Inessentials

For the last three months or so, I’ve been dealing with an eye condition that makes my right eye blurry, very sensitive to light, and occasionally painful. The treatment for it includes (temporarily) making the eye even blurrier and keeping it dilated all the time. It’s a condition I have had before, and one that I will probably have periodically for the rest of my life. The treatment takes months, but it quickly becomes such a regular part of my routine that I hardly think about it. Because one of eyes is always dilated and out of focus, it changes the way that I interact with technology, so I thought it might be worth sharing some of these altered interactions.

I wrote all this for two reasons. One, I wanted to chronicle (for my own benefit) what it is like when I have this problem, so I can deal with it better in the future. Second, I thought it would be helpful to point out the ways in which I experienced technology differently because of a relatively small difference in my physical condition from most of the technology-consuming public. As ever, I am trying to reflect on who I am and how I engage with the world around me, although this time I’m less interested in the content of what I view than the physical conditions in which I view it. So bear with this unusual (and probably boring) post.

Tom Cruise in shades, from Top Gun

There are basically three things I have changed to deal with the problematic eye.

1. I avoid bright lights. This doesn’t just mean not going outdoors when it’s sunny. It also means keeping the lights off at home, even at night (where the glow of the TV is often the only light source).
2. When I am near bright lights, I wear sunglasses. This includes almost situations when I am outside the house.
3. I wear an eyepatch. Yes, an eyepatch. Even in low light settings, it can be a strain on my eye to be near any light (even the backlit glow of a computer screen). Add to this the fact that my problem eye is always out of focus, and suddenly using an eyepatch can be a very helpful way of seeing things more clearly.

These three changes have an impact on how I engage with various technologies that depend heavily on eyesight. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t use my iPod for watching video, so I’ll leave those aside.

1. Movie theaters. I simply refused to stop seeing films at the theater because of my eye. So I typically wear sunglass through the previews, when the house lights are still on, then switch to the eyepatch for some or all of the main show. Being in a dark theater isn’t too bad, depending on the brightness of the film. Since I’m especially sensitive to light, I’m particularly aware of the difference in how films are lit. Big Hollywood studio films like Knight & Day, for instance, are considerably brighter than moody indie flicks like Winter’s Bone. Not only is there a difference in lighting techniques (not least Winter Bone‘s greater reliance on natural light), but these choices result in how much light comes through the film strips themselves and therefore how much light reflects off the large white screen and back toward the viewer. Winter’s Bone is more consistent in its color palette and brightness (from outdoor to indoor and from daytime to nighttime scenes) than Knight & Day is from car chase to warehouse gun fight. Other than noticing this, my unequal eyes don’t make a great deal of difference when watching a movie at a theater. It is a bit harder to focus when not wearing the eyepatch, and I do have less depth perception when wearing the eyepatch. But, surprisingly, if I am sitting from the middle to back of the theater, having zero depth perception hasn’t made much of a difference in how I see the film. The closer I move to the front of the theater, though, the greater an impact it makes. In watching Inception, I sat near the front of a crowded theater, and I was losing too much by wearing the eyepatch. It may be that Inception keeps its background in focus more often, or I was more often drawn to the details of the dreamscapes, and thus I need both eyes to take in what is happening, but I suspect that most of the problem stemmed from sitting closer to the screen, where it is more difficult to take in the whole screen with one good eye.
2. 

   How 3-D glasses work from 3dglassesonline.com

   3-D movies. 3-D is completely lost on me because I can’t focus with one eye. So among the many reasons to be skeptical of this “new” technology is that it is (like many “advances”) going to leave some people unable to participate. Since my eye started acting up, I saw only one 3-D film in theaters, How to Train Your Dragon. Watching with only one eye focusing through the 3-D glasses and one not focusing very well is very comparable to watching without the 3-D glasses (based on my mid-movie experiment). Watching with an eyepatch under the 3-D glasses makes 3-D even flatter than traditional film. (I think this is often true of 3-D even with both eyes working, but it is always true if you’ve got one eye covered.) My wife hates 3-D because it gives her headaches to wear the 3-D glasses over her regular glasses, and I avoid it because it so rarely improves a film. (I gave Avatar a “B” when I saw it in theaters, but I suspect it would be no more than a “C” if viewed on other formats. But that is the exception.) (And, yes, I do believe it is legitimate to grade films differently based on the medium employed.) But trying to watch 3-D with one good eye reminds me of how technologies affect people differently depending on their bodily circumstances.

3. Live theater. Going to watch a play is nearly impossible, since I can’t see the stage from the cheap seats (the only ones I can afford). Distance viewing is very difficult, and it is extremely frustrating to be unable to see what is happening on stage. Even if I can handle the lights, which is already a strain, the frustration over watching blurry shapes move around leads me to avoid traditionally staged plays. There is a small black-box theater that I love, that perhaps I could handle because I would be close enough to the action, but I haven’t tried it.


