The Awe I Crave
At the end of 2012 I was in Uruguay, weeks after graduating as an animator in Canada, helping my mother load the car for what would be my last trip back home. I had spent a good part of the previous week walking through Montevideo trying to get used to this new city, this whole new country that my parents had moved to. Montevideo seemed quaint and calm and I could not, for the life of me, understand why I was there. I was confused and uncertain about what my future would be. Two years outside of Bolivia and in that time it felt like everything I understood as my previous life came undone. Time went forward without waiting for me to catch up to it, as it often does.
Awe, as a moment in fiction, seems to be missing from the mainstream stories coming at us. The superhero blockbusters, the crime stories, the tragic romances — these are mostly built to sell the experience of the genre. And the experience of a genre can be often recreated via some basic elements that are then tacked onto the conflict and used to construct the plot. Without having to build up to a moment of awe.
And I am not saying that moment-to-moment elements are always undeveloped in mainstream stories. I am not cynical enough to say that there are no scenes of pride, heartbreak, or laughter that move me. Of course I love a good final conflict, and I cry when the old man dies. However I feel that most of the focus goes towards some of the most clear emotions we have: anger, love, sadness, and most of what’s in between. Unlike these, awe feels harder to describe, more subjective, conflictless, grander.
Surprisingly, superhero movies seem to be almost completely missing true moments of awe. Which are, to me, fundamental to these stories. It says something that some of the most memorable moments of awe in superhero movies go back to stuff like Christopher Reeve’s Superman, who promised to make us believe a man could fly. So scenes were built to highlight how striking Superman’s abilities would have been to the common people. Nowadays, it feels like superhero movies assume we are no longer impressed with the powers of these characters and try to get to the story points as quickly as possible. There may be exceptions but seeing how the movie trends are going, exceptions they’ll remain.
And I find that a shame because I feel there’s something inherently positive in trying to inspire, and sometimes succeed in creating, a genuine sensation of awe.
On our road trip towards Bolivia, my mother and I passed by the northern area of Argentina. Until then I had never been in the country and to be quite honest all my expectations about the area were based on what I’ve seen in TV and read in stories, so I expected a lot of gauchos casually drinking mate on the side of the road with their horses. Turns out, I was not completely off.
Most of the time, however, the landscape was plain and vast and the highways were empty. Through most of the days, we listened to CDs or the radio; we saw large processions for local saints; we bought fresh bread on the roadside from a kind man who gave us twice more than what we paid for. It was a long trip made out of small moments.
See, awe is a Romantic emotion. Not “love” romantic, but more from the tradition of Romanticism. Especially when we think about the “sublime”. What is sublime is awe-inspiring, not necessarily beautiful, but bigger than the self, either in literal size or power. That is the kind of awe evoked in the introduction of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park: Alan Grant has been brought along with his teammates to an island to see an eccentric rich man’s project. Cynical and skeptical about the whole ordeal, he and his companions are taken around to see the island in 4x4 trucks when suddenly Alan sees for the first time a living dinosaur. What he has studied all his life through fossilized bones. He sees the impossible.
In the scene the characters are clearly placed in a recognizable physical place as everyone can imagine walking through a grass field and are familiar with the sensation of being in a car. There is nothing from this scene that is unrelatable and could break the sense of place necessary for the moment to hit properly. The contrasts — to be familiar led into the unfamiliar, to be grounded then to be unmoored in unreality — hit hard.
In Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, there are several scenes that are quite impressive either artistically or in scope but arguably none quite as awe-inspiring as the storm scene. The whole thing is set up as a chase where a mother drives her child away from a flooding storm. Amid the hectic chaos of the scene, waves strike the road with crushing force and swallow everything behind the car. The boy turns towards the ocean just to see that on top of the rolling waves a little girl is running on the water, calling his name with a smile. It is a strange scene, but it moved me deeply.
And to be moved by something in fiction in such a way makes it unforgettable. It does not require a large storm, or the presence of dinosaurs. It could be as simple as seeing a person act uncharacteristically. If the reveal is built with the right sense of place, it contrasts with what we have known before and it is honest enough to move emotionally. There are tons of stories that have left me awe-struck and even though I can’t always describe them properly, I remember them all, and there’s something within me that craves more.
During the road trip I was scared of my future. In the silence between the chats with my mom, when the music was turned off, I sat thinking and afraid. The road seemed infinite and clearly held no answers for me; instead, it rained. On the third night of our trip I fell asleep as my mother kept driving. I felt her tap me on the shoulder hours later, telling me that we had crossed our last bridge and we had just over a day left to arrive. She told me we were going through the wetlands. I looked out of the window to see nothing but darkness. Eventually, my eyes adjusted and saw the night sky. The empty horizon surrounded us completely, and as large puddles of water reflected the glittering sky, for a moment I felt that we were travelling through a field of stars.
There were no revelations or epiphanies, there couldn’t have been, as I had forgotten myself completely. I was just glad to have been there at that moment, looking into the lights.
