Films you related to so much it was scary

Gandhi

^ That’s funny, Deckard. One reason I have never watched The Graduate is I’ve always been very suspicious of that obnoxious male fantasy element.

Anyway. I relate a lot to Spirit of the Beehive, Nights of Cabiria, and Tokyo Twilight.

I love Spirit of the Beehive. Such a beautiful film.

Annie Hall, or really just Woody Allen in general.

Greenberg reminded me of teenage me. That actually made the film kind of uncomfortable.

In seriousness, I related a lot to Chasing Amy, not because I’ve ever been in love with a lesbian, but because I have been in love with girls who thought of me as just a friend. The whole part where she falls back in love with him has never happened, but its a nice bit of fantasy.

Also weirdly enough I relate a lot to films like High Fidelity and Annie Hall, even though I’m only 18 and have yet to experience any sort of emotional break up.

All the Real Girls
Five Easy Pieces

I’m not willing to get on the internet and explain why I relate to these movies so much, but I do.

BERANAK DALAM KUBUR is the most scarriest movie ever on Indonesia

and another movie with suzanna play the character

Andrew Garfield character in lions for lambs

Grave of the Fireflies. At the start of the film I was relating immediately with the brother and sister relationship as I have a sister around the same age and I am much older than her. It’s a relationship that is more fatherly than brotherly and that I could fully relate to.
I’m sure you can imagine I was pretty torn apart by the end of that movie.

Cria Cuervos. A kid confronted with and coming to terms with the idea of death. Who hasn’t been there?
I’m aware how much of an oversimplified description that is but that was the part I fully related to.

I wish I had some happier movies to post.

Downfall.

In all seriousness though, Billy Liar is me all over.

“Mr. Jealousy,” but that was a long damn time ago.

Cronenberg’s THE FLY.
TAXI DRIVER
GHOST WORLD
FACTOTUM
BARFLY
LEAVING LAS VEGAS
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

Ghost World is definitely another one. Thanks for reminding me of a somewhat “happier” movie, Filmstress and Danger.

My adolescence still comes back with cravings: Daisies ❃

Others:
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
À nos amours
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Piano Teacher

(Loneliness, desperation in love & dysfunction within my family and myself.)

Antichrist. I’ve had a lot of problems with depression, and that was a frighteningly realistic portrayal of depression. Charlotte Gainsbourg deserved everything she got.

Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia

Rohmer’s Le rayon vert (released in the U.S. as Summer)

A Single Man
Jack Goes Boating
Precious
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The Wrestler
Revolutionary Road

adaptation.

Under the Volcano
Vengeance is Mine

I relate to many others but these are the ones that I’ve been disturbed by in my empathy towards them.

But if we’re talking the most we relate to, then for me, Light Sleeper.

Billy Liar!

Notes on a Scandal
Y Tu Mama Tambien
American Gigilo
Breathless
Crush

Somewhere in the haze of theory I read somebody mentioned this term I really like, called “The Spark of Recognition.”

I have done subsequent searches and have not found literature on The Spark of Recognition since.

(Quick Google double-check: Hrrrmmmm, getting closer, one year ago there wasn’t even this here )

Anyway, The Spark of Recognition as I understand it (and, frankly, since I cannot find the original theory behind it, have decided to define it) is the moment where the medium ceases to be an actual medium and becomes experience or memory—the moment when you’re not just engrossed in a movie, but suddenly jolt awake as if from a dream and realize that what you were watching you were watching, as opposed to experiencing. The Spark of Recognition is something important to me because it is a complex meshing of media theory, psychology, and empathy all saturated at a single point, and also because it explains why after someone alerts you to a new idea, you suddenly see that idea mentioned or referenced everywhere around you.

