Rats!
“A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the mask-like attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels seemed to turn to water.”
Ever since I saw the torture scene in 1984, where two rats fight in a cage strapped to the protagonist’s face, I’ve been terrified of rats. They were a daily occurrence when I commuted on the New York subway, where they say you’re only ever a few feet away from a rat wherever you are in the city. I’ve awoken screaming and sweating with the idea of the rat king, where several rats’ tails grow together and fuse into one multi-bodied enormous creature of nightmares. I cannot be near them. Even the very idea of them causes my skin to crawl.
The thought of enormous subterranean colonies writhing away under the streets and in abandoned tunnels. Being swarmed by them as they gnaw away at human viscera. Over the years I’ve attempted to come to terms with my fear of rats, which of course is a common one. Perhaps even writing all this down is a cathartic form of coping. I’ve read about the history of rats and their relationship to humans. I’ve watched documentaries about the secret life of rats. But even the very word rat surfaces a tension in me. Three letters which say much more than their form, and stand for something much, much worse.
”The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.”
I sometimes think about the worst fear. The one which would be in 1984’s Room 101 waiting for me. The worst thing in the world. In this instance I think it would be the same as the one which befalls poor Winston in Orwell’s book. A curious case of cinematic fear manifesting as real-world fear. Would I have such an irrational fear of rats had I not watched the movie? What else am I afraid of because of what I’ve watched? I’ve watched plenty of movies with particularly gruesome ends. Why was it this particular one which stuck?
