**This post was originally published on my EQAL ‘Umbrella’ site in the spring of 2010, which has since been shut down.**
While stuck on the rain soaked 405 an hour ago, a breaking news storypopped into my iPhone inbox: ‘Avatar’ is now the ‘king of the worldwide box office’. It took just over a month to ‘sink’ that other mammoth box office champ ‘Titanic’; both films, of course, conceived of and realized by James Cameron. Wow, good day for him. Yes, that is an understatement (and no, I don’t want to think what stratosphere his ego now resides in). It got me thinking though, as I navigated around inexperienced rain drivers, what really propelled these two films to the pinnacle of mass consumption. Was it simply the awe-inspiring 3-D of Avatar and CGI of Titanic. The obvious answer would be yes, those elements were certainly instrumental to the initial draw of the films. But what if those pioneering hi-tech elements were intrinsic to a more primal reaction shared by the masses? What if those technically advanced films just made people feel more?
The stories, as we all know, are recycled: derivatives of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘David and Goliath’, man against nature, man against machine; we’ve all seen the mash-up of the Avatar voiceover on the Pocahontas trailer. Avatar and Titanic couldn’t be more basic in their character archetypes and narratives. But what moved so many millions of people to go to the theatre and then go again, was that those tried and true love stories were presented in an immersive, yet awe inspiring fashion that compelled our complex neuro web to make us feel something new. In both cases we had NEVER seen that type of spectacle before in our lives. Each movie may have told only a simple, universal love story, but it was nestled within a very un-simple, foreign yet believably tangible landscape. Hmmm. As human beings, are we becoming so desensitized to filmed entertainment that we need huge advances in technology to have the story affect our primal center for emotion? Do we need tech to feel more human?
I read a fascinating article in Wired the other day (what else is new) about a new company in San Diego called MindSign Neuromarketing. It uses brain scans to pin point when the amydala (the center for primal emotions and emotionally based memories) and other key regions of the brain activate in response to viewings of movies and trailers (apparently Jerry Bruckheimer used this fMRI technique to fine tune his last Pirates of the Caribbean trailer). As I do quite a bit of neuro-research for different projects that I’m working on, I found this fascinating, yet very expected. If a studio can craft a trailer that creates peak experiences in your emotional center, whether you want it to or not, they have you hooked. With regards to the draw of Avatar, mapping neuro responses to theatrical stimuli is the other side of the coin. What patterns will be discovered? What level of stimuli will we need to get our next ‘hit’?
This topic is obviously a huge one and has far reaching ramifications, definitely beyond simple consumption of movies. The advent of Twitter and Facebook made us feel more connected; when someone adds you as a friend or replies to a tweet, the pleasure center of the brain activates (the folks at Twitter know this or why would they have put an exclamation mark after their email alert that someone new is following you!). But now these social media platforms are part of the more traditional landscape and in becoming part of the norm, what is them the future technology that will, for lack of a better phrase, give us our new hit of happy? It also brings forth something that I struggle with as a fledgling sci fi writer. The science and the fiction is important and the delicately constructed web that I weave to create my unique world is paramount to the genre, but the story has to be elevated by the it, not detracted (which is why I think most scifi films do poorly at the box office, District 9 being an exception for the obvious reason in that it connected on an emotional level).
I have so many more thoughts on these nebulous issues as I delve into what the future means to me and the technology I think that will define it, but I have to end this post for now. I would love to hear your thoughts. In the mean time, I’m going to try to remember that a simple story, one that connects on a human level with the masses, is not something to discount…it just has to find it’s way through our overloaded neural pathways and into our well-protected hearts.