Draw Breath

We're just back from seeing The Orphanage in the QFT. Jesus. I don't know why we do that sort of thing.

How bizarre is it that a good Saturday night would include getting totally spooked by this sort of thing. This did not exactly feel like fun. My pants were not just scaredy by the end of it.

Still, I always come out wondering at the way that film has spoiled our capacity for fantasy. Maybe its just me, but I find it relatively easy even in films like this to distance myself from the story by thinking about the whole confection as a manufacturing process. If you get to engrossed just have reassuring thoughts about the cameraman, the bloke with the boom, the people in makeup, the director. Works a charm for the likes of me.

What we miss is I suppose no longer even available from literature. The veracity of the spoken word is probably the only place where someone can become truly immersed. The folklorists may have been doing us a huge favour in allowing us at least to be tourists in story-telling (I personally recommend David Thompson's Creatures of the Sea - don't let the whimsical title put you off). But reading the stories is not the same as actually being told by the very people you relied on for information about the world - neighbours, family and passers-by. We belong to only the third generation in Ireland who were likely to travel more than a few miles from home. Where, for all those who came before, can the boundaries of this world have ended, if anywhere?

The firmer lines between the recognisable world and fantasy are undoubtedly a modern development. By this, modernity is a function as much of medium as anything else. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, it always distances us from the voices of those we trust. In truth, if you really want to cast doubt on the way things are just whisper in somebody's ear.