UPFRONT August 1, 2005 Issue

The sum of all comfort

WARREN BOLON. SENIOR WRITER

Searching a DVD rental website, I found 74 videos with fear in the title. They ranged from the classic film Cape Fear to the 2002 Armageddonish thriller The Sum of All Fears—"27,000 nuclear weapons ... one is missing," goes the promo. We keep our home DVD player fairly well fed, but we've seen nothing on that list. That doesn't surprise me. Although we enjoy an eclectic range of movies, there are genres that we avoid. Using a selection process I'd call "the sin-disease-death filter," we skip films focused largely on sensuality, illness, or violence.

Sure, the movies are largely about entertainment, and all kinds of unpleasant things are part of human existence. Yet while I value anything that makes me think more deeply about relationships and other challenges facing the human family, I don't find nourishing those movies, TV, or Internet images that aim to impress the bad and the ugly into consciousness, even when it's done with memorable screenwriting, acting, or special effects. That's just it—moving pictures are memorable.

We live in a subjectively mental world. Many of our everyday anxieties spring from mentally projected expectations of bad things happening, from believing we're vulnerable to evil. As Christian Science healer Jean Hebenstreit said in last week's issue, "Whatever is held in thought is not long out of experience."

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

ITEMS OF INTEREST