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Twisted Perspectives

When I was growing up (and this still happens today), I was always told to "put myself in somebody else's shoes." While I've progressed past the elementary school vocabulary and logic that questions how and more importantly why somebody would let me and my socks slip into their Reebok tennis shoes, it's certainly still challenging at times to view the world through someone else's eyes and to walk a day in their life.

But movies and paintings and pictures and novels and other pieces of art let us do just that, albeit based on the author's decisions rather than our own (maybe Choose Your Own Adventure books kind of count). We're knocked right into the words (or strokes?) of the artist, transformed into the characters or narrators they wish us to be. While it might be hard to imagine what these strange characters might experience, vivid imagery and talented writing help to approximate these experiences, sometimes allowing us to sympathize with characters we've never met in person.

While your average fanfiction or fourth-grade creative writing assignment reads with the same sense of artificiality that Splenda adds to cheap hotel coffee, great writing makes us doubt our own viewpoints. Is this character truly evil if I'm beginning to sympathize? Or does it make me evil? Perspective not only distorts our interpretation of these works but also the mood with which we might interpret them.

The Florida Project uses light imagery and playful perspectives to mask us from the grim reality of the children's lives, making the camera an unreliable narrator to us. Similarly, the movie cliché of "driving off into the sunset" towards the end of Little Miss Sunshine paints the ending as a "happily ever after" delight, even though deeper inspection reveals the truly tragic nature of the movie. In Lolita, Nabokov's skillful twisting of reality makes us almost sympathize with Humbert Humbert's at times, even though we all know that he is a terrible character. 


While it's hard sometimes to walk in someone else's shoes, it can also be too easy to fall into someone's footprints. Authors and directors deceive our eyes and our minds, all too often manipulating our prototypes and assumptions of the world, raising an essential question: are we reliable narrators for our own minds and memories?

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