I was coming back home for work yesterday on the bus, and remembered this scene from the film K-pax. I don't actually know why I thought of it and it might be something to do with thinking about the music for the film.
Kevin Spacey plays a patient ("prote") from a mental hospital claiming to come from another world ("K-pax"), so his therapist played by Jeff Bridges, takes him to an observatory to meet a group of astrophysicsts. However, things don't go quite as planned.
The film keeps you guessing all the way to the end and you want it to be true. Spacey carries the role very well with a balance of weirdness and humour. If you decide to watch it, it has a sad ending but may be worth seeing all the way through.
The idea of putting ourselves in that scene, starting out being so certain of something only for the unexpected to happen is quite a liberating idea. We perhaps collectively suffer from something akin to a delusion of sanity in that we think we have seen everything and know it all. Some part of our childhood eagerness and curiosity gets trained out of us until we become bored with the world and often become boring ourselves. It doesn't have to be that way of course. Occasionally, we need to be surprised to remind ourselves how amazing the world can be. Its strangeness is not always dangerous and sometimes it can be easy to be frightened of what we don't understand.
If we ever did come in to contact with a member of an alien race, far advanced to us, we would have to be ready for some surprises. Closer to home, our delusion of sanity can often get in the way of understanding each other because we are all a little bit "alien": we try to fit people into labels and categories but we often lose sight of the complex and contradictory development of the person underneath. In the clip, Kevin Spacy starts the scene with the label "crazy" implicitly written all over him, but the wonder of the scene is getting us to question whether he really deserves the label. As Bill Nye puts it "Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."
I don't really have a purpose for this thread, but maybe it can get a discussion going on how much we really know and how we can learn to deal with it more easily.
Kevin Spacey plays a patient ("prote") from a mental hospital claiming to come from another world ("K-pax"), so his therapist played by Jeff Bridges, takes him to an observatory to meet a group of astrophysicsts. However, things don't go quite as planned.
The film keeps you guessing all the way to the end and you want it to be true. Spacey carries the role very well with a balance of weirdness and humour. If you decide to watch it, it has a sad ending but may be worth seeing all the way through.
The idea of putting ourselves in that scene, starting out being so certain of something only for the unexpected to happen is quite a liberating idea. We perhaps collectively suffer from something akin to a delusion of sanity in that we think we have seen everything and know it all. Some part of our childhood eagerness and curiosity gets trained out of us until we become bored with the world and often become boring ourselves. It doesn't have to be that way of course. Occasionally, we need to be surprised to remind ourselves how amazing the world can be. Its strangeness is not always dangerous and sometimes it can be easy to be frightened of what we don't understand.
If we ever did come in to contact with a member of an alien race, far advanced to us, we would have to be ready for some surprises. Closer to home, our delusion of sanity can often get in the way of understanding each other because we are all a little bit "alien": we try to fit people into labels and categories but we often lose sight of the complex and contradictory development of the person underneath. In the clip, Kevin Spacy starts the scene with the label "crazy" implicitly written all over him, but the wonder of the scene is getting us to question whether he really deserves the label. As Bill Nye puts it "Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."
I don't really have a purpose for this thread, but maybe it can get a discussion going on how much we really know and how we can learn to deal with it more easily.
