The Importance of Film and Why We Should Make Art During Troubling Times.
This might not be a common sentiment, but before I started pursuing filmmaking as a career I kept hearing statements similar to these:
“People are so focused on the next movie coming out that they’re ignoring the things that matter.” — Fictional Guy I made up to emulate a sentiment.
“Why do you care so much about movies, they’re just entertainment. Not that important.” — Family member during Christmas party.
(I was admittedly, rambling on about why the transformers movies were absolutely horrendous. Kinda deserved to hear that one.)
“It’s hard to get a job as an artist, it’s better to learn an important skill. Like math or science. you’re smart, you can do whatever.” — Another well meaning family member that just made me wanna drink more during a Christmas gathering.
“Why are you so angry at people not liking Swiss Army Man? It’s just a movie. Relax, man.” — Guy who didn’t see Swiss Army Man cause it didn’t look like his cuppa tea.
Do you see the pattern? People tend to see film purely as an entertainment method. Something to put in the background while they turn off their brain for a couple of hours to unwind from a hard’s day work, and they’re not wrong.
I just think they’re only experiencing part of what makes film a valuable medium to us as a culture and why it’s grown into such a massive, complex and beautifully self-destructive industry.
They’re an extension of the best way to communicate emotions.
Storytelling.
Telling stories has been crucial to the growth of society. Myths, legends, folklore and even language I think stem from the intrinsic need our social brains have to tell stories.
We told them to keep our children safe and away from dangerous areas, they’re a huge part of social identity. Every culture has their own iteration of folklore and those stories serve to pass on tradition, express their values in easy to digest soundbytes and texts.
Stories help us cement on the future generation what we think are desirable traits to have for their future, we shove morals in stories not because they improve upon them but because it gives a frame of reference for a new mind to make a conscious, hopefully beneficial choice later on in life.
But most importantly; Stories instill in us a sense of empathy, the notion that we are all connected and feel the same things the person telling the story is feeling. It’s why we react to them, because we could be the storyteller.
With that being said, why are stories looked upon as a hobby or as a trivial part of daily life when it actually makes up a huge part of our identity? Why are they being perceived as unimportant enough to discourage people that want to tell them?
I’m not a scholar on the matter, I don’t claim to be nor do I understand all the intricacies that make up the field of sociology. I’m just a film lover that spends a lot of time thinking about and exploring his field, but I think it’s the fault of our work-till-your-death mentality.
We currently live in a society where work is most people’s number 1 priority. To the point where in the early 80’s the term “Latchkey Generation” was coined to categorize children that came home from school to an empty house. People were busy working because the previous generations knew how bad it could get if you didn’t and they taught their kids that you HAD to work, you HAD to provide even if it meant making emotionally unhealthy sacrifices.
Skills that were directly applicable to something, mechanics, cops, firefighters, engineers, product designers, inventors, computer scientists, scientists. Those skills meant something, they meant that you were needed for the betterment of society, that your effort could improve technology, could improve the area where you lived and more importantly could keep money in your wallet and let you support a family.
So what did schools do? They started focusing on them. Science, Technology, Math and Engineering became the important skills to have. Parents started pushing the belief that STEM would mean that their child, with the newly found belief that a college education meant you could get a job anywhere, were going to have a better life if they learned Science, Math or any of the skills in between that applies to technology and engineering.
And they were right. Technology was a big deal from the 80’s onwards, it evolved exponentially and new minds where always needed on the field to keep up with the demands. Medicine was getting better and life expectancy grew, science meant you could save lives. Engineering opened up thousands of ways to apply that newly developed technology to our daily life and Math was the core of it all.
We needed those values pushed into our heads in order to improve our quality of life.
But, over several decades, it created a culture that glorified over-exertion, prioritized hard work and profit over emotional (and sometimes) physical health. A culture that romanticized the idea of a work-a-holic. A culture that cared more about having worker bees than innovation.
