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i so often think about how life would feel and look like had movies not existed. would it be better? worse? pretty much the same? I at least too often find myself watching myself in third person, as if through a screen. you should be the main character in your life, life is a movie, all that stuff. but what about living life as is? is that even possible?
Sources:
Article from Morgenbladet (Norwegian) - “Filmkritikeren som så for mye film” about David Thomson
Article from the Atlantic - “movies are good, actually”
Transcript
Bad movies ruin our lives? Imagine you worse a passenger princess on a very scenic route. Linger by the cranberries is playing on the radio, looking out the window you feel like the main character. You imagine a camera capturing it all, straight cinema. Life is a movie better what does that even mean? The movie critic David Thompson stopped criticizing individual movies and is now criticizing the movie as concept. He writes that we let the lifelike distract us from life, that it has cursed us with an eternal movie, capital M. Movie here doesn't mean a single film. It's more so a mode of cognition, a way of imagining the world. He thinks that by no, most of us inhabit a condition of movie. We slip into a low level fantasy mode where the world presents itself as itself as seems to be watched rather than situations to be lived. And not everyone agrees with him naturally. An article in The Atlantic argues that movies grease our souls, shock us, move us, make us laugh, and keep our hearts from slowing to a stop. And that's probably the real dilemma. That the medium which has trained us to live inside an eternal movie is also one of the ways we feel most alive. So how can we use a medium built for fantasy without letting it replace life itself?
