Walking to the supermarket this afternoon I had a not entirely unusual or infrequent (though let us say uncommon) thought as I passed a woman getting into her car. 'I could crack her head against the door of the car no problem at all,' I mused as I walked by.
Luckily I didn't do this (the thin line separating the criminally insane from the normal, law-abiding citizen), but I thought, people must have random impulses like that all the time. Perhaps.
Anyway, I wondered what would happen to Mel Gibson in the film What Women Want were he to encounter a woman at the moment such a casually amoral thought flitted through her mind? (If you haven't watched this cinematic gem, Mel gains the ability to hear women's thought, and hilarity ensues.) Would he perhaps tackle her to the ground, believing he was about to be attacked, only to end up on assault charges, unable to explain the thoughts he could hear, and hence his reason for pre-emptively attacking her?
In a similar vein, everyone in the movie has thoughts of a quite linear, scripted nature, rather than the usual half formed sentences, ideas, feelings and pictures that really constitute our thoughts. What would Mel be like if he were privy to these? Quite rapidly insane perhaps? It would have been interesting also in the movie were he to meet a schizophrenic woman, or perhaps an Einstein-like woman, who thought largely in symbols.
Time for a sequel perhaps.
