I love a good documentary.  When I was in television news, I produced several ”mini-docs,” and I appreciate what it takes to tell a true story in provocative, interesting ways.

My Sundance Film Festival  schedule is always doc-heavy.  I was especially looking forward to Cane Toads: The Conquest  in 3D.  (The director introduced it as “Avatoad.”)

It was educational, and it was also hysterically funny.  The audience howled with laughter, and I was guffawing along with the rest of the crowd.  And I’m still feeling terrible about that.

The documentary details the history of cane toads in Australia, where they now run rampant and are a horrible nuisance. (Imagine your lawn alive with hundreds of toads. And they’re poisonous. Pets who bite them die.)

Aggrieved Aussies employ an imaginative variety of methods to rid themselves of the pestilent toads.  It’s like a Road Runner cartoon  come to life, complete with toads strapped to fireworks and launched in an explosive shower of aerial pyrotechnics.  One man demonstrates his prowess at running over toads in the road.  With each squish, splat, and pop, the audience laughs harder.  I was right there with ‘em.  It was funny.  Except it isn’t.

Back in my TV news days, I reported on some Hare Krishna  devotees who did not make a move to brush away the flies that buzzed around them.  They did not kill anything.  I thought they were nuts, not even responding like a normal human. I mean, who doesn’t shoo a fly?

In the decades since then, I’ve become more sensitive to the way we humans think so much life is disposable, for our own convenience.  Anyone who isn’t a vegan endorses killing for their own convenience. I find it interesting that someone who is so pro-life when it comes to human babies thinks it’s funny to say “There’s plenty of room for all of Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.” 

I’m still eating meat.  My family still engages in fishing and we allow hunting on our property.  But I no longer step on insects if I can avoid it, and I’m likely to help an arachnid out the door instead of smushing it in my home.  So I haven’t evolved as much as PETA  might like, but I’m not as insensitive as I used to be.

I am still feeling queasy about my helpless laughter as the toads exploded.

Was I influenced by the crowd? (I don’t think so. I think I would have laughed if I were alone.)  What is there inside me that was so amused by the macabre panoply of execution methods?

Last night I saw The Shock Doctrine  and there were some shots of the Abu Ghraib atrocities .  The military personnel involved thought the naked poses of their prisoners were funny.

Today I am meditating about what I have in common with those torturers, and I am sensitized to the cultural cues that encourage laughter at the genuine suffering of another.

The Director of the Sundance Film Festival , John Cooper , told a true story as he introduced the documentary “Cane Toads: The Conquest.” 

Every year, the Sundance Institute  conducts filmed interviews with over a dozen directors whose films are featured in that year’s festival. In 2000, Mark Lewis  was one of the chosen. His documentary that year was The Natural History of the Chicken.  At the end of these interviews, the directors are usually asked, “What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?”  Mark replied, “I’d like to do something on the cane toads of Australia.” 

It’s exactly ten years later, and Mark’s 3-D documentary on cane toads is here at Sundance.

Isn’t that a wonderful example of intention in action?  Name it and claim it? What you can conceive and believe you can achieve? What you think about you bring about? (Add your own cliche here) 

Intention is a powerful thing.  What intentions are setting up root systems and taking hold right now?  What will blossom ten years from now?

At least once, you will probably be rewarded for your trouble with abaaaaaad movie,and everyone will have a different definition of that.

Yesterday, a woman sitting in my row said she couldn’t give “The September Issue” a favorable vote for the Audience Award because its ostensible subject, “fashion,” was so lightweight. She doesn’t want it to win. A prize might give it attention that more serious fare deserves and needs.

I was shocked, as if we’d seen two different movies. I had just seen the story of a long professional marriage between Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington, illustrative for anyone who works with other people (especially difficult people). I saw a filmabout personal transformation – how people transcend their early years, shaped by their choices. I saw the real life version of “The Devil Wears Prada” and”The Office.” It was about art and commerce, taste anddecisionmaking.It was beautifully photographed and skillfully edited.

I gave it highest marks, but that woman might be right.

Would I rather you see “The September Issue” or “Reporter”? No contest. See “Reporter.” Would I rather you buy “Vogue” or “The New York Times”? Are you bleeping kidding me?

“Reporter” reminded me what a wuss I was when I took money to be a journalist and how I was and am in awe of the people who are willing to go, and go again, even after terrifying chases through the jungle and bouts with the deadliest form of malaria and nonstop encounters with the worst that humanity can produce and experience. Nicholas Kristof has the kind of courage and skill I didn’t have the guts to aspire to, much less emulate.

That documentary introduced me to the term “psychic numbing,” and comforts me with the facts: human beings are designed, biologically, to tune out widespread suffering. Our brains, our hormones, our chemistry is programmed to care about ONE, and as soon as one more is added, we begin to care less immediately. When confronted with the suffering of millions, we shut off our compassion as a matter of self-preservation.

Kristof might appear cold and uncaring in this documentary, but he likens his clinicalattitude in the face ofgenocide and atrocity to that of a doctor. A certain emotional distance is required for physicians, soldiers, law enforcement officers, others whose jobs require cool heads and steady hands.

I confess. I am in possession of that ability to distance myself. Did I have it before I became a reporter or did the job force me to learn how NOT to care about everyone and everything all the time? I remember being in the newsroom during the Jim Jones tragedy in Guyana, back in the days of wire service machines that type-type-type-typed and signalled bulletins with ding-ding-ding. All day, ding-ding-ding as more bodies were discovered.

Some time after that, I got a bout of what I called “news sickness.” The magnitude of the tragedy, the pictures you didn’t see of the heaps of rotting bodies (we wouldn’t have put them on television, but the raw feeds came to our newsroom), the insanity of the entire situation somehow penetrated my usual defenses.

I spent a couple of days crying and throwing up, and then I got my act together and went back to feeling very little about the tragedies that were my daily bread.

As frustrating and unrewarding as the Sundance experience can be, there’s a reason I keep coming back. Inspiration. I’m refreshed and challenged by the parade of creativity, the persistence of artists, the new ideas and fresh ways of looking at old subjects.

And I always fall in love with talent and good hearts here. Ben Affleck was largely inarticulate at the Q&A after “Reporter,” of which he was the Executive Producer. But, bless him forever, he managed to say that if celebrity was good for anything, it’s the ability to direct attention tothe people ofDarfur, Congo, Rwanda, and reporters like Kristof. Jack White? I’m still in stunnage after “It Might Get Loud.” Maybe you know all about him, but this was my first introduction to his history and his oeuvre. Next time I’m in Franklin, Tennessee, I might stalk his house like a groupie. And I will never look at a guitar the same way again. I used to be married to a guitar player and I know now that I only half “got it”- I never understood the way I do today. (Hint: see this if you are thinking of marrying a person who picks.)

I gotta go. There are buses to wait for,lines to stand in, people waiting to shove me and step on my feet and whack me with their backpacks. And maybe a movie, and if I’m lucky, new eyes through which to see a part of the world.