afraid of planes to go on that business trip.  Looks like you'll have to send the intern, Jimmy, and promote him to regional manager instead.”

These people ride because they have to.

Fear is fear.  Being afraid of something so ordinary, so inevitable isn't any different  from the voluntary kind of fear that characterizes theme park rides or horror movies.  But let’s face it: no one made watching Poltergeist a prerequisite for family vacations, business trips -- or life in general.  So why do people do it?  Why do people willingly drop their psyches to that dark, cobwebby level?  The level that pops the doors open on the Tower of Terror and snaps your picture.  The level that tells you, in spite of all rational judgment that your basement is not a secret breeding ground for raptors or mass murderers, that you still better run for your damn life up the stairs.

Is the thrill of fear something instilled in us in childhood?  When it comes to fairy tales, for example, the process starts off just as it always has -- orally, usually in the form of a bedtime story.  Perhaps fear, which takes the form of these stories, the form of entertainment, becomes a kind of conditioned norm.  Furthermore, fear is an emotion.  And because it's an emotion, it’s also very powerful -- not unlike the sensation of falling in love.  Experiments have been done to show that men and women who meet for the first time on high, rickety bridges have a greater chance of liking one another than if they had met on solid ground.  Why?  Because the brain mistook the pitter-patter of a panicked heart to the pitter-patter of a heart in love.  (“Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but there’s a chance we might die, so call me maybe.”)  Fear is misleading, yet incredibly lasting.  It alters how we interpret the world so that we have a greater chance of surviving it.  As a result, the mind clings to it -- sometimes to the point where we never fully grow out of it.  Fear as raw, addictive power.  

Ask me about the 1992 vintage E.T. doll some time.  Then ask me how long I was afraid of it.  

GOOD GOD.

I would tell you I haven’t seen E.T. since.  

I’m sure I’m not alone.  Freud had a wonderful theory about what he called the “uncanny.”  Essentially, things are terrifying when they have the semblance of being human but are actually not.  Just think of any horror movie that features demon dolls, masks, zombies, exorcisms, and aliens.  

Here's Rumpy!

Think of any horror movie that features children.  Children are prime examples of something so like us and yet unlike us at the same time.  They look like us, true.  But they think on completely different wavelengths, operating under completely different rules of reality.  Our window of understanding is about as opaque as a brick wall.  Ask Henry James in the Turn of the Screw.  Or M. Night Shyamalan in The Sixth Sense.  I can promise you that movie wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if Haley Joel Osment was written to be a 35-year-old male played by Edward Norton.  


This takes us to Grimm.  Rumplestiltskin is scary because he is so very close to human.  He has two arms and two legs, he walks upright, he talks.  But we would be remiss to actually call Rumplestiltskin a human.   Or take the undead chorus -- none of whom are human.  But they’re utterly terrifying because that’s still precisely what they are.  

The Grimm brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, weren’t aware of Freud’s theory, which explains why their stories might be scary.  But they were still aware that their stories could be taken as such.  And so was the rest of the German public.

Early folk-tales were violent.  Robbers raped and murdered young brides.  Snow White’s stepmother dies after dancing in hot, iron shoes.  In the Princess and the Frog, the Princess throws her amphibious lover against a wall instead of kissing him.  Part of the violence stems from the nature of the medieval era when many of these tales were first written down.  As a result, they were never intended for children at all.  It was only after the Grimm brothers imbibed these stories with a specific, German agenda that they needed to be rewritten to reach the larger German audience.  This meant toning down the brutality, shifting the stories to function as behavioral tools for children.  Suddenly fairy-tales had a  new purpose.  And it involved teaching all the lederhosen-wearing Augustus Gloops in the land that avarice leads to evil witches trapping you in their candy houses and eating you for dinner.

When it comes to fairy-tales, psychology, and Sigmund Freud, I could go on.  But I still have another flight to get through tomorrow night, so stay tuned.

The movie is called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by the way.  Yeah, I didn’t see it either.