The most panic I’ve felt in recent memory came while watching the second ‘Incredibles’ movie, which I don’t have an explanation for (the panic), but I do have observations on the movie, and also the movie I saw at the my university’s theater, ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ which is an entirely different kind of movie that has not been marketed as strongly as the second ‘Incredibles.’ The former was very slickly animated and relied on the ‘parallel storylines converging’ thing that a lot of modern superhero or action/adventure movies seem to get into, wherein the father and mother, in a gender-role bending way, deal with the difficulties of saving the world (either the literal or the local, filial) the ultimate realization being, shocker, that they actually need or deserve each-other, that each of them has different skills (except of course the polymorphic Jack-Jack: fantasy or potential embodied) that can be complemented/complimented. And the audience’s own excitement, youth, and alternativeness is embodied in Voyd, who we get to watch watching the movie’s events. There is even a shout-out with a geriatric superhero. It’s not their fault for having a bimodal target demographic—also am I the only one who likes the half-lisp thing Elastigirl does because now I’m feeling weird about saying it and you can unread it now.

This is not why I panicked before watching this movie (which is prefaced by a heart-prodding short animated film, which I read a glowing article concerning before seeing, whatever that means), the reason for said panic probably being that occasional realization we have of lost time and opportunity (analogous to the one time in a thousand or so when you tell yourself ‘I will die someday’ and you believe yourself and feel impending death: this should make us very concerned about decision-making and language). I experienced a very boring panic before the film, is the short of it, and soon enough into watching the picture it started to go away—as in saying something too many times, any linguistic explanation or underpinning for the panic bled its potency. I don’t know if this is important to even discuss, the magnitude of the momentary and seemingly idiopathic panic being its only surprising or unusual feature, inducing physical effects associated with severe panic like sweating, the feeling of being squeezed, and very sharp vision.

Cesare from ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ is this guy whose aesthetic then was probably interpreted way different than it is now viz. androgynously malnourished and attractive to the art-school or MFA type. Do the hollows of one’s face contain magnitudes? A: probably! Otherwise the movie was more engaging than I thought it would be, the only allusion I’ve ever really picked up to it before seeing it being this one Portlandia skit where whoever watches the film is doomed to recommend that other people watch it until some recommendee watches it and is curses themselves, this clearly being a riff on the very real phenomena of the film’s overblown notoriety because it is perceived as seminal or otherwise important and ‘auteur,’ its smartness or aesthetic vision ideally buttressing the watcher’s own (or, perhaps doing the opposite with the proliferation of this Portlandia skit, although Portlandia is definitely passé now). I’m not actually allowed to say if I liked the movie, on review. Nevermind. The film attendant melted a frame with the projector lamp, which a friend told me was because no one knows how to really work the 16mm projector, which is seldom used, and which contains asbestos. I did not feel appreciably smarter for having watched the movie, but I do feel bad for the projection tech, who was probably laughed at, or inhaled asbestos. Get tested for mesothelioma. Imagine Elastigirl saying ‘mesothelioma.’ But the ticket taker did let me in for two bucks less than standard and hopefully this discount implied I was cute and/or appeared strapped for cash.