Media is plural for medium, and medium refers to something that is both between and connects. Think of a window. It is also a reflection. Think of a mirror. When we watch stories, we project our own experiences into the context of the stories. This is natural, and the more critically you approach stories, the more capable you are of distinguishing your own life from characters. The Spark of Recognition is when that breaks down and you and character become essentially the same. This has happened to me while reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. It has also happened while playing Silent Hill. It is not necessarily connected to real-life experience, but definitely to real-life perspective. This is why it is a very difficult term to explain (as well as the fact that I can’t fucking reference it because I can’t find the goddamned essay where I read about it …. needless to say this essay I read on The Spark of Recognition sparked recognition).

Secondly, the Spark of Recognition is, like deja vu, rather arbitrary and may just apply to your certain state of mind. Deja vu occurs when your brain gets tired and mixes impulses (happens more regularly than you think), sending visual data into memory receptors, and the subsequent feeling of hyperreality and cognition (“No no really I remember all of this happening including you asking me about it!”) results from a JOLT as your brain reacts to those crossed inputs. Surrealism and Dada play with these impulses, as Inez points out in her essay “Breaking the Frames”. In “Breaking the Frames”, Inez provides a cognitive psychology theory framework (as opposed to psychoanalysis) for understanding Dada and Surrealism, where both modes apply the audience’s expectations towards some standard meaning or narrative direction, and then subverts them. Luis Bunuel is an absolute master of this. The Spark of Recognition applies to this conversation because it’s the moments where you as audience cease to have expectations, and start to have experiences, with the medium you are watching, as a result of a cognitive dissonance between your own perspective and the flood of familiarity a piece of art or a story brings. This usually happens with characters, like in my case with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (mentioned previously in this thread), where technically Joel is not much like me at all, and is obviously a performance, however the cause and motivations behind his actions are, in my experience, so true to life, and the structure of the movie so recognizable to my mindset, that upon initial viewing in the theatre when it first came out, at one point I not only forgot I was watching a movie, but suddenly became aware that I was inside of it, before “snapping awake” in a deja vu sense (but not in a “I was falling asleep, dude,” sense) to remember that I was watching a fiction and that Joel was not me, in any means.

I stress again, the Spark of Recognition is very, very rare. It isn’t just empathy, either. Empathy means that you can understand a person’s dilemma because you have the ability to imagine yourself in their place. Sympathy is where you feel bad for the place they’re in. The Spark of Recognition is the liminal moment when you cannot tell the difference between yourself and the person, the dilemma becomes your own, and worse, for a split second (the time it takes for a spark to die out) you aren’t even aware that you are separate people or, in the case of media and movies, that what you’re looking at is a personal avatar of your projected experiences, and otherwise designed differently from the actuality of your existence.

As I mentioned before, criticism in its own way creates a form of detachment between the mostly visceral nature of the Spark of Recognition, and in my opinion it actually is the case that as critical rigor increases, detachment from the Spark of Recognition increases whereas more technical intellectual engagement (re: thesis, theme, semiotics as opposed to empathy, connectiveness, transcendence) occurs. It’s sort of sad because as you find yourself more interested in cinema, to apply the theory to this board’s focus, knowledge of that medium decreases Spark of Recognition, of which probably interested you in the medium in the first place, making it rarer for those moments when cinema feels truly experiential and engaged with your own personal emotive unable-to-describe life. Meanwhile, watching previous movies that sparked recognition may end up disappointing, because subsequently to previous viewing, one has gained the critical framework to see it from enough of a different and ultimately detached perspective to see the ways it is actually different and possibly even contrary to personal experience. After all, everybody, movies are not real life.

