This Is Running for Your Life (35 page)

In my review I used a word that critics have adopted as shorthand for the sins of the modern theme movie:
cynical
. More than pandering or mercenary laziness, these often wildly profitable films give off the chill of the inhuman. Things we associate with a story line occasionally occur, yet no story takes shape. Action set pieces prime us for a climax, yet we stagger out feeling gypped. Actors who resemble human beings speak in understandable sentences, yet nothing they say sinks in. Actually, my visit to MindSign made more sense of films like
Cowboys & Aliens
and
I Am Number Four
—the latter a non sequitur genre amalgam with high activation potential and low everything else—than a third or fourth viewing could have. Here was an explanation for the persistent, peculiar feeling that much of what I watch has issued not from flesh and blood but a floating, flashing brain.

I tried to talk to Carlsen about how bad it is out there, as if he didn't know. He assured me that science can help. He foresees neurocinema decamping from the fear- and threat-assessment responses of the amygdala to resettle its interests around Brodmann Area 25, the section of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex thought to mediate between the external world and the working memory to produce a sense of self. It's the spot they see lighting up most often during what Carlsen calls “heartfelt” scenes. “In our opinion,” he said, “that's the coolest area right now.”

I mean, it sounds cool. But I'm not sure it can stop what has been started or outperform the lambent gold mine of the twelve- to twenty-five-year-old male amygdala. We are now weaning a generation that has assimilated activation as entertainment, to the dismay of at least one subway-riding dad recently overheard complaining to a colleague about the way that the Nickelodeon network's signature rapid cutting and jarring sounds and colors transform his seven-year-old daughter into one of those new breeds of zombie who can book it like a black bear. This is, of course, a very circular concern: our parents told us television would rot our brains, but the age of
iCarly
and
Hannah Montana
makes
Sesame Street
look like
The Mark Twain Children's Hour
.

“I think that's why kids are kind of …
awful
today,” said Carlsen, who wound up in the children's television arm at DreamWorks. “You know? They don't have good TV.”

Evaluating the classics against this new metric produces scattered results. A 2008 study conducted by Israeli neurobiologists Uri Hasson and Rafi Malach found that an episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
produced nearly identical patterns of brain response across a group of viewers, results that could only please a director who conceived of audience response as a form of reflexology. But Hitchcock was also profoundly interested in representing subjectivity; few directors made as plain the idea that we go to the movies to literally
see
how things
feel
. There may be no better statement on subjectivity vis-à-vis the movies than the one presented in
Rear Window
. The attempt to grab each viewer individually gives art to what would otherwise be an exercise in collective muscle control, something achievable by a lone tripod trained on a Wimbledon match.

Hasson and Malach's studies helped spark Carlsen and Hubbard's interest in neurocinema. They conducted a study of their own involving the original, 1968 version of
Night of the Living Dead
.

“Boooring,” Carlsen said. “Unfortunately. It was very nonactivating. And, like, that movie—it scares the hell out of me.” I wondered how he felt about helping create a standard that contradicts his own experience of what makes something good or sweet or scary. “Culture is different now,” Carlsen shrugged. “Often the people we scan are young college kids, and one could argue—I don't know if this is actual fact—but one could argue that it's just a different culture. They're attracted by colorful things, pretty things, not as …
old
.” A movie like
The Kids Are All Right
, which Carlsen cited as an example of a recent film he loved—“it had me just as engaged as any
Harry Potter
movie or anything else”—will never activate the way a brain-pummeler like
Battle: Los Angeles
does.

I mentioned
Battle: Los Angeles
—concept: aliens versus marines—to Carlsen because it had recently jackhammered a spot in the forefront of my memory of violently unpleasant viewing experiences. It's the only film whose equilibrium-scrambling combination of epileptic camerawork and dysphasic, microsecond shots has actually made me sick. I was still nauseous almost forty-eight hours later, when I had to file my review. The judgment seemed obvious; the real challenge of the new generation of concept-driven, high-activation films is figuring out enough of what you just saw to write an opinion. The tighter the elevator pitch, the more elusive the explanation of the resulting film.

