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…?