Growing up, my favorite horror movie trilogy was Scream. There’s something beautiful about 90′s clothing, bad special effects, and Neve Campbell that I cannot resist. Till this day, I still watch Scream 1,2, & 3 when I’m bed ridden by illness.
In the opening of Scream 3, a movie theatre audience is beginning to watch a 3D horror film. A mass of 3D glasses and popcorn buckets fill the screen as a masked killer takes his seat and plots out his next move. As the scene progresses the inevitable takes place. The killer finds the perfect time to stab his victim repeatedly as she lets out a blood-curdling scream. Her fellow moviegoers watch on in complete amazement as the woman is horribly slain before their very glasses-wearing eyes. Does someone stop him? Is the killer wrestled to the ground, disarmed and then arrested? No, the audience simply believes that this all apart of the three-dimensional effects and continues to enjoy their movie with the crunch of popcorn and slurp of soft drinks.
...because 3D animation was brought into the theatre to enhance the viewer’s experience. To better it. To unflatten it.
In Nick Sousanis’ dissertation Unflattening, the subject of flatness is presented as a negative or lesser concept and/or state of being. Throughout the text, a reader may be swayed to loathe flatness, to look down upon it and swear allegiance to an elevated existence, but one must be careful. Just like that of the innocent moviegoers, the reader may open themselves up to harm by losing interaction with the tangible or the established.
Yes, unflattening one’s life, work, behavior, and way of thinking can be beneficial, but not to the extent that flatlessness becomes the only reality they acknowledge.
