Undergraduate / Destroy and Build the Word with Scissors - CommonApp Essay about Personal Dilemma [10]

My Essay:

Destroy and Build the World, All with Scissors

Is it a "first-world-problem" to say I've lost the "magic" of movies?
To explain, I think I have explain two things: My personality and Star Wars.
I was born to take things apart. From my very earliest of days, if I managed to grab anything, within several minutes, the object I grabbed would be a bit... Ruined. When I first went to temple as a small child, my parents performed a ceremony with the priest, and presented objects to crawl towards and select, as a sign of what person I may become. According to my mother, I grabbed a pair of scissors. Though she didn't give much of an explanation regarding its significance, I think I've come up with a meaning of my own. Scissors cut and shred, tearing apart anything the metal halves can bring between them, and break an object into smaller parts, so I was a scissor, taking apart things for my own purposes. That explained why the vacuum cleaner brushes were constantly un-plucked, why my toy trains had missing wheels, why I smashed instead of ate my crackers, and the other mischievous acts of my childhood. I was also quite hyper, and when things were silent in my home, either I was up to no good, probably damaging something, or for once, my attention was transfixed onto something. I think that's where Star Wars comes in.

When I was around three years old, the onscreen "magic" of Star Wars convinced me that there were such things as lightsabers and X-Wings. Over a dozen years ago, I was sitting around and playing with some toys downstairs, probably before I would eventually take it apart. My dad was watching all the original Star Trek films, but he couldn't find one of the movies at Blockbusters, so he instead picked up the other "Star" series. He turned on the TV and pushed in the VHS, and began to watch the film. Now for many people, movies and other sources of entertainment are ingrained as what was fun, but I wasn't about played with and watched at the time, I was simply in my own world having fun doing what I wanted, so pop-culture was an afterthought. I think that changed when I looked up and saw Stormtroopers walking down some corridor. The striking image is still burned into my mind. I saw a dozen men, wearing sleek white armor, with huge helmets. The helmets themselves almost resembled skulls, and I got the eerie feeling that perhaps these people were the bad guys of the movie. So to be sure, I sat down with my dad and began to see the rest of the film. I was completely enthralled. It probably had to be one of my first moments where I was truly focused and lost within something. After the movie ended, I re-watched it from the start, and to this day, my fanatical interest in Star Wars has not waned. That film changed me for who I was. No longer was I a scissor that took apart things, I began to see things more for what they offered.

The tricky part to all of this is to explain what has changed since. To summarize, over a decade later, my habit of being the scissor and tearing things down has reverted, and has now infiltrated how I see films. After years of watching Star Wars, the details and the behind-the-scenes have revealed to me just how the movie was really made, and seeing so much of the technical details behind it, in essence, has caused me to lose the certain element of "magic" movies once possessed for me. If I could, I would want to know how the movie is made, and still be able to have that "magic" resound with me, but I can't. So if I can't experience it that way, I think I should instead get more involved with film. Maybe there's something about the whole process of bringing a movie from concept to the bring screen that will deliver on some sort of "magic" I used to feel from films. So, scissors can cut things and break them down, we all know that. But maybe the smaller pieces are cut so that something can be made from what the scissors cut. I think I should embrace the scissor once again, and use what I tear apart to construct something wonderful from it.