MOVIES - Teaching Myself Another Lesson

One of the most important things I have learned in my life is that things which provoke powerful emotional responses are important and should be carefully examined.  Dickens, Shakespeare and Aeschylus were part of  the popular entertainment media of their day, just as current movies and television shows are part of the popular media of ours.  I do not doubt that in Dickens' times there were those who hunkered down over their Greek Classics muttering imprecations against the cheap magazine serials that were degrading the weak minds of the populace.  Some works of today's popular media will join the classics in immortality but most will fade into oblivion like the majority of the works of the past.  Understanding their place in literature and history is why I watched the last two Star Wars movies and Twilight this week.

I saw the first Star Wars movie in the theater when it came out and it was the brainless space opera spectacular I had always wanted to see.  I thought it was great, and then I was done with it.  All the Star Wars ripoffs that followed were a real delight to me, but I had little interest in the actual Star Wars movies.  I have looked at the toys, read a collected volume of the comics, and at last have seen all the movies, all in an effort to understand its place in our culture and in our future history.  The first movie was like a bright loose watercolor sketch in strong colors that jumped out at me with its surprising energy.  As the years passed that sketch was worked up into ever more vast canvases in which every square centimeter is uniformly detailed and every pebble and blade of grass is given the same value as the main figures - making the image uniformly flat and lifeless.  Picking out the salient detail, the important part of the scene, becomes a chore not worth undertaking.  I think what Star Wars does provide, its cultural strength, is a framework - it gives its fans a lego set to play with, to build their own story.  The picture on the box is a guide but the fun lies in building some crazy unwieldy thing of your own and zooming it around making swooshing noises.  It's hard to see how it will be viewed a century from now but what is certain is that Star Wars is a triumph of marketing, not of literature.

An effective fantasy takes simple and common human experience and extends it, personifies it, magnifies it into an epic.  Twilight expands the idea of  First Love into a torrential storm and life-threatening disaster.  While I doubt I will ever have the strength to see more than the first movie or read the books I felt it was important to know just what the attraction is.  Twilight is a well-made movie, with strong visual appeal.  The dialog and characters are consistent and believable in their slightly unreal world and, while I never choked up or had to wipe away a tear, I felt it was very effective in conveying its ideas.  It doesn't really get any more complicated than being an expansion of the fears and anticipations of  being a teenager with adulthood looming on the horizon - learning things about life which are rather frightening and which really do have the power to ruin your life if you don't figure out how to deal with them.  The secondary details of environment and other characters gave a grounding to the fantastic elements, and it effectively conveyed the feeling of moving into an unknown world while those around you are living in an ever-receding normalcy.  Twilight's strength is in its simplicity, and its comprehensible depiction of a common emotional experience.  Its survival as literature seems to me unlikely, but it is an important component of our culture now.