(no subject)
“When everything feels like the movies, yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive...”
-Iris (Goo Goo Dolls)
What is it about our obsession with movies? And I don’t mean our obsession with the stars, or the lavish lives they must lead. I don’t mean our obsession with the concept of Hollywood in general. I don’t even mean the actual business of watching movies. I mean our unquenchable, undeniable and unyielding desire to model our lives after what we see on the silver screen.
I know we all consider ourselves to be fairly intelligent and logical creatures. We’d like to think that there comes a point in our lives where we can distinguish between reality and fantasy, thus retaining our status as intelligent and logicical creatures. But I’m not talking about what’s going on in the mind. I’m talking about that overwhelming feeling we get when we watch a movie, and we see ordinary people in ordinary situations doing extraordinary things - things that we're certain just don’t happen in “real life”. And all we really want is live the reality we see.
We want to say all the right things at all the right times - just like in the movies!
We want to make all the best choices and never have any regrets - just like in the movies!
We want every emotion, every experience to be the most profound and exhilarating it can be- just like in the movies!
AND we want to do it all to the tune of a really great soundtrack!
So I guess the question is, how much of what’s in the movies is really fiction? I mean things like heroism, the perfect romance, the closure - which supposedly only exist on a roll of film - these ideas had to have come from somewhere, right? They aren’t just made up, they’re actual things. Are we so cynical that we’ve finally convinced ourselves of the absolute rarity of these things? Enough to have reduced them to mere fantasy?
Maybe...
Or maybe what we see in films really is a sort of reflection of our reality. But after all this time, after all we’ve done, we just don’t think we’re worthy of it. So we make it as unattainable and unlikely as, oh I don’t know, something from the movies...
-Iris (Goo Goo Dolls)
What is it about our obsession with movies? And I don’t mean our obsession with the stars, or the lavish lives they must lead. I don’t mean our obsession with the concept of Hollywood in general. I don’t even mean the actual business of watching movies. I mean our unquenchable, undeniable and unyielding desire to model our lives after what we see on the silver screen.
I know we all consider ourselves to be fairly intelligent and logical creatures. We’d like to think that there comes a point in our lives where we can distinguish between reality and fantasy, thus retaining our status as intelligent and logicical creatures. But I’m not talking about what’s going on in the mind. I’m talking about that overwhelming feeling we get when we watch a movie, and we see ordinary people in ordinary situations doing extraordinary things - things that we're certain just don’t happen in “real life”. And all we really want is live the reality we see.
We want to say all the right things at all the right times - just like in the movies!
We want to make all the best choices and never have any regrets - just like in the movies!
We want every emotion, every experience to be the most profound and exhilarating it can be- just like in the movies!
AND we want to do it all to the tune of a really great soundtrack!
So I guess the question is, how much of what’s in the movies is really fiction? I mean things like heroism, the perfect romance, the closure - which supposedly only exist on a roll of film - these ideas had to have come from somewhere, right? They aren’t just made up, they’re actual things. Are we so cynical that we’ve finally convinced ourselves of the absolute rarity of these things? Enough to have reduced them to mere fantasy?
Maybe...
Or maybe what we see in films really is a sort of reflection of our reality. But after all this time, after all we’ve done, we just don’t think we’re worthy of it. So we make it as unattainable and unlikely as, oh I don’t know, something from the movies...