Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2011 | Page 36

32 Popular Culture Review Heidegger’s mind with the illumination that one’s life is without that sense of order and meaning that, spiritually and psychologically, sustained one in previous centuries. Heidegger’s observations about boredom may not seem immediately relevant to this discussion, and, as he points out, they certainly do not apply to “stupid people.” But a reading of Heidegger does raise the notion, one that current researchers have picked up on and, most importantly, one that Reinhard Kuhn focuses on in his classic The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, that it is this dread, a by-product of ennui, that underlies the craving for spectacle and sensation that seems to characterize a modem age shaped by industrialization, rationalism, and scientism. Kuhn reinforces Mansikka and Heidegger’s observations when he points out that “ennui...presupposes an encounter with nothingness, [and] the affirmation of being is the attitude most inimical to it” (67). In a recent article, Shelly Fahlman, Professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto, reinforces Heidegger’s theories concerning the emergence in our own culture of something akin to existential boredom; that is, without being fully aware of it, many today live in an “existential vacuum” (308-309). Fahlman comments, “Although diverse in their thinking, many existential theorists posit that lacking a sense of life meaning is at the forefront of human suffering, and that experiences of boredom and negative affect are central components of this lack of purpose or meaning” (309). She refers to the work of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl to reinforce her position: “Frankl...emphasizes the fundamental importance of having of a sense of meaning in one’s life. Indeed, for him, the quest to find and fulfill a sense of meaning is the essence of man’s motivation, a basic striving that he calls the ‘will to meaning’” (309). Fahlman goes on to explain: “According to Frankl...the conditions of modem society have left many individuals with a feeling of meaninglessness—an affliction he refers to as an existential vacuum” (309). The existentialism Frankl and Fahlman have in mind is not necessarily one bom of a conscious decision. Rather, it occurs when “individuals are said to Tack the awareness of a meaning worth living for.’ They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves” (Fahlman 309). In short, this existentialism is as culturally-induced as the constant need for thrills that fill up the empty spaces in the mind and soul and that draw viewers to films like Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. This void, this “existential vacuum,” may very well be the unacknowledged spiritual condition of our own popular culture, which has been shaped and reshaped by the industrial and technological revolutions, one consequence of which has been to provide the individual with the means by which to satisfy, immediately, the need for boredom-relieving adventures. Whether those adventures come in the form of climbing a mountain, going on cruises, playing wildly and wickedly imaginative video games, attending cage-fighting matches, or watching movies that move from incredible spectacle to incredible spectacle does not really seem to matter. What matters is being lifted out of this profound