The rest of my family is downstairs watching The Return of the King downstairs, but I discovered that I'd rather iron shirts than eat popcorn and watch. It's not the popcorn, and I don't even think it's a Pauline Kael-esque preference to only watch a film once. Let me try to explain this using literary references!
Remember the My Teacher is an Alien books? The one I'm thinking of in particular is My Teacher Flunked the Planet, when the former leader of the galaxy tells Peter Thompson that he was sacked for giving television technology (highly dangerous, forbidden stuff) to Earth. Humans, apparently, can't cope maturely with its rhetorical power. After my first look at The Simple Life 2 and the latest Canadian Idol, I tend to agree.
Film and TV warp my mind. Maybe I'm just not as rational as everyone else, but I have a really hard time trying not to compare myself and my life to what I see or hear in a movie. It's too much. This going to sound like something right out of The Republic, but how willingly we come to take these moving pictures as the ruler with which to measure our own lives! On the one hand, I enjoy spending time in a dark cinema sympathizing with Frodo, Shrek, or whoever the protagonist of the week is; on the other hand, I'm shocked that a latexed, wigged, and digitally-manipulated Elijah Wood can elicit that kind of emotion for me when I turn a blind (well, nearly blind) eye to the homeless on the street.
There's just something not right about that. I don't like the person I become after I watch these things.
It's completely unlike reading, or even music -- there's some element of distance, where the rhetoric is more obvious and the arguments more abstract. I'll be generous to the film and TV industries by saying it's because I'm not as sophisticated as they expect their viewers to be, but I don't really think that's the case.
I think we're forgetting how to live.
Remember the My Teacher is an Alien books? The one I'm thinking of in particular is My Teacher Flunked the Planet, when the former leader of the galaxy tells Peter Thompson that he was sacked for giving television technology (highly dangerous, forbidden stuff) to Earth. Humans, apparently, can't cope maturely with its rhetorical power. After my first look at The Simple Life 2 and the latest Canadian Idol, I tend to agree.
Film and TV warp my mind. Maybe I'm just not as rational as everyone else, but I have a really hard time trying not to compare myself and my life to what I see or hear in a movie. It's too much. This going to sound like something right out of The Republic, but how willingly we come to take these moving pictures as the ruler with which to measure our own lives! On the one hand, I enjoy spending time in a dark cinema sympathizing with Frodo, Shrek, or whoever the protagonist of the week is; on the other hand, I'm shocked that a latexed, wigged, and digitally-manipulated Elijah Wood can elicit that kind of emotion for me when I turn a blind (well, nearly blind) eye to the homeless on the street.
There's just something not right about that. I don't like the person I become after I watch these things.
It's completely unlike reading, or even music -- there's some element of distance, where the rhetoric is more obvious and the arguments more abstract. I'll be generous to the film and TV industries by saying it's because I'm not as sophisticated as they expect their viewers to be, but I don't really think that's the case.
I think we're forgetting how to live.
