The View from the Passenger's Seat

            In the tunnel, the tile surrounds you. Headlights bounce of the grimy walls, creating a sickly yellow color akin to that of an underground parking lot. The farther you get in, the more apart from the real world you become. You are removed, in the futuristic dream of a mid-century city planner. Then gradually, light appears, so far away that it might just be a mirage. The tunnel is suffocating, dank and gross, but then suddenly you have arrived. The city opens up in front of you. Against the inky black and navy of the sky, lights shine. The river and the sky and the concrete are one blackness; the backdrop to thousands of pinpricks of shining yellow.

            The road winds and twists around the city, following the river. Up close, the lights separate into a million different sources. They are the fluorescence of office buildings, the faint white of stars, the blinding flashes of stadiums, and the red-orange of the steel mills. Few still run, but where they do the light is striking. It is a constant presence. They relentlessly run, never stopping, but it is at night when they come alive. The sparks fly, and the glowing molten steel flows.

            Up, away from the river, the road winds. The lights fade and the buildings become dark. They rot from abuse, vacancy and abandonment. The windows are boarded up, and metal bars keep life out. But somehow, that this was once a vibrant town, is still evident. On the corner is a majestic bank, whose marble walls and grand doors once held the center of this community. But now the doors are closed and the lights are off. On street corners and in doorways people smoke and talk and wait. What they are waiting for I will never know. The only building still open is a lonely bar, with windows so caked in years of decay that light barely reaches the outside. Green and red neon struggle past the windows and onto the sidewalk. The sign no longer hangs straight, and the letters are so dark they are illegible.

             Finally, we round the corner and travel up, winding around trees and guardrails until we have left the urban decay. The car stops and turns into a neighborhood like any other, with small brick homes and identical white trim, but yet it is different than any other neighborhood. It is a place I have come to a million times, and it has never changed. As we pull into my grandmother’s driveway light shines from the familiar silhouette of the front window. But this light glows at a different frequency from the rest. It does not illuminate the sadness of a city in disrepair or the monotony of the winding road; this light brings warmth. It is a constant, shining with the light of memories, and family, and home.

FEAR

The woman puts her hand on the doorknob. She does not know what lies ahead, but you do. Around her the music’s swells envelop her; violins, harps and the crash of symbols all cry out “stop!” But she does not hear. The woman exists altogether in another dimension, yet somehow you are tied to her. She does not know what is coming for her, but she is dragging you, you who knows all to well where you are going. Your pulse quickens, your eyes widen, and your hands become cold and clammy. This is real; this is fear.

            Many movie producers must believe that the audience’s panic is in reaction to the revelation of the horror villain waiting in the closet.  They hold on to the conviction that if one knife wound was scary, then one hundred must be bloodcurdling. But fear does not work this way. Fear does not follow the laws of science; it cannot simply be multiplied. On the contrary, gore and blood seem to lose their effect the more abundant they become. Seeing one victim, one person, gives you an intimate connection. If that one victim is lost in a sea of hundreds, the viewer is no longer horrified. They simply become callous.

            Garish black and red poster dripping in blood after horror movie poster will tell you that theirs is the next best thing; that it is scarier and more terrifying than anything you have ever seen before. But this is simply not true. Used as a marketing tool, fear loses its power. Logic does not apply to it. Imagine you are given a choice. You can walk into your home and find a robbery in progress. You can look into the eyes of the man who will steal your money and your security. Or, you can hide. You can dive under your bed watching through the thin slat of light coming in, waiting for the pair of black boots that are coming for you. That will walk past you, never knowing you are there. That will never know you are there until suddenly they do. Until they reach down and stare into your eyes with all that is evil in the world. Or maybe they won’t see you. Maybe the black leather boots will walk past where you cower under the bed and leave behind destruction, and mayhem, and you. If you were an empiricist, you would logically choose to hide, because you have a better chance of evading your captors. But yet the fear intrinsic to the second option would be paralyzing.  It would consume you; almost to the point at which you would give up, give in, and let yourself be found, just so that you could regain the smallest amount of control.

            For one to fully grasp fear, holding on to what it is, manipulating and controlling it, is a near impossible feat. An emotion this strong, so irrational, yet so gripping, is one that is worth a lot of money. Movie producers, politicians and radio hosts would sell their souls to be handed the key to fear. But what is it? What is fear? The fear that is represented so often in the media is a false representation. It is distorted in an attempt to maximize the potential to fright. Pieces that are scary to each individual viewer are piled on top of each other into a gargantuan pyramid that no longer resembles fear. Take the classic “opening the door sequence” in a scary movie. The slow opening of the anticipatory creaking wood alone is enough to set viewers on the edge of their seats. But yet, once the door is opened, once the murderer is revealed, the scene no longer generates terror. The blood and the guts create disgust, not fear.  This is because fear, at its heart, lies in the unknown. Terror is the blackness, it is not the monster.

            For all of human history our race has seemed to have one goal: to create control over our lives. We seek the truth by attempting to describe and quantify everything around us. But the unknown lies as the antithesis to knowledge. From this chasm springs fear. It is not something that you can touch or study, because it simply cannot be controlled.  It is exists in the wait, in the anticipation of what is coming for you, in the darkness behind a door. It is uncomfortable because it is indefinable.