Why We Watch Movies

This article is more or less what my prosaic (and therefore practical) title suggests. There are many schools of thought on this subject, which extends beyond the attraction of movie watching, since that which attracts us to a movie has something in common with that which attracts us to a book, painting, play, etc. They are all a form of art. But here we may have a problematic assumption since not all movies (books, paintings, plays) can be considered art, that is, something that aims toward an aesthetic end.

I'd say that most watch movies not for the aesthetic experience, but to be momentarily entertained. Going to the movie theater is sometimes a supplementary social event subsumed into an entire night-out. It is a form of therapy, not unlike the purgation that Aristotle talked about in his defense of art; but entertainment does not remove or purge dangerous emotions, it suspends them for as long as the individual is being entertained and then releases them again, subjecting the body to a constant flux of emotions. Yet, it may have something in common with the kind of pleasure we extract from a lover whom we fight with often but refuse to break up with.

Once upon a time movies were interpreted, over-interpreted, analyzed, over-analyzed, judged, renounced, banned, expurgated, censored, psychoanalyzed-which meant that they were important, relevant, defiant, innovative, avant-garde, recalcitrant-but now they just are. They sort of hang there in contemporary American culture like tinsel after New Year's. They express the conventions that audiences grow to accept (each epoch has its own corresponding conventions) but what is missing today is that crafty, artful touch that so often incorporated new themes, new movie stars in the days of Hollywood past. Those movies no longer have relevance for us, their themes and their sentimentality become stale to modern viewers who understand nothing but being bought into something. Movies have always been commercial, but now they are being processed like our meats: bigger, faster, simpler, and more inferior.

This generation of moviegoers is perhaps the first to have grown up almost entirely on television, that is, except for everyone over sixty. That means they have grown up, been bred, by poor art and reject everything else. Artistically they remain babies because, as Pauline Kael says, they fell in love with the babysitter-television. And V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winning author, in his short story One Out of Many writes, "...to some extent Americans have remained to me, as people not quite real, as people temporarily absent from television." From this I say that the tract which once separated movie magic (art) and television banality, now houses both so that the only thing that separates them now is screen size. Avatar, a film which has just broken the world-wide box office record, is a spectacle of the most cutting edge technology, nothing more (all movies in and around the top 10 are special effects related). They are the apotheosis of television.

So the question of why we watch movies can be answered by saying they are a little bit better than watching television, and why we watch television is because it offers us intensity greater than the one in our lives. It is a fictional world giving us an experience similar to the one kids get at Disneyland, or the one that adults get at a casino, where they are enveloped by fantasy and hyperreality. I have said that there is a small, and in some cases no, difference between television and movies; however, this was not always true. In Pauline Kael's 1970 essay Movies on Television she explains that: "Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise. We almost never think about calling a television show 'beautiful,' or even complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates without beauty."

The same is now true about both. The "absence of beauty" is the absence of art, and the absence of art is the end of the need for variety, for quality, because modern viewers want neither. Of course, not everything that we enjoy has to be art, we can easily extract pleasure from a decent or even bad movie, but I guess the point is to understand what you are watching, otherwise when you do come across something of higher quality you will miss its potency.