I just finished a half-hour hike around the neighborhood, my exercise for the day, and it was a good one, thanks to the fog. The whole town is choked in the metaphorical pea soup resulting from a warm, heavy rain following a snow. As long as you don't have to drive in it, fog is terrific. It always gets me feeling moody and introspective, but paradoxically energetic. It's a time to think up murders and conspiracies and apocalypses, to picture driving to final confrontations with archrivals, to pass bribes to Soviet border guards. And I got to thinking how conditioned we are by the movies.
Sure, people respond in gross ways to the weather: happy if sunny, depressed if drizzly, alert in a heavy storm. Getting such specific associations as Checkpoint Charlie, though, takes some training. When specific responses are widespread, you can suspect mass media are at work. And when the associations don't make immediate sense, you know you're being conditioned.
Take, for example, cigarettes. The tobacco industry owes much of its dramatic success to how spectacular cigarette smoke can look with backlighting, especially in the pre-Technicolor days. Roger Ebert quips in a review of 200 Cigarettes, ?There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.? Because smoking looked cool in the movies, it became cool in real life. People would carefully practice techniques of collecting, exhaling, re-inhaling, and releasing thick, dramatic curls of smoke. Without the visual impact of choreographed smoking, is there any chance teens would be eager, as Bob Newhart puts it, to stick burning leaves in their mouths?
Take organ music. I love Bach, and listen to his organ pieces for themselves, but for my father, it ?just sounds like church music.? (This is no coincidence; our church organist loved Bach, too.) After its dramatic debut as the invisible co-star of Phantom of the Opera, organ music, even relatively light pieces, mean nothing but angst for player and audience. Granted, organs are not delicate instruments, and do not play delicate music, but without Phantom and its imitators, the attachment of dry, intellectual fugues to the passions of the romantic era would be a real stretch.
Take middle-aged bureaucrats. What could be more innocuous than a little, graying man in business jacket and tie? Well, presuming you haven't seen The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Or The Man Who Knew Too Much? Or, saints preserve you, The X-Files?
Think of a few of your own. Ever feel a chill upon hearing a helicopter? Was it Apocalypse Now, or M*A*S*H?