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Okay, I didn't know where to post this, but here it goes... I read this article yesterday on Paxil and the effects it has with the brain's chemistry. The writer at one point states he was no longer able to watch movies or read books because they couldn't pull him in emotionally. He was so removed due to the drug that he just didn't care enough. However, this was very liberating for him at social gatherings when mixed with alcohol, which was his ultimate goal.

Alright, so here's my question: Can one still be a director, yet totally be removed from his or her emotions? Would you still be the same person? Is it possible you could even be a better director? It's all hypothetical, and maybe even a little naive, but I can't help but wonder. I mean, if you're no longer pulled in, can a film still work? And I wonder, are most directors generally sensitive? I know there's a spectrum in everything, but if you're a distant and cold person, can your filmmaking still be as effective? Am I making sense here?

There's another slate article I read about wearing ear plugs, and by drowning out all the sound, the ability to concentrate is obviously very heightened. Imagine if the analogy was parallel, could one do the same with directing if their emotions were just as removed? To be as deaf to caring for a particularly engaging performance, scene, or sequence, and still make a good movie? I'm sure there are many directors out there who have and continue to take drugs while making films, but I mean the extreme here: to function with zero attachment to any emotions whatsoever, and still make a good/great movie...

I guess it begs the question, what is a good/great movie? Does it have to be emotional? Does emotional mean manipulative? I don't know, but this is really on my mind here... Help me ponder this out, if you will... What are your thoughts? Anyone?

Interesting article considering I just started Zoloft five days ago for anxiety similiar to the author's, which is an SSRI like Paxil. I'll be curious to see if my reaction is anything the author's and whether or not it'll affect the way I watch and react to movies.

As to your question, I'm not quite sure it's possible to entirely remove your emotions even under a medication like Paxil, but then again I'm not doctor. Of course there are directors who are accused of being cold and distant people, such as Stanely Kubrick, but I think people miss the genuine emotional warmth of the last scene of Paths of Glory or the scene where Barry Lyndon's son lay dying, to name a couple in Kubrick's oeuvre. So I don't think it's possible for any human to be entirely cold and emotionless short of a lobotomy or being heavily medicated because, after all, even a cold hearted bastard like Hitler loved dogs.

well Hitler was also a meth head too. I have a question, if i feel that i have anxiety can i just go to my doctor and tell him my symptoms and then he'll write a perscription for me? I feel that i have both anxiety disorder and ADD but i've always felt weird about going to a professional and telling him about it.

No a director can't be totally removed from their emotions, even though that's one broad term-- they may be able to make themselves insensitive to obvious sentimentality or less concerned with the basic beatings life gives out, but to be a director, or an any artist for that matter, is to connect with the people or to yourself first and then the people, on which there is some common ground. There always seems to be this push and pull between pure feeling and intellectual filmmaking. I prefer a balance but would much rather be on that side of pure feeling than completely intellectual, which would be hell in my opinion.

An interesting hypothetical question but I don't think you can be completely adrift emotionally and still be capable of making films. Even so called "cold" directors like Kubrick and Cronenberg don't come near this point.

Before I start rambling about Paxil, I think we need to clarify what we're asking a little bit. Are we speculating as to whether or not a person with deadened emotions could direct a film, or whether a person with deadened emotions could direct a good film? A great many films are churned out every year that seem so formulaic I imagine no significant amount of emotion is really required to make them. All you need is a chart that tells you when each event is supposed to happen and what it's supposed to consist of. But whether or not such an individual could make a personal, original film with some sort of unique value is a harder question that I don't think has a clear answer. I doubt such a person could direct a good dramatic film. I suspect that without emotion they would have little or no regard for "drama" in anything but the most technical sense, and in any case I find it unlikely (I can't say impossible) that such a person would have an adequate method for gauging the sort of drama that would be compelling to an emotional audience.

On the other hand, there's a whole world of non-narrative, non-dramatic film that someone devoid of emotion, at least in the day-to-day sense of it, might be more equipped to take part in. Perhaps if you lose interest in people and stories you will gain interest in shapes, colors, patterns, rhythms, etc. I find the possibility intriguing. I'm imagining something like an experimental film designed for meditation, solely for the purposes of sharpening the mind. I think that's a potentially workable concept.

Greathinker wrote:I prefer a balance but would much rather be on that side of pure feeling than completely intellectual, which would be hell in my opinion.

Hm, that's a nicely ironic stance to take for someone of your moniker. Anyway, I think it depends on the goals of your film and the subject matter. When trying to evaluate a statement like this, I find myself asking what feelings, and what the intellectual approach would be - something like an essay film, or something more like the meditation I described previously.

Moreover, I have doubts about clear distinctions between "feelings" and "intellect." Many of the things we commonly describe as "feelings" would probably be more accurately described as drives or impulses (or from an evolutionary standpoint, instincts) and there is probably a great deal of emotional motivation in the subjects we choose to devote our intellect to. This discussion is a good example.

