I love movies, but...

Movies are a social evil, even the ones that try to bring about social good. I think of the last 3 movies I saw with Don Cheadle in it. Hotel Rwanda, Manic, and last night Crash. All three were great movies, very provacative, all there made me think, made me reflect, and shocked me with their honesty. See them all, I'm tellin' you!

In all three movies some of, if not all of, the characters are living pretty unenviable lives. Everyone in Rwanda was getting slaughtered or seeking refuge in the hotel hoping not to be slaughtered. Everyone in manic was a teenager suffering from a different sociopathic disorder. In Crash every character was dealing with the trials and tribulations of getting along in the ever-hot melting pot in today's Los Angeles. In movies like these, you always get the feeling that your problems aren't so bad, in comparison. And movies have always been like this. [expand]

Part of the wow-factor in seeing a movie like Traffic, Carandiru or The Piano, or any movie that tries to depict the ugliness of a society comes with that part in the movie where you say to yourself, "Wow, I never knew life could be like this." In some distant land, whether from the past or from some distant land Brazil, or be it from the imagination of the writer, movies always show how bad it is/was somewhere else. Then you see the movie, reflect on it a little bit, and a few of us who appreciate our good fortune briefly think, "Man, my problems in comparison aren't so bad."

But then you start to think; I start to think. Do I feel any better? Firstly, whenever you compare your own troubles with the more dramatic problems of characters in a movie, you immediately start to feel invalidated. It's almost like seeing a child fall off his bike and scrape his knee, than he begins to cry. His mother runs over to him and says, "Shut up! At least you have legs to ride with!" How much better does the child feel at that point, do you think?

Even worse, feeling better because you know other people feel or felt worse seems pretty bourgeois. Sitting high above the world of struggle, from my ivory tower I watch the sad lives of other civilisations on my large screen playing beneath me. After watching them suffer for a few hours I turn around and go back to my world. Back to my property, my possessions, my business, all those things which I can now appreciate even more. Filled with the fear that life can be as bad as it seems on the screen below me, I make every effort to gain even more security for myself, gain more possessions, more property, lest they begin to make such movies about my life.

So clearly making me appreciate my current social status more isn't the best way to motivate people to change the world, and I don't think that making people feel guilty about their possessions is at all a better motivator. Ultimately, these movies are just for our entertainment, and we exploit the pain of the characters for our own benefit. That's really all these movies do. I'd be lying if I said I didn't love movies though!