A Lesson From Christian Bale

On Saturdays, my friends and I like to watch movies. Sometimes these movies are incredibly bad, but we love them nonetheless. Last week, we watched Equilibrium, a film about a futuristic society in which the top enforcer (Christian Bale) misses a dose of an emotion-blocking drug and begins to realize that "things are not as they seem." After finishing it, I was struck with the idea of a world without emotion and I thought about the role emotions play in who we are. If we did not have emotions, the decisions we make would be completely different. I can't count how many times I have chosen something based on that "gut feeling." If I couldn't take that emotion into account when making choices,  I have no idea who I would be right now. This ties into Proust's musings about emotions because memories are a large source of feelings. It would be difficult to remember an event or a person without emotion to direct you. Feelings are important tools to being human. In the movie, you can see the difference between the Christian Bale with emotions and the one without. He is a completely different person, and having emotions changed his motive for living. They made him both more selfish and more selfless. Emotions are confusing and contradicting, but they are part of who we are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVDiaYQXBVs