Watching Movies is a Skill

Warning: I’m about to out myself as a seriously awful film snob. You will probably want to punch me right in my smug snob face. Very light spoilers for the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie follow, as well.

I don’t understand paintings. I really do enjoy looking at good art, I think, but I need someone to tell me what makes a painting good or bad.

“See,” they say, “how the brush strokes on the tiger flow fluently forward to create the cohesion between the stripes, and the illusion of fur?”

“Ah, yes!” I nod, seeing it only after they explain.

“Now look,” they say, hands pointing at the picture, “and see how the artist’s use of color shows the depression that she felt during this period of her life, and the utter and bleak hopelessness that pervades all of her works during these years.”

“Right,” I say, “of course. I understand.”

But I don’t, really. I only understand because it was explained to me, not because I felt it in my heart.

A few months ago, I took a Sunday afternoon to walk through an art gallery in Rochester, NY called the Memorial Art Gallery. It’s a deceptively small place, and examining all the pieces takes only an hour or two. This, of course, has no bearing on my enjoyment of the experience; one short film can outshine a three-hour movie just as a short walk through highly curated art outshine flipping through the “Random” option on Imgur for half a day.

I walked the halls, taking the time to examine each and every painting and sculpture that I saw. I tried to formulate the feelings behind the piece, to understand where the artist was coming from when they created their work, and then I took a look at the actual description given by the artist, or ascribed to it by scholars. More often than not, I was completely off the mark. It struck me then that I did not understand the basic language of physical art. That is not to say I cannot learn it, only that I am ignorant of it as I am now.

Flash forward to a months later. Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2 has just come out and my mother, an avid superhero film fan, asked me to take her out to the movies as a birthday present. I had seen it already, once, but I was more than happy to see it again because, to put it simply, I love that movie.

The jokes almost all hit , the action is fun and flows smoothly without too many jarring cuts, and while the plot itself is, in my opinion, about as bland as it can get, the overall experience of the film puts it easily in my top films of the year so far. Hell, maybe it’s the best in a few years. Not sure yet, need some time to mull it over.

Now, I studied film in college. Go on, laugh it up. As those of you who have read this blog before know, I am not currently working in the film industry. That’s certainly for the best, because I’m simply not insane enough to set foot in that ego-destroying business. To those of you who claim sour grapes, well, you may not be wrong, but a summer of making films at Universal’s back lot taught me it simply wasn’t the place for me.

Now, I may not have picked up a job in the industry, but I like to kid myself that I understand the visual and artistic language of film. I love movies that have deep sub currents of metanarrative and that use their visuals as part of their storytelling motif.

(Looking at you, American Psycho, you glorious bastard of a film. Christ, I could spend half an hour talking about the intro scene and its role on the viewer’s perception of Patrick Bateman both before and after the big reveal at the end… but that’s for another time.)

It was while I was sitting in the movie theater with my mother that I realized film watching, in itself, is part of the art of cinema.

Let me reign it back a little and admit something a little embarrassing and probably TMI: I cry at the end of Guardians 2. Part of this, I’m sure, is due to my own lack of a father figure in my life. Never knew my dad, never felt the need to. Now, I don’t want to spoil the ending of the movie, but I will say that Guardians 2 explores Peter Quill’s connection with his absent father in an unexpected, touching moment. Fireworks are involved. And yeah, I cried. Both times I saw it, in fact. I think the visuals, character connections, and soundtrack really come together in the last few minutes to make an incredibly bittersweet ending that ties up a lot of loose ends for Peter.

And then I looked at my mother, who has watched and rewatched the original Guardians probably ten times of her own volition, and knows the characters and plot inside and out – and found her completely unaffected. She didn’t remember the names of several characters – characters she had been introduced to ten times over in the first movie – and yet she thought it was “very fun!”

I was reminded of how some of my friends watch movies – cellphone in hand, texting or browsing the web, looking up once every thirty seconds to say “whoa!” or “huh!” and then turning back down to their phones. I ask them how they liked the movie, and they say “Oh, I loved it! I just wish it made a little more sense. It was hard to follow” or “I don’t really understand why that one guy died,” or my personal favorite: “Why were they all so mad?” (That last one was asked by someone watching a war film. No, that’s not a joke – somehow the presence of soldiers and gunfire didn’t tip my friend off as to why they might just be a little bit upset)

Now, before I continue, I want to emphasize that I’m not just waggling my you-know-what around saying “Ooh, look at me! I’m great! I’m unique! I’m the only one who truly understands art!” Far from it. I’m the guy that walks into a movie based on a long-running series without reading the books first, who asks his friends who the characters are when they first appear on the screen. “Was that guy in the comic?” I’ll interrupt a show and ask, and my more educated friends will fill me in on some crucial details that I was ignorant of. I’m not saying I’m anyone special, really.

