whatever gets you through the night

So as I went about the rest of my day after posting my thoughts on Synecdoche a little voice was yelling at me in the back of my head.  I guess it was only fitting that my write-up on a movie about copies  would feel very much like the movie itself.  Much like the experience I had when watching the film my thoughts feel like a scatterbrained excretion of the many strands that have been running through my head lately.  Sorry.

I would like to go back and look at something I almost tacked onto the end though, that being the reason I feel I watch films or really engage with art in the general sense.  Most people agree that what they are looking for when they enter a cinema.  They want to be entertained.  They want to forget about their disappointing lives.  they want to escape.

However when it comes to films whose goals are not that of escapism things get a little trickier.  Often those who don’t understand how I can like the kinds of movies that I do say that I like to go to them because “they make you think.”  This seems silly for a number of reasons.  First off, what constitutes thinking?  I know that far more “thoughts” were running through my head when I sat through Slumdog Millionaire than when I became almost sedated while watching Silent Light.  Also, this kind of reaction is completely indicative of the anti-”art” attitude in America which is directly tied to the anti-intellectualism that breeds here as well.  The bottom line though is that I do not go to the movies exclusively to think.  I go for a reason that in some ways is the exact opposite of escapism and in some ways is quite similar.

But why do people want to escape in the first place?  Well, because life is hard.  People work meaningless jobs for meager pay.  They come home to people they feel don’t love them like they’d wish.  They are constantly told by the media of people in even worse situations in other parts of the world.  Given all of this it seems only natural that what few good things, or easy things, or exciting things there are in the world would be magnified and blown up to create a utopia where those other things don’t exist, or at the very least, don’t matter.

I however can’t run away from the world.  I already feel so removed from it as it is.  Not that I don’t experience the same downfalls that the escapists feel, it’s just that our coping methods differ greatly.  I can’t shut off.  I can’t ignore things.  I can only hope to come to some kind of terms with things.  I watch movies, or read books, or listen to music that reminds me that I am not alone in this.  This does not mean realism in the Neo-realist sense.  I love watching Astaire and Rogers in Swing Time.  Even though it is silly and was very much made as a tool for escape, there is something in it that hits a chord with me.  Under all the deco gloss, there is a very real heart in that movie.

I don’t know if my coping method is better than most.  I like to tell myself it is.  I like to say that by dealing with some form of reality or truth we can help change the problems, or at the very least acknowledge they are there.  Acknowledgment may not lead to the change that many had hoped would be possible through cinema, but maybe it can at least foster understanding, which might makes things easier to take, if not better.  Or maybe that’s just the peace of mind that I try and sell myself.  I don’t know.

I would like to leave you with a quote from author James Baldwin:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.  The first idea was acceptance, totally without rancour, of life as it is, and men as they are: in light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace.  But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.  the fight begins, however, in the heart and now it had been laid to my charge to keep my own hear free of hatred and despair.

-From Notes of a Native Son