If Life Were Like the Movies

I have just finished with school, and in turn have finished up one of the most interesting courses I’ve taken in University. It’s called Comics and Cartoons, and is a historical study of the context, content, and form of American comics since World War II.

While I mostly signed up to understand the origins and lengthy histories of certain superheroes, I walked away with a lot more. It was the first time I had studied American history (although the rest of this article refers to North American culture as a whole) from a pop-cultural perspective rather than a regular history lesson. There were a number of very interesting points I’d like to explore, but the one that struck me the most was the discussion of the Simulacrum.

A simulacrum, as defined by dictionary.com is a slight, unreal, or superficial likeness or semblance, or an effigy/representation. Mainly, the telly and the silver-screen. It ended up tying in quite nicely to one of the film courses I took (yeah, I’m going places). The evolution of film from the Cold War onward is an interesting thing to watch. From the insanely ludicrous film noir crime thrillers to the tighter-to-reality family drama, we can actually watch the evolution of the average audience’s mind in its cultural surroundings. With the creation of HUAC and the fiasco with the Hollywood 10, one could easily argue that much of Cold War cinema is merely a product of paranoid American authorities and therefore irrelevant in discussing the truth of the dark cloud that had descended upon the people of America. But given you aren’t begging for the answers to be spoon-fed to you, the sub-text says more than enough. It’s a live-in-action deterioration of a people’s faith in its government. Watergate, Vietnam, the Korean War: discontent with the American government is certainly nothing new. As that trust in a great power to continue to lead America into greatness dissolved, HUAC was a last minute desperate attempt to hold onto what was left of it. And in the end, it wasn’t much.

After HUAC was disbanded, American cinema took a new route: the people started looking to film for more “real” and “relevant” stories, to dispel the myths established by the American government shortly after World War II. Families ceased to exist in “Leave it to Beaver” perfection; instead, the familial structure was deconstructed from the inside out. James Dean does an excellent job in both Rebel Without A Cause and East of Eden portraying a teen tortured by his own “uniqueness” and identity (Despite Rebel ending in a pretty sickening “Hollywood ending” way, but in those years it was still acceptable). From then until now, movies have continued to reach further into reality, to make the experience as real as possible for the viewer.

There is a reason that books are adapted into films so regularly. Both of them work on a very similar level. Authors write in order to create a believable world for the reader, to submerge him into the writing, to experience the life and actions of the main characters. However, the rules on “realism” have been quite lax. The setting must feel real, the characters must feel real, but the malleable element is time. Characters do not have meaningless conversations in books. Each and every single word uttered, every slight action serves a greater purpose. Essentially, it is real life condensed with all the boring parts cut out. Movies have adopted a similar scheme.

The exception to this case is the relatively young post-modernist movement that rejects all the cliché images and pat endings. They explore the human condition as a chaotic purposeless existence. I’d recommend Keane as an excellent example of a movie that turns several preconceptions of cinema in general on its head.

I digress: this brings us back to the original idea if the simulacrum, the world of images. Movies for a great deal of time struggled (and continue to struggle) to portray characters, dialogue, and plot-lines as true to life as possible. Yet, somewhere along the line, the audience lost track of who was copying who. How many times have we heard people say, or have said ourselves, “This is just like the movies”? This is especially relevant to the younger generation, who now attempt to build their lives around teen dramas and comedies.

We’re submitting to this world of images. Hollow and purposeless images. There are no real roots in a real cause, only the photographs of a larger event that we’ve entirely lost sight of. The real truth here is our lives are not like the movies, but the movies are images of our lives. We shouldn’t be taking cues from the big screen on how to be, on what to expect from other people, or how we deal with our own lives. The horribly boring and mundane bits are what make the great moments in our own lives feel genuine and powerful.

So what’s the point of all this? Well, the other day I was talking to my mum about my name. My middle name, to be exact. I asked her where she got the name, hoping maybe for an interesting story. Something worthy of a character in a book or a movie.

Turns out my mum’s gynecologist’s name was Antony-Michael. My brother’s middle name is a variation on Antony and mine is Michelle. The following conversation ensued:

Me: Wait – we were named after a gynecologist?
My mum: Yep.
Me: Did he play some sort of integral role in our births?
My mum: No, not really.
Me: Does he even know?
My mum: Nope.

There you have it, folks. Life is anti-climactic, often bitter, and has a very twisted sense of humour. And that is the truth of the matter, but it certainly is far more real than anything out of a movie, and I guess in its own way maintains a kind of impenetrable aura that our pop-culture can only hopelessly attempt to mimic. Don’t surrender to the simulacrum. Remember, your lives are infinitely more interesting than the movies you watch, because YOU are REAL. And the next time someone says, “This is just like the movies!”, you be sure to get all uppity and say “No, this is what movies are made of”. Genuinely. Everyone loves a cheeky ironic bastard. I think.

God…a gynecologist? Seriously. SERIOUSLY.