Renata Adler famously put a four-year warranty on the sensibility of any practicing critic; I think lingerie models have longer careers. I had been reviewing films for four and a half years the night I staggered back into the neon hippodrome of Times Square, my mood as black and bottomless as the divot in Aaron Eckhart's chin. For me steady reviewing was something of a fluke—a way to earn a living on the way to wherever I was going. It felt like a miracle then; for the most part it still does. But in addition to experiencing the habituation that can turn even a great job into a bit of a drag, I have come to suspect that writing for a living is one of the trickiest things a writer can do. With all due relativity noted, it is
tough
out there for a second-string reviewer; you can go to some
dark places
watching
Hoodwinked Too!
or blowing another evening on a movie based on a comic book that was invented for the sole purpose of spawning a movie that could then make the illustrious claim of having been based on a comic book.

And trust me, no one looks to the culture or nobility of the profession for sustenance: when the Internet is not whizzing on your reviews and calling for your commitment to a cultural reeducation camp, your own colleagues are pretending not to notice each other on the screening-room circuit, each time behaving as though they've arrived at a 6:00 p.m. showing of
Battlefield Girth
and are desperate for the lights to go down. Perhaps the only thing worse is when people start talking. The urge to concuss myself with a seat rest when I hear the adenoidal stringers behind me wondering if it's “reductive” to hate a film they've only heard about—maybe that's an overreaction. Or wanting to clink the tilted heads of the bald white men seated in front of me together as they segue from an appreciation of the timeliness of
The Help
to seditious whispers about that bald-white-man-disappointer President Obama (“I remember weeping with joy,” said the one bitterly. “
Literally weeping
”)—perhaps that is a disproportionate response.

Where criticism first seemed a natural and happy extension of my love of movies and writing, lately I have started to feel that there's something unnatural about habituating to—that is making a career of—a certain level of stimuli. I don't mean just at the movies but at the movies especially, where studios seem less interested in engaging individuals than equalizing audience response. That I am almost shy to admit fearing for my senses suggests how loath we are of being dismissed ourselves, aware on some level that to resist the culture's unchecked velocity is to fail.

“Neurological data is just another thing,” Carlsen said, in response to a question about the impact neuromarketing will have on the creative gene pool. “It's not changing movies. It's just making better products for the consumer. And that could be anything—it could be a better movie trailer, a better movie, a better Oreo-cookie package.” I asked what he meant by “better,” wondering out loud about the nefarious possibilities of this kind of research, its capacity to exploit the parts of our viewing, wanting, buying selves that we are not aware of. MindSign's goal is to get the suits comfortable with scanning everything back to the pitch—to determine, say, if simply hearing the words
aliens versus marines
activates well.

“I don't know if Hollywood's ready to bite onto that yet,” Carlsen admitted. “Somebody will, soon enough. That's kind of the thing with Hollywood, and America: somebody's gonna do it eventually.”

*   *   *

The machine was free until one, and Carlsen offered to scan me while I watched a couple of movie trailers. A new
Pirates
movie was on deck—number four or five, neither of us could remember—and Carlsen had cited it several times as the exact kind of film that could use their help. The trailers on hand were a little older, one for
Red Riding Hood
—a gothy teen “reimagining” of the children's fairy tale designed to catch some tailwind action from the
Twilight
franchise's flapping druid robes—and one for the aforementioned
Battle: Los Angeles
.

I changed into a pair of the hospital scrubs stacked in the MindSign bathroom and stepped back into the hallway with bare feet, where a tech was waiting with a few questions about the status of my bra. Having failed the underwire test, I stepped back into the stall to remove it, and a barrette too.

A disclosure form designed to flag pacemakers, piercings, or bionic parts furthers the vetting process. I was clear until the question about claustrophobia, where I somehow circled
yes
when I meant to circle
no
. After a solemn promise not to hyperventilate, I was led onto the cool tiles of the machine's chamber; they keep blankets on hand for the easily chilled. I hopped onto the machine's sliding gurney and was fitted with a pair of earphones. Once she is laid out on her back, the subject's head is guided between two padded clamps, and a slotted contraption is fastened over her face. Inside the headgear, all the subject can see is herself: a mirror redirects images projected in from behind, but until then the show is her own two eyes.

In trying to ease my passage into this tunneled creep show, the tech demonstrated his awareness of the effect of the word
tiny
on a woman. We had just acknowledged my height and weight on the record, yet I'm sure every floret of my traitor brain lit up like the Rockefeller tree.

The tech slipped a squeezy panic button into my palm before retiring to the monitor bay. Then I was swallowed from the knees up. The sound piped in through the headphones competes with the machine's anabolic white noise, and not very well. The screen went black except for a small white crosshair in the center. Trailers run twice for a proper reading, and the crosshair returns for exactly sixteen seconds between showings—long enough to return your brain to its baseline. The tech cut in with a few last words of advice: the most important thing is to keep as still as possible. I concentrated on this until I shook from concentration, like a husband with something to hide. If it was possible to ace such a thing, bias probably didn't help, so I focused on clearing
Red Riding Hood
's bad buzz from my mind, until all I could think about was not thinking about how every person in the entire world knows that
Red Riding Hood
bites, with a subfocus on what terminal self-consciousness might look like from the inside—a rainbow-colored question mark? Emergency broadcast stripes? Psychedelic hamster wheel? The second time through I tried to simply see what I was seeing, which went something like this:
Man, Amanda Seyfried is one odd-looking duck. Wow, the cape and basket and everything, huh. That is some extreme robe-flapping—gotta be CGI.
And:
Gary Oldman? Really?

With the cruel
Battle: Los Angeles
redux, both times I just tried not to cry.

*   *   *

After refastening my bra and barrette I ran into MindSign's one o'clock in the hall. I knew the fragile, middle-aged woman perched on a red indoor scooter hadn't come to watch movie trailers or pine for her iPhone. In recent months, Carlsen had told me earlier, the company had redistributed its resources to accommodate a potential breakthrough in multiple sclerosis research. Their subjects are now split more or less evenly between focus-group volunteers and MS patients hoping for a miracle.

It happened like this: After receiving an MS diagnosis in the midnineties, thirty-seven-year-old Elena Zamboni's health deteriorated swiftly. Horrified by her suffering, Elena's husband, Paolo, a vascular surgeon in Ferrara, Italy, devoted himself to vanquishing her disease. A century of MS research had yielded a set of symptoms but no clear cause. Dr. Zamboni began with one of them: MS blood is typically iron heavy. Over a decade later, in 2009, he revealed his theory that MS is not an autoimmune disorder, as is widely believed, but a vascular one. Dr. Zamboni had discovered that the neck arteries of a majority of MS patients are either blocked or malformed, and improper blood drainage, not an autoimmune malfunction, leads to the excess of iron, which can lead to neural pathology—specifically the brain lesions associated with MS. In 2006, Elena was among the first to undergo the experimental stent and balloon angioplasty procedures of the “liberation treatment” and has since made a complete recovery. Evangelical-type stories of patients suddenly rising from their wheelchairs and regaining movement in their extremities soon emerged from Ferrara. The media were alerted and the entrenched interests of the neurology community prepared for attack. If Dr. Zamboni was right, it was both a watershed breakthrough and a huge embarrassment for a field approaching a basic plumbing issue as if it were curing cancer.

Shortly after Dr. Zamboni's discovery was made public, Devin Hubbard was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Dispirited by the stalemate in MS research and inspired by Dr. Zamboni's findings, Dr. Hubbard scanned Devin at MindSign, found the suspected blockages, and convinced a local surgeon to clear them. Some countries have already banned the liberation treatment, citing insufficient research. All the Hubbards know is that Devin has been symptom-free for over a year. Dr. Hubbard has unofficially emerged from retirement to advocate for the study of what has been rebranded chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI); his daughter Alexandra now heads a family foundation to find and help sufferers; and MindSign has overseen the overwhelmingly successful treatment of more than four hundred MS patients.