November 20, 2007
Inanimate Emotions… Just as Powerful as Real Ones
Last night I was making carrot juice, and I poured some of the pulp down the sink, into the built-in garbage disposal. It seemed to work fine, but then I looked in the sink to see a mess of spewed carrot bits and egg shells, smelling pretty raunchy. It made me think immediately that the sink was sick, and I tried to remedy the situation, but the mess kept coming back up into the second sink… then back to the first one.
I asked Barry to help me out, and he was able to stop the suction effect by removing some pots from the second sink. The way they had been covering the hole, they kept the suction going and wouldn’t let the mess go down the drain.
“It’s okay,” he joked. “The sickness is gone.”
Now that the thoughts of doing irreparable damage to our sink and having to call plumbers had vanished, I was immediately swept with emotions, and said, “I’m sorry for making the sink puke. I didn’t mean to hurt it!”
Then I laughed at how I had personified the sink, and it suddenly reminded me of an old commercial I used to see on TV a lot. I told Barry about the Ikea commercial, which was apparently created by Spike Jonze, and how it used to effect me emotionally:
But it wasn’t just me. All the girls I knew felt sorry for this little lamp when watching the commercial…. then we’d laugh when the host said, “that’s because you’re crazy!”
But deep down we knew we weren’t crazy. We had been affected by the same tools movie makers use when hooking you into a story: the music, the pacing, the positioning of the “victim”, and the back-and-forth points of view.