We turned into a culture that left Art behind. Of course, art has always been an active part of culture, but we put it in the back burner. It wasn’t important if you could paint the new Sistine Chapel, we cared more about how well you could draw a circuit or how to make the new logo for its packaging.
I think kids weren’t encouraged to think of art as a viable way to make a living, it was entertainment and you’d grow out of it by the time you reached adulthood and you’d never think too hard about it again because you were busy studying for Med School.
Art became the hobby, it became the way to unwind, to shut your brain off, to stop thinking.
We stopped thinking about art.
That was the saddest thing we could have done. Millennia of linguistic and intellectual evolution that allowed us to tell the stories that gave our social lives meaning were pushed to the side, not getting thought about, withering away in our garage with the bike helmet we got for Christmas when we were 13.
Art was always there, but it was the shirt in the back of the closet we’d wear when all the laundry was dirty but it didn’t quite fit anymore so you didn’t leave the house wearing it unless you absolutely had to.
Sure, we had great pieces of art, specifically film, from the 80’s onward. The blockbusters:
- Jaws
- Terminator
- Terminator 2
- Rambo
- Alien
- Goodfellas
- Any Coen Brothers Movie
- Most Tarantino Movies
But we weren’t thinking about them. We just enjoyed them, filmmaking was left to the ones that rebelled against this romanticized work culture. They made their own empire and getting into it was impossible. This created the thought that if you wanted to make movies you had to be naturally stupendous at it, further discouraging people from exploring it.
“There’s no jobs in filmmaking, Why would I wanna do that? They’re just movies. I can do something better with my time.”
People disassociated themselves from the creative process, letting a select few take care of it instead of engaging it and thinking critically about it. I think this changed the purpose of cinema.
Writer’s Note: Full disclaimer here, I’m not saying that there was some golden age of cinema where everyone was thinking critically about movies and everyone had some say in the creative process of making a particular film. People have always and will always be people and anything I say will have outliers within those examples. This is, as I see it, what the trends are.
Cinema became less about entertaining a thought and more about providing an escape, less about empathy and more about substitution of reality. It became more targeted, no longer carrying the full weight of what a film maker wanted to say. The weight of that substance was replaced with “How many people will pay for it?”
Now, I understand that at the end of the day film is a business and as such its artistic integrity will sometimes take a hit. I’m absolutely okay with that. But this change in attitude made a formula out of filmmaking, and that was and still is a huge problem.
Movies became echoes of each other because everyone that invested in a movie wanted to make it’s money back. It wasn’t just about the art, which motivated studios to make the movie that would make money, often in an attempt to re-skin an already existing story (probably one that had already made a lot of money.), instead of the better or far more interesting film.
We’re currently seeing this happen in the superhero genre. Deadpool released on February of 2016, the first big success story of an R-rated superhero film, and already we’re seeing studios trying to emulate that (or at least taking notes from it).
The problem with this approach is that the films that follow the formulas are often blander, poorly written, carbon copies of the films that created the formula and they take the filmmaker’s voice out of the equation.
Without that central voice at it’s core, a movie can be entertaining at best, it can’t really be thought provoking or even worthy of discussion beyond the technicality behind the movie.
This type of filmmaking turns cinematic ideas into cinematic catchphrases and you can’t have a conversation if everyone’s shouting catchphrases at each other. (Just watch every live studio sitcom ever.)
The greatest thing about art is that it cannot be replicated, every artist frames the same scene differently. Formulas, by definition, are meant to be replicated and therefore cannot and should not co-exist within a creative medium.
Writers Note: Formula Does Not Equal Trends. Trends in movies are pretty common, it’s filmmakers borrowing from each other and the audience for which the film is made for. Trends are not beats, they’re elements. This could be the typing of a character from the way dialogue is delivered. 2 movies can be undoubtedly different and still follow some of the same trends. Formulaic movies will look and feel the same way. Like the bootleg cocoa pebbles you got as a kid, at first they look like the real thing but then you realize they taste like cardboard dipped in Hershey’s chocolate sauce and you feel dirty.
