I think movies are a bad thing.
The mark of a good movie (that is, a movie that does well what a movie should, one that corresponds, if you will, with the Platonic form of a movie) is that it affects your sense of reality. You should leave the theatre with the line between what you have just seen and the world in which you live and breath blurred.
How perverse is that?
Think about it. We purposely seek to confuse ourselves about what is real and what is not? We consider it a GOOD thing when we are uncertain how truly real our life is?
But we do, and we succeed. Just look at the consequences.
We today live in a sterile, idealized world. We have done all we can to create for ourselves a world that is safe, that is unaffected by the constant danger and death that has been the lot of mankind for millenia. One genre of movies perpetuates this idea of the world. And of course, the intelligentsia mock these so-called "chick flicks" as unrealistic, and counter with a harsh, gritty realism that grows dirtier and gorier with each passing year as we seek to better shock ourselves out of a self-induced stupor that we somehow know is not real.
And all we manage to do is further deaden our senses, dull our sensibilities, until not even the most horrific reality can truly affect us. How many times do we look at the Pulitzer-winning pictures of starving children or mangled corpses in distant countries whose names we can't even pronounce, and roll our eyes at the "bleeding heart liberal" who is trying so hard to awaken--hmmm, what was the word? Oh yes!--sympathy in our hardened soul.
It seems it is almost universal. I would wager that almost no person reading the daily news actually understands the truth of what he reads. It seems so far away when 50 people die in Timbuctoo. It doesn't really affect us if Iraq is hiding chemical weapons. What does it matter to us if North Korea has nuclear capability?
The truth of is that if we really understood the horror of what is now everyday in this world, even in our United States, where we are ludicrously SAFE, we would probably go insane. Or at least, on a deep-seated level, we fear that it is so.
But that's only the obvious part. It runs even deeper, I fear. Certainly in my own heart it does.
Leave any American alone for even a few hours and watch what he does. He may pace back and forth for a few minutes, wondering what to do. More likely than not he won't even have to think. Before ten minutes have passed he'll have a movie in the VCR, or a CD in the stereo. Certainly something to break the silence and protect him from a confrontation with that which he fears above all else: himself.
Yes--for more than anything we fear ourselves, fear to be alone, fear the thoughts that we somehow know will come if we are free from outside stimulation for even the briefest of moments. There is a depression verging on despair that comes to a man left to himself. And heaven forbid that we should actually be forced to come to terms with the horror that lies at the depths of our own soul. It's too ugly, too dirty, too real--so we hide behind the veil of entertainment, and leave the wounds to fester.
For fester they will, only aggravated and further infected by the constant stream of drugs we pour into ourselves. We are entertaining ourselves to death, to borrow the title of a book I never read by an author I don't remember.
And that death is the death of our soul.