This episode of "Shots of Awe" is brought to you
by the Toyota Prius.
Let's lead the way.
So I'm a big fan of moments of absolute aesthetic immersion.
When you get sucked into a film.
When you get caught up in an environment that is completely
absorbing, and you go into a kind
of trance, a kind of liminal trance state.
You enter that magical borderland
between dreams and reality-- the space
of archetype, the space of dream, the space of myth.
And so I recently picked up a book by Allison Griffiths.
And this book was about the uses of instructive media
throughout history to evoke mind spaces of ecstatic worship.
So she basically says that the IMAX
is the contemporary equivalent of what
was once the Gothic Cathedral.
That these were immersive technologies that
mediated our encounters with transcendence,
our encounters with these spaces of ecstatic worship.
And one of the things that she talks about
is the revered gaze.
Now, the revered gaze is that moment
in which we're sitting back in the IMAX theater,
staring at the movie trailer for "Interstellar" when they're
talking about how man is going to leave it all behind,
and transcend, and he wasn't meant to stay on earth.
And you're feeling that cosmic awe, the wow,
the buzz of science fiction in an immersive environment.
And it's just like, ah!
It's that feeling.
Or when you're in the Gothic Cathedral
and for whatever reason, I'm not religious,
but you're staring at the beautiful colored glass
and the sun is coming in.
And maybe you're listening to some phantasmagorical music
that's tripping you out.
That's the revered gaze.
That is a place of ecstatic catharsis.
A moment of illumination.
And these moments in which we so fully lose ourselves,
these ecstatic flow states that shut down
the lateral prefrontal cortex, shut down
to the sense of self-awareness, it's
this apotheosis, this death and rebirth.
That's what we seek in aesthetic experiences.
It's what we seek in transcendent experiences--
to smash our sense of separateness in temples
of fragmentation in this form of electronically
mediated Buddhism.
It's something that is intrinsic to the human desire
to dream, and to lose ourselves in the imagination.
And I think that the Oculus Rift, virtual reality,
surround sound, all these ways in which we mediate
these encounters, these new exotic forms
of instructive media that will continue to emerge,
they have this historical context
that we've been doing it for hundreds of years.
It's perfectly normal.
It's something that's inside us and is driving us.
And, yeah, that's in a nutshell why cinema is an altar.
That's why I love these technologies of immersion.