Show and Tell - diminishing aura

Aura is concept that is, in terms, hard to conceptualize; yet everyone knows exactly what it means. People especially know what it means when people say, “the aura diminished.” So this entails the question, how is the aura diminished? Or how is aura different from the first time we experience something, to the repeated experience of it. I presented this question in my show and tell presentation forever ago based on the movie Swiss Army Man. Swiss Army Man is movie about a man, Hank, who becomes stranded on a dessert Island, and right when he is about to kill himself, he finds another man. Although this man is dead, he has some odd capabilities that allow Hank to get off the island and back home. While trying to get back home, the dead body, Manny, starts talking and Hank has to reteach him everything about life.

            At one point in the movie Manny comes across a magazine with a woman with minimal clothing. Hank proceeds to tell him about magazines and girls. At one point he says, “Before the internet every girl was a lot more special.” This correlates to what we were talking about with Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Due to the Internet and advances in technology, pictures of girls have been more and more easily accessible, which in turn diminishes their aura. This scene in the movie is able to physically show the concept of aura by making Manny’s heart beat again. This picture’s aura effects Manny in a way it doesn’t affect Hank anymore. So one could argue that aura can be closely related to innocence.

            Aura diminishing over time is a concept that can be seen in everyday life, for example, marriage and relationships. When first entering a new relationship with someone there are butterflies and excitement in everything you do. This is because it is basically unchartered territory for you. The whole experience is new to you and that excites you, and thus the aura is affecting you more. However, this aura diminishes after spending so much time with that person. After repeatedly experiencing something, the excitement, and therefore the aura, fades.  You come to an area of familiarity, and so the aura of this other person doesn’t effect you anymore. This is a common problem among relationships because they tend to just lose that excitement and tend to lose interest.

            We crave the feeling of excitement, and so we seek out new experiences to experience the sense of a “new” aura. This is a reason why we make things so easily accessible to everyone, because everyone wants these new experiences and wants to feel that excitement from the aura. By doing this, we are actually diminishing the aura even more and making it even harder to experience the aura in the ways we want.