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The 25th Frame

The films that let us escape for a short while are also the ones that can help us grieve

An Escape

I fear that in this, my second column here at HEAVE, I must adopt a more somber tone to my commentary. Over the past week, my friends and much of the DePaul community have been grieving the loss of DePaul University Senior Francisco “Frankie” Vanlencia Jr. who was shot outside of a Halloween party last week. An RA (like myself), Frankie lived and worked with me on the Lincoln Park campus and he was one of the first friends I made when I first came to Chicago. His loss is extreme and nearly impossible to put into words.

So why do I mention Frankie's death in this space? It serves as a catalyst to to my main topic: how I grieve. People grieve loss in various ways. Some drink. Some eat. Some punch brick walls. Some do all of these and more. How do I, Max Alborn, grieve and process?

I watch what I can only describe as an ungodly amount of movies and listen to music constantly (and I do that enough when life is good). At the end of the day I lock myself in my room and line my movies up; watching films well into the early hours.

In retrospect, I stopped myself and asked if what I was doing was healthy. Was watching all of those movies, listening to all of that music, playing all of those games, actually helping me to process what had happened to my friend?

The answer was and still is yes. Films are an escapist craft when you get down to their core. They can dazzle, shock and/or distract you. Regardless of a film's intent, they are all rooted in the nature of escapism; taking the viewer away from reality, if only for an hour. This was what I wanted and it's what I got.

So how is escapism, especially in a time of such heightened emotion, healthy? It is in the nature of the escape and the film(s) to which we escape to. Films are a medium without time. No matter when they are viewed, they retain their structure, characters and ideals. They exist outside the context of the viewer's world and cannot feel the emotions of the viewer as a result.

However, humans feel the emotions of films. In watching films (good ones, at least) viewers like myself tend to severe their ties to their own world and connect on some level with the film. Essentially, while films are an escape from our reality, they are not without many of the issues that plague reality: life, death, punishment and mercy all come to mind as a write this.

This begs the question of why one would escape to films if they find the same issues there that they find in their own reality. In the end, it comes down to individual perception. As a viewer, I have a habit of completely immersing myself in a film, which includes it's characters, setting and issues encountered.

However, I know that despite my immersion, I am not a participant of the film: I am an observer. Like life, I have little power over the issues at hand and can only watch. By viewing a film that addresses issues that affect me in my own life, such as the death of a friend, I can view the issue in a manner that is personal, yet outside the personal context of my life. By being on the outside looking in, I can look to my own dealings in my life, such as how I process my anger and loss over the violent death of a friend.

As I have said before, all films have one core trait: escape. If you want to mindlessly shut down and drool at nice effects, you can pop in “Transformers 2”; if you want to laugh, pop in “Young Frankenstein” and on and on. While serving as an escape, films also serve as a form of therapy (to me, at least). They take us out of our lives, put us in another and allow us to perceive the good and bad of the world with little direct consequence. Armed with a different perception on issues based in our reality, viewers are capable of taking the lessons they learned in the world of a film and bring it to reality; possibly improving their world in the process. 

And that is all Frankie ever wanted or asked for.