It’s all fun and games–until someone dies
I’ve been reading about the new middle-school craze–the Choking Game, which involves strangling (one’s self or someone else). The goal is to produce the light-headed feeling that happens when oxygen to the brain is cut off and the “rush” that happens when the choke is released and the oxygen flows back in. As one who, over the course of many years in the martial arts, did plenty of choking (and was choked at least as often), I can say that there is a tiny bit of truth there–you do get a little light-headed before passing out, and you do get a rush when the blood comes back. But I was reminded of two movies that dealt with exactly the same search for a choke-induced high. The movies I’m talking about are “Flatliners,” which starred Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, and Kevin Bacon, and “In the Realm of The Senses,” a Japanese