In recent decades, as horror has become bloody, grisly, and flamboyant, filmmakers have detached us from emotion; they've turned horror into sawed-limb, campy fun.
In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years.
The experience of the plays should detach us from ourselves in the same way as the encounter with fellow spectators.
Jokes are the soul's analgesic: they defy gravity — which is to say, anything that weighs us down — and they detach us from grief.
Though undeniably gorgeous (Francisco Gózon's cinematography is frequently stunning), the film's images don't quite add up to a satisfying whole: the theatricality of masked tableaus and endless, circular pans detaches us from the story and rebuffs emotion.
We were two ghosts * [but] very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better than ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life".
The paradox that Goethe highlights is that materialism understands itself to be the champion of empiricism, when really it detaches us from the world as we experience it, in the name of objectivity.
It's plain, I think, that film promotes fantasy as a basic form of existence, that it can detach us from reality, and that it may have shifted the pursuit of happiness from a phrase on paper to a kind of imperialism where presidents cannot help but behave like characters from old movies.
Emotions are a vital aspect of almost all human relations; motivating much of our behavior; serving to attach us to, or detach us from, people and places and facilitating and modulating our worldly experiences in profound ways.
A century ago, when psychologists still talked like philosophers, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychology (October 1907) said of humor that "Perhaps its largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective.
But are they really bringing us closer together, or just detaching us from our surroundings?
