Name a blockbuster movie that you most enjoyed.
Pick any box office hit off the top of your head.
It could be a spectacular action flick with stunts and explosions or an unbelievable sci-fi with mind-bending quantum concepts. Think Avatar, Titanic, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Avengers, Harry Potter, Top Gun: Maverick, or any of Christopher Nolan’s masterpieces.
These movies may have state-of-the-art special effects, a stellar cast, brand recognition, and an obscene amount of money to boot. But the one fundamental element that lends breath and heart to these separate ingenuities and ties them together is the human aspect woven into the storyline.
Character emotion serving as the undercurrent to the plot of the film in the form of tension, tragedy, suspense, and triumph is what captivates the audience and guarantees the success of any movie.
Take for instance —
The movie made with the largest replica ship built almost to scale with meticulous attention to detail — from the Grand Staircase with its ‘Honour and Glory’ clock to common cutlery stamped with the White Star Line crest — would’ve only remained an exorbitant documentary if not for the touching capture of—
- the bravery of the eight musicians who kept playing as the ship went down to its watery grave,
- the poignant confession of love by the old couple who chose to stay back in bed to die together in each other’s arms, and
- the heart-wrenching courage of the third-class Irish immigrant mother who comforted her children with an Irish folklore tale about a ‘place of eternal youth and beauty’ as she put them to bed for their final sleep.
It’s not the mind-boggling concepts like time dilation and fifth dimension or the plausibility of both an aesthetic and scientifically-accurate supermassive blackhole that nailed the audience to the edge of their seats in Interstellar. Rather it was the crescendo of emotional misery that a desperate father endured to go galactic distances to go back home to his children.
Of course, we are not the gullible audience who would fall for magnetically-responsive floating mountains, synaptic weepy willow trees capable of transferring consciousness, or flying jellyfishes that favor humans with morality. But when these concepts of fantasy are served alongside the story of natives facing genocide and colonization in their fight to protect their land, it becomes easy for us to accept their world and root for them, maybe as an attempt to absolve our own conscience of the horrors etched in our collective human history.
We are emotional beings.
We weep when we hear a sob story and cheer when we witness triumph in the movie. We feel the sentiments of the characters as our own and walk away from the experience soaked in and moved by the intensity.
Emotions and feelings are how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world. In any given moment, we experience an emotion, feeling, mood or sensation from the spectrum of basic to complex human emotions ranging from tensed to tired, bored to astonished, at ease to alarmed, or sad to delighted. It is what makes us who we are.
But how well do we know our emotions? How accurate is our assessment of how we feel in a given instance and how confident are we about our subsequent actions and reactions to it?
Firstly – and this is news to me – emotions and feelings are not technically interchangeable. These are two very separate concepts per the process in which they come about.
Emotions are the biochemical reactions that our brains cook up in response to internal or external stimuli. In layman’s terms, whenever we encounter a trigger – an event, situation, self-inflicted dramatic thought, or even just a word – our brain immediately dunks into the nonexistent storage folds of past experiences and scavenged wisdom, puts together an educated guess at a wicked speed, and dumps its result as biochemical signals in our body. And all of this happens beyond our awareness, instinctively and unconsciously.
But “feeling” is what transpires after we consciously become aware of the physical sensations triggered by the neurochemical output from the brain. Feelings are the mental interpretations of the “emotions” by way of giving a title and storyline to identify what we are experiencing.
(Sensations are sense-based signals like hunger and pain while mood is just a spoiled cousin of emotions, both of which are irrelevant to this post)
“Until a man has expressed his emotion, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is, therefore, an exploration of his own emotions.”
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art
There is a chicken-egg dilemma among psychologists anonymous about the sequence of events surrounding an emotion. The scientist group is unable to agree if –
- The physiological sensations came first and then the brain recognized the reaction as an emotion (you cry watching a sob story and end up feeling sad), or
- If physiological sensations and the experiencing of emotion occur side-by-side (you get scared and your heart beats faster), or
- If thinking occurs at the time of encountering an event and that reasoning decides the bodily reactions and emotion (you realize that the political chat with your coworker is going sideways and you begin to feel irritated).
Whatever is the case, the general consensus is that emotions are outside of our control and awareness. Just like thoughts, they arise beyond our consciousness and explode in our body via hormones and neurotransmitters as physical sensations, blindsiding our awareness and forcing it to deal with the aftermath. And the tool that we use to interpret these incognito emotions, the means we have to intellectually analyze the biochemical experience happening in our body is the limited vocabulary of the language.
R. G. Collingwood’s perspective is not far removed from my personal scientist guru Noam Chomsky’s stand on language, which is language is primarily a tool for the expression of thoughts and feelings.
“It seems that language evolved and is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. It is a system of thought basically. It can be used to but communication doesn’t seem to be a part of its design.”
Noam Chomsky
Only the six basic emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust – are recognized by humans universally in the same manner. The feelings that are used to interpret them are subjective and strongly influenced by everyone’s cultures, backgrounds, personal experiences and memories, biases, and beliefs. The feeling of “content” as understood by me may not conjure the same value to another person. As an introvert, I could never understand the feeling of “hwyl” of the Welsh people which means an excitement and fervor that comes when people get together.
If we whittle these six basic emotions further down and keep it strictly evolutionary, we will find that the developing brain did not care about all six emotions, but was meant to only work with two extremes – “is this situation going to keep me alive” or “is this situation going to eat me alive”. The brain is always about fear or reward, the threat for survival or the opportunity for survival. It did not care about fancy feelings like social acceptability, shame, guilt, admiration, or serenity.
The concept of emotions appears even more simplistic when we look at it through the eyes of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza who observed that happiness and sadness are the only two basic emotions and that all other emotions and feelings are the modification of these two emotions at varying degrees and intensities.
So with two fundamental emotions at the core and a plethora of feelings to represent them that are not even understood the same way by everyone universally, how sure are we that we know what we are feeling?
The truth is we are a species made of collective drama and collective chaos.
We hoard a large vocabulary with predetermined boundaries and expect the pre-word biochemical information arising in our body to conform to the limited vocabulary mold. We are quick to assign the closest name to the sensations we feel without standing in the emotion a moment longer to really get to know it. But we cannot “stand” in the emotion without using language to bring it into existence, so we are forced to form-fit the biochemical information into verbal molds and live by whatever it turns out to be.
The tragedies as conceived by Shakesphere are truly ours to bear.
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
Baruch Spinoza
