I have found a reason to write; it’s better than ranting to myself. My original motivation for blogging was making my friend happy, that’s always a good motivation. As soon as I started writing I discovered that it made me happy and that’s still a good reason. There are ideas that run around my head and won’t leave. Writing about them is like letting children out to play, they get much needed exercise and gain experience in the real world. Ideas feel cooped up in head. Sure there’s a risk they’ll get bullied by the other kids, but they can make new friends.
I’m often critical of films and say things like “X” makes no sense. It can be things like objecting to spaceships banking against the air while in space in Star Wars. When people reply, “It’s just a movie,” I used to get annoyed. “What they don’t think things need to make sense in a movie?” I finally realized that’s probably not it. I can’t look inside other people’s heads, but I can let other people see inside mine, and that’s the reason I’m writing this. This is about how I experience a movie or a book or any sort of story. I’m not looking in from the outside, I’m inhabiting the world of the film. In On Fairie Stories Tolkien rejected the idea of “willful suspension of disbelief” in favor of subcreation. As soon as I read that I recognized it as the way I experienced fiction, all fiction, not just fantasy. A great accomplishment of Star Trek, Harry Potter, and the MCU was the normalization of the idea of fiction as world building. We can set new stories into these universes. Nobody did this better than Tolkien, LOTR and The Hobbit was just a tiny part of Middle Earth which was just part of Arda, which was part of Ea, and it took place in a tiny fraction of the history of Arda. The Silmarillion filled in more of the blank spaces on the map beyond, “and here be dragons,” though there certainly were dragons, in addition to so much more.”
I don’t just enter these words as a fly on the wall, I enter the minds of the characters. As much as ridiculous physics bothers me in films, characters acting out of character bothers me more. A huge problem I have in many films is characters doing something stupid just because it’s needed to advance the plot. Ideally every action taken by every character should come from interior motivations. Good writing strives to do that even when the scene was written to serve the greater plot. All those scenes where the villain finds some slow way to kill the hero, walks away, and then the hero escapes, are bad writing, even in a great film like Goldfinger that’s a flaw. Seven-year-old me was loved Bond tied to the table while the laser moves towards him, but I was seven. As an adult I recognize it as a flaw in the film.
To this people are still responding, “But it’s just a movie, accept it and enjoy yourself.” They are missing what I said earlier. I have left the real world and entered Goldfinger’s lair. As soon as I’m confronted with ridiculous behavior on his part I’m jolted out of the film and back into my living room in front of my TV set. It’s as annoying as someone ringing your doorbell while you’re watching and then discovering it’s Jehovah Witnesses. I get offended every time the filmmaker kicks me out of their world and back into the real one. Watching a film is not passive at its best. While sure there are times I’ll have something mindless on TV while I’m working on Spelling Bee and don’t expect much of it. Any time a film is reduced to that level of involvement it’s no longer art, it just fills up time the way motel art fills up space. It’s not there to engage you, it’s background.
When someone tells me, “It’s just a movie” what it tells me is that they aren’t experiencing it the same way I want to and it doesn’t bother them. There’s no right or wrong, it’s a subjective experience. I know for me that I get far more satisfaction from worlds I can enter and remain in than those I can only look at from the outside. I perfectly understand that it’s a movie, the part I don’t’ get is the “just.” Films can be magical, say it’s just a movie is like saying chocolate is just an edible plant product or love is just an emotion.
Wise Madness 