"To a dark place this line of thought will carry us."

“Knowledge itself is power.” Sir Francis Bacon

“Power tends to corrupt…” Lord Acton

Sir Francis Bacon

My head was filling with information. Art school was saturating my brain with words and concepts I had never known existed. They covered everything. Every medium was sampled, art history from around the world, an entire class devoted to the theory of color and another dedicated to the complexities of perspective. It was a lot of information and it… was… great! I could apply most of it to film, too. My major, I had finally decided, would be digital art. I had a small understanding of computers at the time and too much impatience when it came to sitting back while waiting for paint to dry. What had also caught my attention was the mention that the digital design department was going to add a video class… I’m in!

The problem with all this was that I was becoming arrogant. I had been absorbing all these new theories and ideas and somewhere along the way… I got lost. I started feeling a sense of superiority towards the non-artistically inclined. I felt as if they were beneath me and I was a member of an exclusive club. It was intoxicating… going to all the art shows and standing around with my glass of wine and a napkin full of cheese. Meeting new people and discussing all manner of topics while engaging in a barrage of trivial banter in order to prove just how smart I really was. Spewing out names and dates and long words ending in “ism” while juggling gargantuan terms like “juxtaposition”, “nexus” and “oxymoronic” … anything with the letter “X” in it. I was in… deep.

I had a professor who once said that we had an arduous journey ahead of us because, ”We artists are like gods. Like God, we have the ability to create worlds.” Now… I am not a particularly religious fellow but I can recognize bulls**t when I hear it and this guy was simmering in it. Something was off. I would hear many of my teachers talking about how we represented the soul of the people but these people were too elitist to even give the average man a second thought. How would they know the feelings of the everyman when they spent the bulk of their time amongst each other… praising one another while stabbing each other in the back?

Don’t get me wrong… there were a few decent people among my professors but I had learned the magician’s tricks and somehow… the magic was gone and the magician, as it turned out, was an a**hole.

I knew it had taken hold when I started keeping things to myself. I would only speak of things that made me seem… intellectual. I only spoke of Indiana Jones and Star Wars in the context of their social applications… not to mention how E.T. was a childish film that had no real relevance as an adult. Who the hell was this guy? What happened to that kid who used to just love a good story? Why was there sudden need to deconstruct everything and analyze it to its very core? Social application!? What does that even mean?

My mother had moved to Connecticut soon after I had graduated from high school. I had visited her on several occasions but half way through college… I really needed a vacation. I was on top of the world and it felt like crap. To add to the frustration, things were going downhill with Katherine and the end was imminent. Yeah… I needed to get away from Puerto Rico for a few weeks.

As usual… I decided to go to the movies. I can’t even remember the movie I watched. That’s saying something. What I do remember was the trailer. The lights were dim and the room went silent. A little television popped up in middle of the screen and a man began to speak. “For an entire generation people have experienced Star Wars the only way it’s been possible… on the T.V. screen.” What? What was this? My eyes widened and my jaw dropped the moment he said, “But if you’ve only seen it this way… you haven’t seen it at all!” and the theater exploded! The Star Wars theme blew out of the speakers and echoed inside my head. With every passing image my eyes started to well up. When the narrator invited me to “welcome back” all those characters I knew and loved as a boy… I damn near lost it in that place. Star Wars Special Edition? It was old and it was new. It was all coming back to me. When I was a kid I wasn't analyzing anything. I was just watching, feeling and enjoying. How could I go back without sacrificing all I had learned? Was there a way to acquire knowledge but still maintain a sense of wonder? In other words… could I learn all the magicians tricks but still enjoy the show? Yes.

It all comes down to a very simple thing. Honesty. At the risk of sounding like Disney's version of a Paulo Coelho book… be honest with yourself. If you like a certain type of movie or music or work of art… don’t hide it. Don’t deny it. If you hate the Hollywood blockbusters or if the rare and independent isn’t your cup of tea… fantastic! Just be sure it’s for the right reasons. Don’t toss the big budgets aside in an effort to appear intellectually superior and don’t dismiss the foreign and obscure simply because you don’t understand them. Vocabulary is important if only so that when some holier-than-thou nitwit tries to crush you with their god-like knowledge of the universe, you can tell them to go screw themselves in the most elegant way possible. Don’t forget to throw in a few “X” words too. Then you can stick out your middle finger and tell them to “juxtapose this!”

Just enjoy the experience. There will be time for analyzing once the film is over. When it comes to the movies… I say: Feel first… think later.