I think quite a lot about the nature of reality. Our brains—no, our minds—create reality for us. I’m reminded of this when I get motion sickness from watching a movie. I am not actually moving, and I even look away from the screen frequently, but if I don’t realize it soon enough, I become quite ill. There really should be an advisory warning for people with my condition since I have occasionally lost an entire day recovering from such an experience. Most recently it happened with V/H/S Viral. I had not watched any of the V/H/S franchise; indeed, I didn’t realize it was a franchise. I was watching it under the false impression that it was a Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead movie. Well, it partially is. They were responsible for one of the segments—it’s an anthology film.
I made it through an hour and ten minutes, with only eleven minutes to go, when I realized, “I’m going to throw up if I don’t shut this off.” So I did. Now, if you have the condition I do, there’s little that you can actually do when the process starts. You can’t move your eyes much, and even moving your physical body has to be done slowly. (My sister-in-law, who is a physician, once tried a “tough love” cure when I got motion-sick from a small plane ride. It didn’t work. I ended up laying in the dirt by the side of a camp road in Idaho for about half an hour before I could open my eyes and walk, very slowly, back to the cabin. Once there I slept the rest of the day.) You might understand why I resent when a movie does this to me. After maybe an hour, I tried to read. I was actually reading “Hans Phaal” by Edgar Allan Poe at the time, the part where Hans is hanging upside down outside the balloon. I had to put the book down.
Although I’d almost gone too far, after a couple of hours I could stand to scroll a bit. (That often makes me mildly ill, so I need to be careful.) Then I realized that V/H/S is an anthology series and that various filmmakers are invited to contribute. Thus the mention of Benson and Moorhead that drew me in in the first place. I had been trying to complete my viewing of their films. They aren’t a franchise, but I realized, post-nausea, that I had already seen all of their feature-length collaborations. They’re philosophical movies, and leave me questioning reality. The fact that my mind makes my body motion-sick when it’s not moving also does the same thing.
