Need for restraint for bird-brained

One’s love for the movies can be understood, or even appreciated, but an unhealthy obsession that might lead to serious harm points to a disturbed psyche. Bird Box, a thriller film on Netflix, is generating extreme responses, evident in the Bird Box Challenge, where people are attempting to navigate through their everyday life completely blindfolded.

This phenomenon has spread like wildfire, the flames fanned by the film itself, in which a family, comprising a mother and her two children Boy and Girl, has to go on a dangerous journey completely blindfolded to avoid getting killed by a dangerous monster that captures the prey through eyesight. People undertaking the challenge are videographing their experiences of walking or doing things blindfolded, which also includes strolling down a street. An alarmed Netflix is now warning viewers that such a challenge could lead to hospitalisation.

What worked for Bird Box was its concept and the striking imagery of Bullock’s character blindfolded translating into the social-media goldmine: memes. And now with this new worldwide craze, the film’s popularity is soaring. The streaming platform’s plea for moderation — but not abstention — from the craze comes in the wake of thousands of videos posted online showing people stumbling around houses, stairs and woods with scarves wrapped round their eyes.

Bird Box Challenge is the latest act in the flirting-with-danger phenomenon that spans cultures and continents and works somewhat as a unifying force for impressionable minds. Recall the Kiki Challenge of 2018 — another dangerous stunt. Also called the “In My Feelings challenge”, it involves jumping out of a moving car and dancing alongside it to Drake’s hit In My Feelings, while the car continues moving. Some videos of the dances uploaded to the internet show oblivious dancers from various countries crashing into poles, tripping on potholes or falling out of the cars. A series of casualties reported in Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh and Bengaluru forced the authorities to issue advisories.

Such videos of dangerous stunts can inspire teenage copycats who haven’t got the mental bandwidth to figure out this could be very fatal. For them, it’s fun or exciting or even high risk. And anything that is high risk is intriguing, gets the adrenaline going and sets up highly competitive game playing within the fraternity of late adolescence. This growing internet stunt culture for attention can often lead to tragedy. It’s worth discussing the Fire Challenge in 2012 when teenagers applied inflammable liquids on the body and set themselves on fire. The idea behind this reckless stunt and posting it on social media was to test pain endurance or just to impress friends. Then there was the Choking Game, which, as the name suggests, was meant to cut off oxygen to the brain long enough to obtain a brief moment of euphoria and sometimes loss of consciousness. There are enough fools in the world bent on destroying themselves. Whether you’re left in awe, shock or horror, viral videos continue to be internet gold. They have ready consumers across the world.