Written by Nate

A couple months ago I asked Coco out to see a movie. We hadn’t been to a theater in forever and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” had just come out. People were flocking to have their hair blown back by a nearly 3000 year-old epic poem. The absurdity was too good to miss. Coco accepted so I bought us tickets.

The movie was showing in “4DX.” Maybe you know what that is. I didn’t. All that IMAX Dolby stuff is blah blah blah to me, so when the tickets came to $58.98 I launched into my typical tirade about prices these days, then didn’t think more about it. We arrived early and climbed into rather snug seats. There was a foot bar, the kind you’d find beneath you on a roller coaster, and a back-lit button on the arm of the chair that said “water off.” We shrugged. Entertainment is so geeky and over-the-top lately we’ve stopped trying to keep up.

We finally caught on during a recruitment ad for the U.S. Navy¹ that played before the movie. As a giant submarine shot up from the waves and breached with a big guns-ready splash, our seats lurched forward and sprayed us in the face.

Uh oh! Who let Nate buy tickets! Coco quietly reached into her bag to retrieve Dramamine.

Full Immersion (and a Bit of Alienation)

4DX, a technology developed by the South Korean company CJ 4DPLEX, promises “full immersion” through the use of practical effects like bucking-broncho-chair and gale-in-your-face and where-is-that-smoke-coming-from? which, according to their website, “feel like part of the story itself” and make movies into “dynamic experiences that audiences don’t just watch they live.”

So for the next two hours and fifty-two minutes we were treated (condemned?) to “live” The Odyssey, via sweaty Arcadians stepping all over us inside a Trojan horse, and a Cyclops’ filthy hand groping us to see if we were his sheep, and spume from the death-whirl Charybdis spitting against our sea-numb cheeks. Wowee.

Now, listen. I’m a reader. Which to many translates as “fun-hater.” Of course I have some denunciations to fling at this unnecessary innovation in cinema. I am here to promote the pleasures of reading. To me, the fictive dream playing out in the mind’s eye of the reader is the height of immersion. When you watch a movie, the story is happening to you; when you read a novel, the story is happening in you.

But upon reflection, not even Homer’s original was averse to some practical effects. When Odysseus washes up on the shore of Phaeacia and becomes a guest of King Alcinious’s court, he finds he has passed into legend. He is told the story of himself by the blind poet Demodicus who sings at the center of a ring of dancers who “stamped the ground with marvelous pulsing steps as Odysseus gazed at their flying, flashing feet, his heart aglow with wonder.”² Odysseus weeps. You get the feeling he hadn’t really lived his own story until he experienced the telling of it, complete with practical effects.

So while it would be easy to dismiss the haunted chair as a gimmick, I must allow that there are other ways of telling stories that are valid. As someone interested in collaboration, I can’t dismiss the immersive group experience of theater, or its child, film. Even writing has its practical effects, doesn’t it?  What’s the purpose behind the onomatopoetic ring of “spume from the death-whirl Charybdis spitting against our sea-numb cheeks” if not to create a primitive foley effect? It’s the goal of any narrative project to erase the boundary between the listener and the story.

OK OK so what’s the problem here? Is there one? 

I suppose what made me uncomfortable were the extremes, the decadence. There was a literalness to it, where every image was translated into something physical to be done to my body so that my mind could turn off. It was a very weird kind of magic that made the spells done by the witches of the Odyssey appear pretty tame. There was a moment when the Cyclops rumbled into his cave and started moving giant boulders around, that I heard ice rattling in the Coke stuffed into the cup holder one seat over. The guy sitting there had popcorn and pizza slopped all over his lap and a kind of yeah man expression on his face. Let’s see Calypso do that.

A Good Time to be an Angry Sea God

Don’t forget, most of what Odysseus undergoes (and the audience with him) is meant to be a punishment. And man oh man was Poseidon pissed. If you don’t remember, what gets Odysseus in so much trouble is using a hot poker to jab out the eye of Poseidon’s son, Polyphemus, who only had one eye to begin with. For that offense Poseidon says: “I’ll give that man his swamping fill of trouble!” In a rage, he “ram[s] the clouds together . . . churn[s] the waves into chaos, whipping all the gales from every quarter. . . launch[es] a colossal wave, terrible, murderous, arching over [Odysseus], pounding down on him . . . ”³ etc.

The chair was the main instrument of all of this rage. And I admit, it was a big part of the thrill, feeling the hand of an angry Bronze Age sea god furiously shaking this modern marvel of a chair. I remember my second grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson, giving me shaking me like that. You could really feel the wrath in it.

Now that I’ve found the practical effects listed on the CJ 4DPLEX website, I realize that Poseidon, too, has updated his operating system. Whereas in before times, he’d had only his trusty pitchfork to do all this swamping and ramming and churning and whipping, now he merely has to thumb through a menu of motion effects like “Roll,” “Sway & Twist,” “Heave,” and “Shaker”; and environmental effects like “Rainstorm,” “Wind,” “Fog,” “Lightning,” and “Bubble.” From these he can conveniently select his vengeance, sit back, and enjoy.

Here I get another weird feeling I can’t quite untangle, an uncanny a collapse of opposites: a divine fate decreed by a god blurred into the impersonal determinism of a machine.

A Timeless Tale for Our Time

The line from the beginning of the Odyssey keeps chiming in my head, where Homer invokes the Muse to “sing for our time too.”⁴

The haunted chair sings for our time of doom scrolling, when Nature is giving us our comeuppance and we somehow experience it as just another moment of spectacle, vivid and threatening and instantly forgotten. The chair sings for our magical age when we are surrounded by objects that are evermore interconnected and intelligent and seemingly pitted against us. The chair, which inflicts its punishments whether we are sitting in it or not, sings for a time when we must constantly prove to ourselves that we exist, by getting the selfie that shows we were there; by having the new thing, whatever it may be, and being seen to have it; by experiencing the big movie of the moment with the biggest, most advanced technology the moment has to offer. Yeah man. 

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1. Interesting pairing for a movie about shipwrecks, castaways, and the horrors of war!
2. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1996), p. 199.
3. Homer, 161-163
4. Homer, 77