Via kottke.org, I read Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere article, “Addressing the didn’t-see-’em factor,” about how movies, particularly those mighty specimens nominated for Academy Award Best Picture, are meant to be transcendent:
...movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They’re not traveling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They’re supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They’re supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul.
Wow, that’s arty. On days when I’m feeling like an elitist twat, I may agree. But it’s wishful thinking because I don’t see anything wrong with movies as pills that make me feel better.
I have several action-adventure flicks, stupid comedies and horror movies in my DVD collection, precisely for when I want a quick emotional lift—genre classics like Die Hard, Ghostbusters and The Evil Dead. Let’s read a much more eloquent version of my point by Pauline Kael, from her essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” published in the February 1969 issue of Harper’s:
A good movie can take you out of a dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Sounds downright pharmaceutical to me. A sentence later, Kael qualities that when she writes of “a good movie,” she truly means something that’s maybe a five on a 10-point scale:
The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
As an irritation aside, I’m also not big on Wells lambasting “regular people” who “are living such insulated and cut-off lives that they can’t be bothered to go to some of these [non-Hollywood] films.”
But what about people other than those who live in or near major cities, such as myself, Wells and most professional film critics? It’s tough to see good movies in this country’s smaller places, period, and I can’t blame folks there for not willing to take chances on riskier, independent fare. I was talking to my Mom last night and she mentioned that she and my sister had taken the roughly 30-mile, 45-minute drive from the southwestern suburbs to the east side of Cleveland for the nearest—likely only—theater in the area showing Persepolis. They loved the movie but it’s not a commute they’re making regularly. My brother and his wife have it worse: they live in Wyoming and have to drive an hour to reach the nearest civilization, in Colorado, to see non-blockbuster films. Not quite as easy as hopping on the A/C/E train after work to see an art-house flick at the Film Forum within 15 minutes.
In sum: eat it, Wells. Moviegoers, enjoy the highbrow, enjoy the lowbrow, when you want, if you can.