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Have you ever seen Hearts of Darkness, about the filming of Apocalypse Now? In it, one of the actors talks about the experience of filming, and how deeply life-altering it was for all of them. Obviously this is a very extreme and prolonged example of the kind of experience we’re talking about, but back when I saw it, it was the first time that I’d ever heard someone talk about this kind of emotional upheaval outside of a therapeutic context. It opened my eyes to what is possible when people come together and, for a short period of time, agree to live in a reality that is completely saturated with something outside of their daily lives.

– From here.

That comes from a piece about San Diego Comic-Con, which officially opens tonight. It doesn’t directly connect the making of Apocalypse Now with the mindset of SDCC in terms of “the horror… the horror,” but that’s a connection that I admit to tenuously making in the past. Every single SDCC I’ve covered as a journalist has had that kind of weird disassociation with reality at some point along the way – A sense of “I know this isn’t what life is really like, but it’s all I can remember now, and that’s not a good thing” – that, even when you know it’s happening, is astonishingly unsettling. It’s like comic convention as Stockholm Syndrome or something.

When people ask me whether or not I miss going to San Diego, that always comes to mind. I think I do… but is that really me thinking it…?

When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I’d deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that’s far more prevalent.

New York makes it easy to forget that there are millions of people with hundreds of interests—NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land—for whom a tiny constellation of concrete boroughs that are frozen for half the year is not adequate. New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a 10-by-10 room overlooking garbage cans either unaffordable or unappealing, or both. New York makes it easy to forget that the vast majority of people in the world don’t read Gawker, The Awl, the Observer, the New Yorker or even the New York Times, and that that doesn’t necessarily make those people uninformed.

From Cord Jefferson’s piece, here.

This resonates with me, even though I’ve never lived in New York (and suspect, now, that I wouldn’t enjoy doing so; Portland does that to you, as does age). I feel like we left San Francisco for similar reasons, even if we didn’t know it at the time.

But comic book fans need to feel perpetually beleaguered and disenfranchised, marginalized by phantom elites who want to confiscate their hard-won pleasures. And this resentment — which I have a feeling I’m provoking more of here — finds its way into the stories themselves, expressed either as glowering self-pity or bullying machismo. There are exceptions: Mark Ruffalo’s soulful Hulk (though not Eric Bana’s or Edward Norton’s); most of the X-Men. But even that crew of mutant misfits turned protectors of humanity exists in a circumscribed imaginative space.

That’s from the New York Times’ discussion between movie critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis about superhero movies and comic book culture. There’s lots of sweeping statements in there, but this one stuck with me as being close to the truth.