The movie part of the brain

This year's Oscar night made graphic improvements that I appreciate. Additionally, there was no effort to insult half of the viewing audience with Lefty hate comments. Surprisingly, the presence of the French film crew for The Artist resulted in the first historic Oscar record of someone saying 'I love America.'

That is not what I want to comment on. There were many graphic  interludes with comments on screen by celebrity actors discussing the privileged, brilliant and socially meaningful importance of film. I disagree.

I think that films and novels actually stimulate a part of the brain that is associated with pornography.

It is part of the brain that is an entertainment source, but has no connection to reality. That is why I compare it to pornography which is always fresh and new and stimulating and a person who observes a great deal of pornography will not be able to use the experience to seduce a real person.

I have one example of the detachment of film experience from reality. In the 1980s when I was protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor being so close to the ocean and on top of a seismic fault I personally saw many protesters taken behind the prison-bound bus and beaten on the head with batons by the California Highway Patrol.

This matched exactly the police treatment of protesters in the Salt March in the movie Gandhi. I handed out fliers outside of the Gandhi movie describing the identical situation to the offensive footage in the movie. Out of hundreds of people who talked to me, not one understood that reality in California was identical to the footage they found so offensive in the movie.

I would venture to guess the same would be true of people coming out of a current Holocaust film.  Not one would connect their film experience to the fanatic six year-long rantings of Ahmadinejad in the daily press.

Even thinking back to the hundreds of novels I read, I must confess that I doubt anyone of them has prepared me to deal with reality. That includes The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Brothers Karamazov etc.

I repeat.... The part of the brain that enjoys entertainment is not connected to the rest of the important brain functions.  Hollywood films are entertainment and nothing more.