Another reason why Sparks of Recognition are rare is because in addition to empathizing and intellectually understanding what you are spectating, what you are spectating has to be circumstantially related to something that is currently on your mind. That is why I refer above to the idea that when you learn something new, you suddenly see data of it in the world around you—for instance, after reading this, many of you will start to notice people expressing Spark of Recognition moments everywhere, or this essay itself could potentially be pulling together something you’ve been grasping at for a while and have cerebrally, but not intellectually, understood for a while (i.e., it’s totally perfect in describing something you know, but have never previously put words to. Why yes, The Spark of Recognition Theory sparked recognition in me, can’t you tell?). It’s the reason why, as a teenager, I would get really frustrated because I’d come up with some big philosophical idea I was proud of, only to almost immediately afterward discover the same thought in some book or movie or discussion with friends. This is not because the thinking was the same or I didn’t previously realize I had already read the idea or was simply behind the zeitgeist or whatever, it is because once I came to that new understanding, it became applicable to a wide variety of dialogs that fit it in to that theory. The negative side of this is when people decide to keep going in that direction and decide to fit everything into their “personal philosophy on life” or whatever. The point is, all of the significance of the world is in our language, but our language is arbitrary and inefficient in fully expressing all of the significance of the world. Thus, whenever our brains achieve a higher level of understanding of something, all of the things that support that significance become clearer, and since those things are clearer than before, we assume that suddenly, coincidentally, some sort of cloud knowledge has been achieved and out of nowhere everyone is thinking about ______ and _______ is everywhere, even though it was both already there in the way you only currently understand it, as well as it’s in ways divergent of your ideology in the first place, because after all it was created outside of you. This is why you can reread or rewatch texts at later dates and suddenly realize, “HOLY SHIT, I didn’t even notice that before!” You did, but at the time it wasn’t significant to you. Your mind cuts out details it perceives to be insignificant in order to focus on the details that it perceives to be significant, which is why the Spark of Recognition is wrapped up in perception and cannot be achieved by will alone.

Trying to willingly push for the Spark of Recognition and applying memories of older ways of thinking without observing newers rarely returns that Spark back in its place, but rather at worst becomes disappointing and frustrating and at most becomes nostalgia. That match is burned out, though you can at least intellectually admire the fact that at one point the Spark of Recognition was hit. And yes, you can experience the Spark of Recognition before even consuming the text itself. This happened, for me, in readings of Last Year at Marienbad and is the reason why I sought out Thomas Pynchon in the first place (note that the instance of deciding to seek out Thomas Pynchon and the instance in which Pynchon actually personally sparked recognition with Against the Day are two separate events, occurring a year apart, the later event of which is the real reason why I am such a Pynchon fan as otherwise without that moment I would have decided that Pynchon is not quite all that he’s hyped up to be, though I intellectually understood how he could be appreciated by others—you see the difference?).

—PolarisDiB

I think I experienced the Spark of Recognition while reading your description of it. Superb post.

Inland Empire
400 Blows

At different points in my life – and to different extents, now:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – the spot-on portrayal of the nature of memory and relationships
Synecdoche, New York – fear of death, but more importantly, inability to live. Insecurity, loneliness, the struggle for artistic integrity, the passage of time, so many things.
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Hannah and Her Sisters
^ like one of the other members mentioned, it’s just that Woody Allen’s sensibilities, on-screen persona, and views mesh so well with my own. His hypochondriac from Hannah has been me at several points in my life.
Taxi Driver – utter loneliness and isolation and what it does to you.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – excellent portrayal of both jealousy/resentment (Robert Ford) and becoming someone so far removed from what you recognize or used to recognize as yourself (Jesse), a crumbling psyche if you will. I can relate to both.
The Fountain – man’s initial inability to cope with the concept of death and eventual acceptance of the inevitable.
Punch-Drunk Love – anxiety/the feeling of being suffocated in social situations (ie all his sisters hounding him at once)/being ridiculed by one’s family, outbursts of aggression, the fact that in a relationship you need to find someone willing and wanting to accept who you really are, etc.

There are tons more, but these are the ones that came to mind. I realize I’m not doing the films justice with my brief descriptions/I’m painting in broad strokes, but I wanted to quickly bullet-point why I can relate to them.

Oh and also, I’m sure there’s some sort of happy

Midnight in Paris

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

I am a legendary TV showman by day, a CIA hitman by night. Honest.