The specific issue of Paxil is somewhat personal for me because I was actually put on Paxil in high school. I agreed to it because I was having panic attacks in school on a fairly regular basis and I was rather depressed, even if in retrospect I can admit I was overacting in the way teenagers do. At the time it wasn't nearly as dramatic as the Slate article. I didn't notice any personality changes nor was my eventual withdrawal accompanied by any noticeable side effects (certainly not the "zaps"). Now that there's some distance between me and those years, I can look back and say that Paxil appeared to do four things for (or to) me:

1. My panic attacks stopped almost immediately after the drug took effect. That was definitely a plus.
2. My libido went chronically dormant -- obviously not a sort of thing that usually happens to a teenaged male.
3. Possibly related to #2, I developed a rather severe aversion to touching other people's skin. Though neither is as bad as they once were, this and the previous "problem" continue to today, several years after ending the medication.
4. Perhaps most significant to this discussion: I stopped writing poetry. Up until the time I took the drug, I was writing poetry constantly, often several poems a day. Paxil eventually put an end to that, though at the time I didn't realize there could be a connection because it was a gradual decrease in writing.

Of course, I can't assume that the chronological association implies that one caused the other. Lots of depressed teenagers write loads of very bad poetry, and my poetry was only slightly less bad (probably because I actually read). It's just as likely I simply outgrew it. Paxil didn't seem to deaden any other creative impulses, nor did it really have much of an effect on my emotions. Still, now that I've made some short films of my own, it's difficult to say whether I could have directed while on Paxil. If I had never taken it, the panic attacks, if I still suffered from them, definitely would preclude any ability to control a film set. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to take the chance that any part of my brain responsible for devising the film was not going to be available for seeing it through its execution.

Roger_Thronhill wrote:I'm not quite sure it's possible to entirely remove your emotions even under a medication like Paxil, but then again I'm not a doctor.

At this stage I don't think you'd find a lot of agreement about this among doctors, either. Despite the good that Paxil did for my panic attacks, part of the reason I currently oppose the use of SSRIs in all but extreme cases is that I think we simply don't yet know enough about the mechanics of the brain to go altering the chemistry with such potent materials without a very good reason. A quick look at the success rate for any of these drugs, the long list of their possible and unpredictable side effects, or a comparison of my experience and the one recorded in the Slate article shows that different brains can often have wildly different reactions to the same amount of the same substance. Eventually we'll get to a point where the use of these drugs will be reasonable and preferable, but at present I'm not convinced the potential damage is worth risking in any but the most dire cases.

Kirkinson wrote:Moreover, I have doubts about clear distinctions between "feelings" and "intellect." Many of the things we commonly describe as "feelings" would probably be more accurately described as drives or impulses (or from an evolutionary standpoint, instincts) and there is probably a great deal of emotional motivation in the subjects we choose to devote our intellect to.

I tried not to entangle myself in definitions. Let me clarify that when someone says emotion maybe they do only mean anger, joy, sadness, etc. but I understand it as being anything that you feel-- even if that is impulse, and I believe that's the keyword here. After all, your brain tells you to feel something like sadness just as much as it tells you to run for your life when someone is trying to kill you-- the instinct of survival is still manifested in the emotional response of fear.

On intellect vs. feeling, I compare it to painting a picture of your family as in when you were in grade school. I'd rather see a kid put down what he felt, his impulses, and not what his intellect was telling him-- that people look sort of like stick figures, the sun is round, and defining characteristics are things like what baseball team his dad likes shown in the form of a cap. I see intellect as coming about from our need to make sense of the world, to put things into categories that we can understand-- even when those categories don't actually exist. For that reason intellect both limits feeling and extracts it by making us more sensitive to the world we live in. But intellect by itself I find deceptive because it can only point in the direction of feeling. But enough of this categorizing, maybe you can see why I don't like definitions.

Kirkinson wrote:On the other hand, there's a whole world of non-narrative, non-dramatic film that someone devoid of emotion, at least in the day-to-day sense of it, might be more equipped to take part in. Perhaps if you lose interest in people and stories you will gain interest in shapes, colors, patterns, rhythms, etc. I find the possibility intriguing. I'm imagining something like an experimental film designed for meditation, solely for the purposes of sharpening the mind. I think that's a potentially workable concept.

What makes me suspicious of this is that shapes, colors, patterns, and rhythms are so fundamental in creating an emotional response-- but perhaps like you said, in the day-to-day sense. No one wants to deal with people all the time.

I don't want to deviate from the discussion anymore (what we're we talking about?) I think stories like Kirkinson's are more relevant because emotion simply can't exist in a vacuum.

Greathinker wrote:I tried not to entangle myself in definitions. Let me clarify that when someone says emotion maybe they do only mean anger, joy, sadness, etc. but I understand it as being anything that you feel-- even if that is impulse, and I believe that's the keyword here.

This is an excellent and important point. Looks like I was thinking too hard about it.

Greathinker wrote:I see intellect as coming about from our need to make sense of the world, to put things into categories that we can understand-- even when those categories don't actually exist. For that reason intellect both limits feeling and extracts it by making us more sensitive to the world we live in. But intellect by itself I find deceptive because it can only point in the direction of feeling. But enough of this categorizing, maybe you can see why I don't like definitions.

I apologize, but I can't resist. My problem with this is that my intellect can also tell me, "This rock may feel solid and impenetrable, but it's actually made up of atoms that are themselves made up mostly of empty space, and all of them are in constant, unpredictable motion. This rock is no more permanent than the invisible radio wave that probably just zipped over my head somewhere." What I'm getting at is that I think I'd be equally displeased be on the side of pure feeling or pure intellect -- pure feeling would prevent me from having a thought like the one I expressed above, and pure intellect would prevent that thought from exciting me.