Terry Pratchett had an uncanny ability to isolate an aspect of the world, turn it inside out and drop it into the fantastical world of his creation. The result is inevitably an amusing tale, littered with enough slightly more than thinly veiled references to keep your brain locked in looking for the jokes. Underneath the narrative is a substantive point. It really is a rare talent.
Moving Pictures takes on Cinema. An old man guarding a secret dies, and the next thing you know, people are flocking for reasons they do not understand to Holy Wood in order to follow a dream they never knew they had of creating and starring in the clicks, a sort of moving picture which will be shown on large screens to people eating Banged Grains. Seems innocent enough, right?
Ah, but it is not. It is dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
Supposing there was somewhere reality was a little thinner than usual? And supposing you did something there that weakened reality even more. Books wouldn’t do it. Even ordinary theater wouldn’t do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real. The clicks would do it.
That was what was under Holy Wood Hill. The people of the old city had used the hole in reality for entertainment. And then the Things had found them.
Movies are not like books. That is a trite observation. But, people who write books have long been warning that the advent of this new type of entertainment is going to kill the book, and when the book dies, Civilization dies. Pratchett is offering an explanation about why movies are so dangerous. (Unrelated note: Pratchett writes books.)
As even semi-regular readers of this space know, I am a fierce advocate for reading the Great Books. You don’t need to only read Great Books, but your life will be fuller, richer and more enjoyable if you regularly read them. A question which often comes up is why Books? What if one were listening to Great Music or viewing Great Paintings? Is that the same? As good? This question is difficult, but seems answerable. Yes, listening to Bach or standing before a Michelangelo sculpture has merits akin to reading Shakespeare or Dante. The experience is different, and it provides an interesting twist to the parlor game of ranking Great Books authors. Is Dickens or Austen the superior novelist? Is Dostoevsky or Stravinsky the superior artist? Enjoy.
But, whenever I have had this discussion with students, the conversation inevitably turns to movies. Is there such a thing as The Great Movies? I don’t mean are there movies which are better than others (obviously there are) or movies which are philosophical (again, yes). The question is whether there are movies that can make a claim to being as Great as the Great Books. Is The Godfather a Great Movie in the same way that The Aeneid or Canterbury Tales or The Prince are Great Books?
There is no doubt that great (small-g) movies can be analyzed for their artistry and themes. It is easy to imagine a fascinating discussion, even a good college level course, on the movies of Hitchcock or Coppola. The question is not whether there are things in Vertigo or Apocalypse Now worth discussing. There are things worth discussing everywhere you look. Agatha Christie and Louis L’Amour have amazing bodies of work, but I have never heard anyone make the claim either one wrote Great Books.
Why do movies feel different than books? That is what Pratchett is getting at in the passage above. A book must be filtered through the mind. At a minimum, the squiggly lines on the page must be interpreted by the brain to conjure up words and then sentences and then ideas. Even the most passive reading requires the mind to be working at interpretation and analysis. But, a movie? Can a movie bypass the entire cognitive realm and enter straight into the heart? Are movies so immersive that they can be absorbed unconsciously? And if so, what does that do?
To get at this question, consider three movies which I have recently seen, each of which can stand in for a type of movie
1. Killer Bean Forever. You have probably never heard of this movie. (If you have, I pity you.) A former student told me about it after her boyfriend told her she needed to watch it because it is the best movie ever made. (As I told my former student, it is time to upgrade her boyfriend.) The movie is unwatchable. It has a curious history. Jeff Lew, a name you have never heard, made this film all by himself. It took five years. It is an animated tale about a coffee bean who, like James Bond, scurries around fighting evil coffee beans.
What is curious about this movie is that it is not just my former student’s boyfriend who loves it. It is a cult classic, complete with the modern sign of cultural relevance, a zillion memes. It is a trivial matter to mock this movie, but the more interesting question is wondering why anyone would watch it, let alone love it, let alone, at great risk to his relationship, convince his significant other to watch it. It is 90 minutes which could be spent reading a book. If you want the whole James Bond vibe, Ian Fleming is right there on the shelf. It you want corny jokes, there is Terry Pratchett, whose worst joke is better than anything this movie offers.
Yet, people watch Killer Bean Forever. A perfect example of truly Mindless Entertainment. It is hard not to despair thinking about movies like this.
2. Les Miserables. Another former student has spent years trying to convince me that Broadway Musicals are the highest form of art imaginable. Now theater is not the same as movies (as Pratchett notes). But there is a movie of Les Miserables. I finally watched it. Unlike Killer Beans Forever, this movie was a Hollywood spectacular with a cast of movie stars. It was nominated for Awards, Big Awards, and even won a few.
The summary: watching it is an endurance test. I can see how someone obsessed with Broadway Musicals would be glad that Hollywood took notice and made a Big Budget Production. A person like that might be able to see through the movie for a sort of second-hand enjoyment of the beloved Broadway show. But, for someone just watching the movie, with no particular fascination for the original musical, there is nothing here worth seeing.
The plot is like watching a Spark Notes version of Hugo’s massive, sprawling novel. The novel is a Great Book (if you get past the fact that it really needed an editor to cut the length down by at least a quarter). The movie strips out most everything, leaving bare bones. The cast looks good on the screen; these are stars. The problem: most of the cast cannot sing. For a movie in which all the dialogue is sung, this is a real problem.
Why do people watch this movie? The movie could remind you of a Great Book. It could remind you of a magical night you spent seeing the production on Broadway. Maybe you just like seeing movie stars in elaborate costumes. The movie is, in other words, Spectacle. You could watch Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine or Jean Valjean, and your choice is primarily going to be driven by whether you would rather see him with Steel Claws or wearing a Top Hat. There is nothing Great about this movie. Spectacle is simply a way to pass a couple of hours which will be enjoyed by people who enjoy this sort of thing.
3. Citizen Kane. If any movies are going to make a claim to be Great, surely this one would make the cut. When the American Film Institute made its list of the 100 Best Films, Citizen Kane topped the list. It is thus as close to Officially the best movie ever made as a movie could be.
I watched it for the first time years ago. It bored me to tears. I rewatched it recently. It is not as boring as I thought. To enjoy it, however, you have to sit back and absorb the artistry. It is wonderfully crafted. Orson Welles is clever, both as a director and an actor.
The movie can be enjoyed and it can be analyzed. A conversation about Citizen Kane could sound similar a conversation about a Great Novella, but not a Great Novel. Thinking about Citizen Kane makes it obvious that movies are simply too short to be compared to David Copperfield or Middlemarch.
Even making the comparison to a shorter book, however, there is still the very real difference in the experience. It is, as Pratchett noted, true that the movie just bypasses the critical facilities on its way into the memory. You watch a movie. After it is done, you could take apart the movie and analyze what you have seen, but the experience of watching a movie, even an extremely well-crafted movie, is more passive than reading even the most generic genre fiction story you could find.
Is Citizen Kane a Great Movie? The longer I think about this, the more skeptical I become. Most movies are either the Mindless, truly Mindless, productions like Killer Bean Forever or Big Budget Spectacles like Les Miserables. But, even films which might rise above Mindless or Spectacle are viewed in the same manner. I think Pratchett may be onto something is asserting that movies are not like books at all, that movies weaken reality by going straight from the screen into the brain. You sit back and absorb a movie. You can’t sit back and absorb The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace.
If true, the implications of this for the future of Western Civilization are, to put it mildly, troubling. What happens if a generation rises up that spends so much time watching Hollywood productions that it loses the ability to read?
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