When I read a book I'm happy to take the bad along with the good and do the work it requires to sift through what I feel may not be relevant to me in order to find bits of goodness, but when watching a movie I'm not as lenient. I expect a movie to make sense immediately. I want a plot with no holes, I want characters that I can identify with, and a linear flow that I can easily follow, and then at the end I want it bundled up in a little cohesive ball that gives me the warm fuzzies. My movie mind has been Americanized. I use the tv to disconnect, I read when I want to engage. As David Foster Wallace says about commercial movies, "they don't try to wake people up, rather they make our sleep more comfortable and our dreams so pleasant that we will fork over money to experience it."
Thanks to
this guy hosting Manly Men's Movie Viewing and Open Discussion Night (or Manly MVAODN for short) I've decided to change the way I watch a movie and quite honestly I'll be changing the type of movies I watch (we could all use a little less Hollywood in our film diet). We watched a
David Lynch film (my first) and after about 45 minutes of disclaimers from our host about how the work of an auteur is meant, somewhat like an abstract painting—to be enjoyed as an insight into the mind of someone and to enjoy the experience—and maybe or maybe not the final product, but taking in the good and the bad and realizing that it might not end up in that tidy little ball of resolution I'm waiting for. So with an open mind we began our movie. I won't even pretend that I understood it, but I did come to realize that here I am two days later still trying to sort out the plot details in my head and that may be more enjoyable than if it had resolved every question within ninety minutes.
(excerpt from David Foster Wallace's essay David Lynch Keeps His Head)
