Dearest Rachel -
As much as I try to stay out of the boys' business when they're watching stuff, they do tend to be a little bit noisy from time to time. Both the shows they watch and the discussions they have are almost impossible to drown out, even from our bedroom on the opposite side of the house. Last night, they were discussing the improbability of the titular mermaids of the particular show they were watching to show up in Japan, of all places. Sure, Japan is a collection of sizable islands in the middle of the ocean with plenty of coastline, but there's an awful lot of ocean in this world, and however much Japan has is still but a literal drop in the bucket compared to the entirety of the world. Why should they show up there, as opposed to anywhere else in the world?
It would be a fair question, aside from the fact that this was a Japanese anime they were discussing; of course it would take place in Japan – and probably in Tokyo, to boot – because, as far as their audience is concerned, that's the center of the universe. Which is not to chide the creators of the show for this; it would be no different if it were made anywhere else in the world. Whoever was making it would set it in their own country, because that's what their world revolves around. Wasn't the movie Splash, just as a relevant example, set in New York City (as I recall, the mermaid of that story actually made 'Madison' a name after spotting a street sign for Madison Avenue, and thinking it sounded like a lovely name to go by)? Because, as far as we Americans are concerned, everything happens in either New York or Los Angeles. That's just how the world works.
Of course, in this particular instance, while I will complain from time to time about how the rest of the country gets ignored, it's not as if this story could take place anywhere but on the coasts; the Great Lakes, while large, aren't quite large enough to host a species of globetrotting mermaids, so using Chicago as a setting would be right out, to say nothing of some landlocked venue such as Omaha or Denver. The point still stands; we as humans think of wherever we are as the focal point everything else spins around. For all of our pretensions towards being cosmopolitan, every last one of us are parochial at heart.
This isn't a case of self-centeredness, I don't think – at least, not entirely. There is some of that involved, to be sure, but it's also an innate lack of imagination on our individual and collective parts. Despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence indicating otherwise – and which we would all verbally acknowledge, if confronted with it – we are generally incapable of comprehending that (or perhaps just how, and how much so) other people's experiences and perspectives are different from our own, sometimes vastly so. We are only given a single perspective from which to view life – our own, if that's not too much of a tautology – and we have difficulty imagining that another's would be all that different from ours, especially if their upbringing and experiences are similar to ours.
And some of those experiences are based on where (and when – although as living folks trying to communicate with other living folks, that's not so much of an issue, since we all come from more or less the same timeframe) we come from. It's why travel is so eye-opening; as you pointed out when we visited Israel, some of the descriptions in the Bible make so much more sense once you've seen the hills and mountains of the open country, the tight and labyrinthine layout of Jerusalem, rather than trying to picture it through the filter of our own locality, where everything is flat and easily traversable, laid out in a straightforward grid pattern that one could literally drive a truck through if necessary. Not all places are like the ones we grew up with – indeed, quite the opposite, in most cases – and we need to be reminded of that from time to time.
And if you think about it, the potential for weird stuff happening – apart from that which stems from human interaction (because humans can be scary weird all too often) – shouldn't be very high any given city. None of them are the focal point of earth; indeed, to an external force or observer, Earth has no focal point. First contact (assuming it hasn't already happened) would likely end up with a crash landing in the ocean, or in some middle-of-nowhere place; for all the claims that we've overpopulated the planet, there's a lot more "middle-of-nowhere" left here than you might think. There's a certain brilliance, for instance, in the old radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, having set its landing in some obscure rural area of New Jersey; close enough to New York to move the story along fairly quickly, but also far away enough to approximate the randomness of what an actual first contact moment ought to be like.
Having said that, storytellers – especially those in the mercenary business of media – need to create a setting that's relatable to their audience, in order to catch and hold their prospective readers' (or viewers') attention. With more people living in or around cities, this means centering on those urban or suburban areas. Never mind that, in geographical terms, they still take up a minuscule percentage of the surface of this planet; it's where the people, and therefore, it's where the action's going to be. If it were out in the middle of nowhere, would anyone notice?
Most of us as consumers wouldn't; a story only grabs our attention when it's within the circles in which we travel. Just as "a million is a statistic," so those outside what we consider "our" group don't merit the same level of focus. Which may be why the boys were struck by the fact that the story they were watching took place in Japan; it wasn't part of their own sphere of experience, and thus (despite being an anime, and therefore naturally set in Japan) actually felt odd that it should be there, as opposed to anywhere else that it could be.
We expect to be the center of the story, despite knowing that we shouldn't be; and when that doesn't happen, we tune it out. I sometimes wonder how many people actually read this over your shoulder because of this same phenomenon; most of this is just between you and me, and doesn't really concern them. But that's fine with me, as that's quite true. At least until Megumi shows up, you're still something like the center of my universe, whether I like it or not. It would be better if you were still here to actually be that, but this is what I have to deal with for now.
And having said that, I should probably let you go. Remember, if you can, to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I'm going to need it. 
No comments:
Post a Comment