Voyeurism

I like to watch.

Okay, don't go Shirley MacLaine to my Peter Sellers, here - it's not a sexual thing.

I've lived in and around San Francisco twice in my life; once in the late '80s, and now. When you make your way through a metropolitan area on a frequent basis, you can't help but be immersed in large groups of people, and in my case, a rich mix of ethnicities and cultural differences.

The spectrum on which different people communicate is enormous: language, manners, habits, interests, hygiene, all the way down to what they choose to eat everyday. When you throw in the various chemical balances of individual minds, sometimes I wonder how people are able to wade through this flotsom to a place where they can understand each other at all.

A lot of times they don't. But I've learned a little trick, or perhaps, found an invisible "window" through the barriers that people carry around with them, which opens during key moments. All you need to do is watch.

I don't know when I first recognized this. It might have been something I noticed in a documentary produced by Francis Ford Coppola, called Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance).

Granted, when I saw it I was in the middle of my own personal Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during a more experimental period of my youth. And I know that there are a lot of people who would just as soon throw themselves in front of a bus, rather than have to sit through 90 minutes of wordless imagery, accompanied by the musical stylings of Philip Glass. Maybe it was different for me because I'm wired to be highly responsive to visual stimuli, and one of my skills (or one of the compulsions related to my "disability"), is being very sensitive to seeing patterns, and trying to make connections.

At first, one segment of the film makes you feel like you're just watching endless shots of crowds. People on the street, people in the subway, walking, eating, smoking. But cinema, like writing, has certain tools used to convey meaning. One of them is speed - how fast or slow you decide to run the camera. The purpose is to take you out of the mundane way you are used to seeing the world, and look at it on another level of reality, or consciousness.

We see peoples faces all day long. But how long do you look at them? A second? A fraction of a second? Here, during specially chosen points, Godfrey Reggio (Director) and Ron Fricke (Cinematographer) slow the frame rate way down, and force your focus on certain people. Like I said, there's no narrator here, you have to just look. Watching an expression slowly develop across someone's face magnifies its meaning tenfold, and your ability to "read" thoughts and emotions become much easier. Some faces are expressionless, like masks of misery, and all sense of their humanity pours out solely from their eyes.

Anyway, here's the trick of experiencing this in real life, and you don't have to drop any Windowpane to see it.

Now you can't just stare at people, because it freaks them out. But you can watch people when they're watching other people. There are moments in public when strangers will drop their facades for a few seconds, enabling you to see a glimpse of their true selves. This usually occurs when something slightly out of the ordinary happens. When the public "peace" is disturbed.

If you're on a bus or a train, and one person has a baby, it's pretty likely that every adult around is going to stare at it. This is especially true during peak commuting hours, when most of the passengers are adults going to work. It doesn't have to be an especially cute baby. It will be the same when some child is restless or noisy, although the reactions may be drastically different.

When someone looks at a baby, and the baby returns their stare, it usually forces them to respond in some way. Children are so open, that adults aren't as likely to just look away, and it's too uncomfortable to keep staring. This is great to see when it's some stiff-looking guy in a business suit, and he lets his guard down momentarily to smile in a really friendly way, or even forget where he is long enough to make faces.

People are also fascinated to watch mothers try and soothe their fussy children. What is she going to do? Will she be angry about her child making a scene? Will she be irritatingly unconcerned about everyone else's peace? During one of these disruptions, you can easily pick out the people in the crowd who've never had any children, or who clearly don't like them. You'll either see unedited expressions of displeasure (even hatred), or for those who do understand, compassion.

I work at a hotel in the Financial District of San Francisco, so I pass by homeless people daily. One morning at about 6am, I walked by an alcove created between an ATM machine and the entrance to a Jamba Juice store, where two homeless men were groggily climbing out of their sleeping bags. In the two seconds as I passed, I caught a male employee in a Jamba Juice t-shirt (not realizing he would be heard) yelling "Aaaaaa FUCK OFF!" at them through the locked doors.

Looking out one of my hotel meeting-room windows, I've seen homeless people across the street asking passersby for change, and secretly witnessed the reactions of at least 30 people. Most of them looked away uncomfortably, or pretended to already be looking at something else (like the traffic light, wow!). The most extreme reactions were from people who were distracted and didn't see him until they were right on top of him. Those people were unwittingly the most transparent, in that they didn't have time to prepare a response.

Doing this is a real lesson in putting yourself in another person's place. How would I see the world if nearly every person who passed by gave me either vague or deliberate negativity in response?

Again, it's not necessary that you be hidden. You could be walking down the street amongst a group of people, and instead of staring at the person who's screaming obscenities into the air, you look at the ones closest to you. They'll be completely clueless that they're the subject of your interest.

Sometimes what I see in people is very disturbing and makes me angry, especially when it involves people whom on the surface look worthy of respect. Most telling is seeing people's reactions to those with visible disabilities. You know exactly who you're dealing with, when you see someone reacting to a person with Downs Syndrome, extreme obesity, or terrible disfigurement.

Children will obviously do this too, although the experience is so new to them that it is usually either a response of pure wonder, or terror. I know I have to be careful sometimes with my kids, who do not yet have the capacity to self-edit, and may exclaim something embarrassingly honest, almost always within earshot of the person they are talking about.

I want to be clear that I'm not making light of any of these people, and I don't count myself immune either. But in a way, doing it helps me take one step back, and maybe makes me think about what motivates my own responses.

Try it sometime and let me know what you think.

By the way, the part I mentioned in Koyaanisqatsi is only one element of the film. It addresses a lot of interesting concepts about people and nature. If you've never seen it, you can find a really insightful review here.