I am, however, claiming that some people are better at watching movies than other people. Some people, perhaps more educated in film-making and the creation of visual mediums, are able to understand the themes and undercurrents of films better than others and, if some people can be good at it and others are bad at it, well, it must be a skill.

Friends of mine know I have an irritating quirk: to judge someone’s opinions on movies, I ask them if they enjoyed Ted 2. If they say yes, then I disregard their movie opinions pretty much right away. If you were to call me a dick for that, well, you’d probably be right. Still gonna do it, though.

Ted 2 was a movie in which people got hit by stuff, or smoked pot. Those were the two jokes in that movie. I believe it was a movie made for people who like to “turn their brain off” at the theater, something my ADD-riddled mind is perhaps unable to do. There are no deeper themes, and no interesting discussions to be had after watching it. Instead, there are conversations like “Did you see that guy get hit by the spaceship?” and “Ha, there was a lot of weed in one scene and they made a reference to Jurassic Park, which is a movie that I have seen and enjoyed”. 

Well, Seth MacFarlane did kind of equate the struggles of African Americans in the 21st century to a literal teddy bear, something so mind-bogglingly strange that I blocked it out until doing some research for this little essay. Okay, back on point…

The ability to really watch and comprehend a movie is not something that some people are born with, and others are not. I know how these people feel. They feel just like I did when I walked around the art gallery, scratching my head and ogling at the watercolors. I could tell something was going on, something “artistic”, but I didn’t have a language in which to describe it. I couldn’t put those thoughts swimming around the back of my mind into coherent words to describe what I was looking at and, because of this, a lot of the meaning of each piece was lost on me. The ability to really watch and comprehend a movie is not something that some people are born with, and others are not, though.

I think the reason that movies like Ted 2 succeed is the same reason that Adam Sandler movies still make returns at the box office: people don’t know how to watch film in the same way I don’t know how to appreciate paintings. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it makes me sad that when filmmakers do something clever, like pull off a really complicated trick it goes right over the audience’s head.  

So, here’s the solution. Get ready, America, because we’re about to Make Hollywood Great Again: Film Comprehension classes.

Ok, I can tell by the look on your face that you’re not completely on board, but give me a moment to explain.

Writing is one of the oldest human art forms and, as such, we are taught to understand reading and writing from an early age. We learn English is school, take tests on our comprehension of assigned readings, and (supposedly) learn to differentiate good writing from bad writing.

Your milage on that last point might vary, I suppose.

To a limited degree, we practice similar education with other forms of art. I think all of us can remember studying political cartoons in history class at one point or another, and being asked to interpret and understand the events contained in them. I distinctly remember writing a short essay on the boston massacre based on a political cartoon drawn the year that it happened. We are taught to seek themes and structure in all forms of art.

Well, except film for some reason. Even though film sales and book sales run neck-and-neck. Even though films are more easily accessible, and take less time to digest than a novel. Even though people actively seek out movies and ignore books.

That last point is what gets me. Kids like to watch movies. Hell, I’m pretty sure everybody likes movies. So why not teach film comprehension in grade school? Let kids understand what they’re seeing on screen. When a filmmaker pays homage to a Hitchcock film with a Vertigo Shot, is it wrong for me to want other people in the theater to understand the rich film history that the director is drawing inspiration from? Isn’t that why we tell High Schoolers to study Shakespeare? Isn’t that why teachers actively curate examples of good literature to share with their students?

The point is, we need film comprehension classes. Films are more accessible and, in most cases when grade schoolers and high schoolers are involved, more sought-after than their literary counterparts, but that doesn’t make them any less important. If anything, instilling a history of film and cinema culture in the minds of young students would foster a desire for higher-quality film making and story-telling. Hell, it could cause a massive upset in the film industry, leading to better, richer films being produced, and for dull, repetitive and boring works to be discarded. 

People like movies. Is it so wrong that I think we should want to understand movies, as well?

This rant inspired by three shots of awful whiskey, and my mother. Love ya, mom!