I Love Snuff Films—and You Do, Too

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So far, we’ve been pretty good about lighting the menorah this year. For three whole days, Sasha, Sandy, Jean, and I have remembered to twist the flimsy Hanukkah candles into their slots, spark up a match, and say the prayers that remain baked into our brains from repetition. (Well, maybe not Jean’s.) Never mind that we’re not doing this right at sunset; at least we’re doing it at all. It’s a Hanukkah miracle already.

But last night, as we ate a hastily prepared dinner under the menorah’s glow, the kids—being kids, after all—were sorely tempted to blow out the candles. As you likely know, this is just not done! I mean, I probably did it when I was a kid¹. But I wasn’t supposed to. I’m sure that’s not just a Jewish thing, either. When you light a candle as part of a ritual, you should let it burn, right?

Now that I am, finally, an adult, there’s no longer any chance I’ll break that rule. For this I have a modicum of self-control. But the thing is, I need that self-control for, I must admit, I am still tempted. When I see a flame, especially one flickering lightly atop a cheap Hanukkah candle, I want to blow it out. In this, I think, I am not alone.

Much has been written about the human obsession with fires: We love to start them, and we love to stare into them. The controlled chaos of the flames—well, usually controlled—is mesmerizing. They grow, shrink, and seem to play, dancing across the color spectrum in ways that are at once familiar and essentially unpredictable. We gaze into fireplaces, put yule logs (or NASA rockets) on our TVs, and set bonfires on the beach, where the fractal crash of the waves makes for a lovely parallel. I’m not telling you anything here you don’t already know.

But I can’t find much commentary on the complementary, minor-key desire to snuff flames out. It’s not like this satisfaction is obscure. If you have ever had a birthday party in the United States, or been to one, you have experienced the triumphant joy of blowing out candles. Pop culture is all over it, too. One of the most telling moments in Citizen Kane, for example, find a young Charles Foster Kane deciding to, just before press time, insert into his newspaper a manifesto—a “declaration of principles”—making clear his intentions toward the city. “There’s something I’ve got to get into this paper besides pictures and print,” he tells his friend Jedediah Leland. “I’ve got to make the New York Inquirer as important to New York as the gas in that light.”

More after the jump…

And then he turns off the gas light. The flame vanishes. We got some major foreshadowing here, complete with expressionist shadows: Kane’s idea of importance, of necessity, of love is all about withholding, not giving. We know how this will play out.

Even better is an early scene in Lawrence of Arabia, well before T.E. Lawrence has set out for the desert to find Prince Faisal and recruit him and his tribes to the cause of the British during World War I. Lawrence is hanging around with a couple of other soldiers, when he lights a cigarette then proceeds to snuff out the match with his fingers. A minute later, one of the soldiers, William Potter, tries to copy him—and yelps in pain.

If you have read any of the 57 Trying! essays so far, you understand how much I love this moment. To take pain—whether accidental or self-inflicted—and defeat it by adjusting how we think, what we expect, well, that’s the Sisyphean aspiration right there. “Not minding that it hurts” is a recipe for happiness.

But I’m not sure that any of this explains why we like to put out fires. The symbolism is—the symbolisms are?—thin and contradictory. We can acknowledge the fragility of the flame vis-à-vis the fragility of human life, as in “Candle in the Wind,” but does that mean snuffing it out is like ending a life? That wisp of smoke that floats upward sure looks like a soul escaping! So is the 5-year-old blowing out her birthday candles reveling in simulated death? If you want to use that as an image in your next low-budget horror film, be my guest, but it doesn’t feel solid enough to be a broad interpretation here.

Slightly more convincing is the idea that we have an innate desire to assert control over fire, humanity’s first and most dangerous tool. We see the flame’s chaos, its power, and as entranced as we are, we can sense its unpredictable danger and we feel the urge to bring it to heel. We are human, and we are in charge! That sounds good, right? But if it’s real, it’s happening at such a low level—sub-subconscious—that I’m not sure it matters. It’s an argument that would have Sasha and Sandy’s eyes rolling.

Frankly, I’m more comfortable saying it’s just aesthetics: sensory bliss, pure and simple. The lung-huff that knocks out the flame. The tssss of squeezing a match with damp fingers, or dousing a campfire with a bucket of water or stream of pee. The proper deep whump you get when you cut off the air supply. The final rise of smoke like a charcoal line scribbled on reality. ASMR-level pleasures like these are always hard to write about because they seem so basic, so unintellectualizable. We feel them because we feel them or, if you want to get all neuroscience-y about it, because our brains have evolved to react in certain ways to certain sensory stimuli. Which is just a fancy way of saying we like things because we like them. Fun is fun. Setting things on fire is fun. Putting out fires is fun. And we all like fun, don’t we?

Which is why, next time the kids tell me they want to blow out the Hanukkah candles, I’m going to let them. Cuz it’s fun! And guess what: We can just relight them! And blow them out again, and relight them again, and just revel in the delightful, infinite, Kandinsky-esque cycle of chaos and control, chaos and control, throughout this Festival of Lights. That is, of course, if we remember to light the menorah in the first place. 🪨🪨🪨