Features :: We Need the Unreality

Question: Do you watch movies because they’re fun or because you were bored? Or (there’s another category) because you get to say, “Oh, I watch action / horror / art / tiny, badly made films on subterranean flora” and make people think you have a life and you get to use words like genre?

If you belong to the last category, you probably hate — sorry, loathe ‘commercial films’. A commercial film being, of course, one that:

a) More than 10 people have heard of.
b) Is in colours other than grey, black or blue.
c) Has a happy ending.

(Unfortunately, most films are commercial, i.e. they are distributed through those theatre-things where you pay to watch them and the producer or director does hope to make enough money to pay the cast and crew and eat and buy things to wear to the Oscars.)

So, commercial films are unrealistic — they don’t depict reality — there aren’t always happy endings in ‘real life’. I’m sorry, most of us lowly, ignorant people who form the masses, who are shallow enough to actually watch the movies, aren’t really that fond of reality. We don’t have ‘real lives’ that we’re anxious to see reproduced on screen.

We’re the uncultured type who watch movies after a day of staring at computer screens filled with numbers that don’t really matter to anyone, talking to grumpy people on the phone, nodding every time our sadistic bosses breathe for fear they’ll make us work overtime. The only recreation we have is A complaining about her useless children and B bitching about the manager.

What I’m trying to say here is we don’t want reality! (NO, NO, NO!) We’d rather watch something different from our normal lives (HAPPY PEOPLE, HAPPY ENDINGS, HAPPY, HAPPY). Movies are what we use to escape from reality — one and a half hours during which we don’t have to remember that we have something called work to go to the next day or taxes or local trains .

We like to watch people with nice hair that never gets messy, who wake up with make-up on. We like to watch people with perfect features and perfect skin and perfect homes. We like to know that however badly fate treats the main person (that’s “protagonist” for all non-commercial people), it’ll always turn out right in the end. It saves us the nail-biting and leaves us free to enjoy the tears and whatever else. Poor, pretty princesses meet princes and marry them and live in castles forever and ever. Ugly ducklings become swans. You get the picture.

You can go find reality on a television screen (ha-ha). We don’t need to find the meaning of life in dark, artistically shot films with cryptic dialogue and (brilliant!!) directors with unpronounceable names. We live reality and we’re not very keen on it. So do us all a favour — don’t be all condescending, patronising, etc. We need the unreality.

Closet commercial film lovers: put all your Citizen Kanes behind where you can’t see them. Numbers do not lie. You are safely within a vast majority of people who do the paying for tickets and make these movies popular. MAJORITY WINS!