During our recent trip to Orlando, which I wrote about at length in a front-page essay titled “What I Learned at Disney World” (Jewish Press, May 16), we visited Hollywood Studios. There we watched a series of stunt and adventure shows, including “Racing” and “Indiana Jones.”
Each show was exciting in its own way, as onlookers were treated to a series of daredevil stunts typically only seen on film. But while the stunts were certainly mesmerizing, it was the incredible degree of façade and deception behind these productions that really caught my attention.
“Racing” opened with a riveting stunt scene set in a small French town, in which a series of red sports cars zoomed around a short track with precise accuracy, all in pursuit of the film’s hero (actually, a stunt driver in the hero’s heavily tinted black vehicle). As one could have predicted, the drivers were well trained and the scene was brilliantly choreographed. What was not nearly as obvious, however, was the extent of the hidden components necessary to make the scene as effective as it was.
I had initially been struck by the ability of a small handful of drivers to manipulate their vehicles so deftly in cramped quarters, ensuring continuous, heart-stopping action and 360-degree turns. Later it became clear the studio had actually employed extra drivers, allowing them to position themselves neatly behind buildings and other components on the set. When one car disappeared from sight, another identical vehicle was ready and waiting to jump right in and “continue” the action.
But the deception went even further. At one point, the hero, trapped by multiple pursuers, shifted his car in reverse. He then proceeded to race backward up a ramp, jump over a wide gap, land on another ramp and resume the “chase.”
Here too, what we saw was too good to be true. In order to make this incredible scene a reality, the studio had gutted a vehicle identical to the one the movie’s hero was driving and had literally reversed the location of the car’s engine and interior, so that the driver was facing what appeared to be the rear of the vehicle. As such, when the stunt car had zoomed up the ramp it was not really going in reverse at all, rendering a feat of mind-boggling proportions as merely an impressive feat.
“Indiana Jones” also began with a brief stunt scene. In it, the hero escaped a series of booby traps and near misses to finally claim his sought-after prize. At this point, the show’s host shifted the focus away from the scene we had just observed and toward the tremendous degree of thought and preparation (including the many replicas, doubles and stuntmen) necessary to carry out a Hollywood action scene.
Again, I was struck by the huge gap separating perception from reality. What appears to the casual moviegoer as a daredevil act of great skill, deftness and bravery is in reality a contrived scene made possible by a number of well-positioned and well-choreographed individuals.
As I observed these incredible displays of make-believe, it reminded me of a striking statement from our sages, one that addresses this issue of perception and reality from a Torah perspective:
Rabbi Yosef the son of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi became ill and fell into a trance. When he recovered, his father asked him, “What did you see?” “I saw a topsy-turvy world,” he replied, “the upper [class] underneath and the lower on top.’’ Said [his father] “My son, you saw a clear world [in which people occupy the positions that they have merited]. And how are [the Torah scholars positioned) there?” “As we are here, so are we there. And I heard them saying, ‘Happy is he who comes here with his learning in his hand.’ ” [Pesachim 50a, Bava Basra 10b]
Our sages are telling us that there is a large gap between that which we perceive to be the reality of our world and reality itself, particularly in the area of social standing.
From time immemorial, society has operated based on a ranking system determined by physical and material criteria. “Upper” classes consisted of those who achieved the highest levels of wealth and power. All others were deemed inferior, viewed by the upper crust as social and historical irrelevancies.