This formulaic approach to film-making diminished the emotional impact film could have asa medium, therefore people lost sight of what made movies great.
The Ability To Tell Truths Through Fiction.
I first learned of this idea while reading “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brian. The narrative of the book is labeled a war story but That’s only on the superficial level. The story is about how one man that went through arguably the toughest time in his life, survived it, wanted to tell people and talk about it but couldn’t communicate the emotions effectively because the stories attached weren’t relatable to the audience.
So he lied.
Exaggerating his stories, making up new facts, stringing metaphors and similes through the loops of factuality. He lied because he realized that the facts did not matter, the emotional impact did. Tim O’ Brian said what he needed to say so that you, the reader, could feel the way that he felt when he saw the things in the book. He calls this “Story-Truths”.
This is a huge concept in narrative story telling, especially in film, we have to take leaps away from reality in order to create a sentiment within the viewers. Characters in film almost never behave like people in real life, they’re exaggerated versions of us, taking a piece of a personality and turning into an entire identity.
The sentiment that becomes this identity is the core of the movie, it’s what the audience latches on to, it’s what we empathize with. Formulaic filmmaking takes a sentiment that worked one or two times and repeats it over and over and over again until it becomes meaningless.
When the sentiment becomes meaningless, the film is meaningless, when the film is meaningless, we lose the desire to think critically about movies and how they make us feel.
So people that would normally just watch the big blockbusters of the year lose an insane amount of the film watching experience. They’re not being engaged, they’re being yelled at by a loud screen. If the majority of moviegoers experience this, it creates a culture that doesn’t value film for it’s ability to make us empathize. It values it for it’s ability to disconnect us from the real world.
I genuinely believe that all of these things working together have made film (and possibly art as a whole) an experience that some people are just incapable of understanding. The generations that believed you should work hard on purely STEM activities don’t see stories, they see 1.5 hours of distraction.
But now that my generation is about to start taking the reins, we find that their approach to life is unfulfilling, unjust, unhealthy and unviable. We’re in a socio-political climate that is being torn apart by differences and the younger folks want to keep it together by showcasing the similarities.
Our Ideals are so different from each other’s. We still want to provide and be successful but we want to be happy by doing it, and we want to give everyone the equal opportunity to be able to do so.
A lot of people say my generation (Milennials) are disconnected from each other and the world but the more I experience the more I believe that to be the opposite. We’re connected with parts of the world most people wouldn’t even bother to think about, we have friendships that span oceans and continents. Friends who’s faces we’ve never seen but they mean so much to us.
We’re an empathetic generation.
Out Happiness, to a degree, stems from surrounding ourselves from people that are just as happy. We don’t feel each other’s pain, we understand it. We know it could be us at any moment. We’ve even made memes, what used to be a dumb funny picture, a simple way to communicate very complex emotions and ideas that would take entire therapy sessions to explain and condensed them to 140 characters. That would not happen if we weren’t in some way connected to each other.
We want others to feel what we feel, to understand that we’re going through, to tell us that they’ve been through it too and that it’s probably going to be okay later. We want to empathize and we want to be empathized with,
We’re a generation of storytellers.
We live in a socio-political climate dominated by insecurities, uncertainty, discontent, distrust of our government, disdain at inequality, and a craving for what we think are the right things but we’re not in control yet. We’re still at the whims of those before us, of the values that go against a multitude of our core beliefs.
In troubling times, art is the thing that keeps us afloat. Because it lets us empathize with one another, lets us understand that we’re not alone in whatever feeling we’re having. It brings us together. It reminds us, during the times we feel like expendable worker bees, that we are all human and that maybe we deserve better.
That’s why film, and art in general, matters.
And that’s why we have the responsibility to make art during troubling times, to remind ourselves that we are in fact storytellers and that we are in fact connected to each other and that we have a responsibility to be good to each other.
Because Tragedies are often more common than comedies.
Because any one of us could be telling the one telling a story.
