Dispensing with delusion...

I watched an amazing movie tonight, suggested to me by one of my friends. It is called Lars and the Real Girl and tells the story of a man who has a delusional relationship with a doll. Instead of rejecting him and telling him he is wrong and that he needs to change, the small town where he lives embraces him and his "girlfriend". It's a pretty awkward movie to watch in the beginning because it is so different. I found I couldn't even sit right on the couch, but as it goes on, it shines a light on the underlying flow of humanity that ties us all together. By the end, you can't help but love the characters, animate and inanimate.

All of us have delusions. It's funny because how many people have relationships with other human beings that aren't truly as they perceive them? How many times is a person seen as something that he is not simply because of where he stands? How many people have views of themselves that aren't supported in fact? I'd say pretty much everyone has fit into one of these situations at one time or another.

In my book, Eastern Wisdom, the author refers to sociologist George Herbert Meade's idea of "the internalized other". We have a kind of interior picture, a vague sense of who we are, and of what the reaction of other people to us says about who we are. That reaction is invariably communicated to us through what other people say and think, but soon we learn to maintain the commentary on our own, and each thought or observation is then compared to the idea we have formed. Therefore, this image becomes interiorized and in any given situation we must either rationalize why a certain behavior is consistent with that image, or force ourselves to change that behavior, or fail to change it and feel guilty for failing.

When it comes to our outward appearance, we know it is unwise to compare ourselves to others, for instance supermodels, but what about our inward appearance? We compare that everyday to an image that is essentially a delusion we have created of our own thoughts, and what we think are other people's thoughts about us. The character in this movie, however, did not take into account how others viewed him. Perhaps he is not the one with the bigger problem.


More from the Day of the Dead. Death might just be our greatest delusion.