Daryl Hannah, sporting the eyepatch

4. Computers. I keep my laptop’s brightness as low as it can go while still being brighter than the ambient lighting. And, frankly, my MacBook just doesn’t get dim enough for my comfort. I still usually wear an eyepatch, since looking at a computer screen through dark sunglasses is nearly impossible. That increases the strain on my good eye, so I need to relax it more often (close it or focus on something far away for a short while). The one thing that is really noticeable, though, is how difficult it is to watch embedded videos. Nearly all video websites, from Hulu to Youtube to almost every blog on the planet, has a white (or similarly light-colored) background. Videos, however, are typically dark, or at least darker than their surroundings when viewed on a computer. Watching streaming videos on-line is thus one of the most difficult things for me to do. I can lose a lot of quality by taking (some) videos to full-screen; otherwise, it’s a game of trade-offs between making the video bright enough to see and making the surrounding page too bright.
5. Television. My very accommodating wife lets me keep the lights off in our house when we are watching TV, and (with that adjustment) television is the easiest technology for me to engage in right now (at least for the size of our television and its distance away). Apart from the difficulty I have reading subtitles with my poor distance vision right now, television is the most accessible technology for me, in part because it is the most easily adaptable. I have control over the ambient lighting (unlike a movie theater or the area surrounding an on-line video), I have control over the brightness of the television set (unlike a movie theater), and I have control over starting and stopping it so as to give me eyes a rest.
6. Books. Books are perhaps the most difficult to parse. The eyepatch makes it very possible to read a book, but focusing at a reasonable distance puts a large strain on my one good eye, so it is difficult to read for any length of time. This is especially true as day turns to night, and my eye has been worked hard all day. So while reading is quite easy to do (an advantage over almost every other viewable technology), it is very difficult to read for long periods of time. Speaking of which, back to the dissertation…

The dilated eye

My wife and I snuck off to see the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the local theater before they disappeared into the void on Friday. It was an immensely pleasant experience, in part because these short films are clearly labors of love, crafted by people who may be taking their first shot at a film with (modestly) wide distribution, so it is easy to feel sympathy for the creators. And, heck, even if you don’t like a film it’s only going to last about 8 minutes, right?

Catch a run-down of all the short films here: http://www.shortshd.com/theoscarshorts/ (They are also all available to purchase from iTunes.) Here are four highlights from the ten or so shorts that we watched.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty

Although this film had more apparent flaws than many others of the night, it easily packed the most laughs over its six minutes. Watch the whole film below.

Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Wallace and Gromit are two of the most beloved characters in film history, and any new episode in their on-going adventures is to be treasured. Nick Park has refined the stop-motion animation style into its definitive form over the last two decades. This adventure is nearly identical in plot to the earlier ones (Wallace falls for a girl, hijinx ensue, Gromit saves the day), but that’s not why we watch. We watch because we are cinephiles or Anglophiles, punsters or funsters, have kids or feel like kids. These films are so sweet-natured, even in their frightening sequences, that they infect you with good cheer. (And a craving for stinky cheeses.) A Matter of Loaf and Death is more franticly pace than earlier installments, with faster cuts (which means more set-ups for Park and friends). I can’t wait for the next one.

Logorama

The winner for best animated short at the Academy Awards was Logorama, which was perhaps an even more pointed political statement than giving a documentary award to Michael Moore. This was easily the most daring and conceptually innovative film of the night. Constructed almost completely out of brand logos, the film reads like a big postmodern joke at the way in which American culture is saturated with corporate branding. When the film’s story get’s going, it reveals a similarly postmodern mash-up of Tarantino dialogue, Michael Bay action sequences, and CNN round-the-clock “news” coverage. However, like many such attempts to skewer advertising, it must do so by becoming an advertisement. When watching the film, you look for all the fleeting jokes (that’s a GOP elephant! that mountain says The North Face!), so you end up searching out the very corporate brands that the film presumably wants you to dismiss. As one-time viewing, perhaps we can see this as an important step: we raise our consciousness of how steeped in branding our culture is, so that we can defiantly reject it. But in doing so, we give an audience to the very images we are supposed to reject.

Watch the first 45 seconds below.

La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper)

My favorite film of the night was also took a strong ethical stand, but more effectively than Logorama, partly because it did so only casually. To avoid the spoilers that follow, watch all of La Dama y la Muerte before continuing. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

The frantic chase sequences recalls Looney Tunes, but does so in an innovative, visually daring style unto itself. It begins in a realist mode (the bedroom), but quickly devolves into a hyper-real locale (the hospital room), and continues in an exaggeration of the classic Chuck Jones style (the morgue). So it’s fun to watch. But it’s also a surprisingly touching story of a woman who is prepared to die but is forced back to life by a doctor. (“Famous Doctor Saves Another Miserable Life” reads the magazine cover on the wall. “I feel like a god.”) More effectively than Million Dollar Baby, it presents a way of understanding how a person might choose to end their life with dignity rather than continue it. Perhaps because of its Spanish origins, the film presents a mythology that combines Catholicism (there is an afterlife where we can see our loved ones), Indo-European folklore (the Grim Reaper), and classical Greek mythology (River Styx, Cerberus) to pose a challenge to medical technology that can prolong life. Perhaps most remarkably (and in direct defiance to Catholicism) it gets a laugh out of suicide, and leaves the viewer accepting that this was perhaps the right choice for the woman.

This points to an overall theme for these assorted animated shorts (and, come to think of it, for this website), which is that pop culture can be revealing in the stories it tells us about who we are and the lives we live. Even eight-minute cartoons can be expressions of attitude or summaries of philosophical thought experiments about how we do think or how we should think about the world we encounter. Euthanasia, the afterlife, how advertising affects our perception of the world, how our experiences shape the stories we tell about the world. Heady stuff for simple cartoons.