A few weeks
ago walking past the television set, I decided to rest my feet on one of the
rarer moments I sit in front of the box these days. There was a movie playing
only a few minutes in. I love movies. I have always loved movies. I loved
movies so much as a child, the night before a planned visit, felt like
Christmas for me.
I am
forever wanting to reharness that feeling, the anticipation, the what ifs, the
chance to be swept away into something not real and yet often real and possible
too, to contemplate, wonder and be lost or found in something on a flat screen
with dimensions that one can dive into. For me movies were like deep sea diving
or a home away from home by the seaside. The sights, the sounds, the adventure,
the magic and majesty of cinema, the light the shade, the colour and most of
all the opportunity to feel and as Chaplin once said, “..we think too much and
feel too little.” Feeling is everything.
There’s something
about movies. Movies can be accessible to a diverse group of people, particularly
those movies that sit at the centre of popular culture. I’m not sure I entirely
agree with Werner Herzog, when he said “ Academia is the death of cinema. It is
the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars but illiterates”
but I can see what he means on a lot of levels. Film is the storyteller and all
of us can spin our yarns, tell our side, reflect from a raw and truthful place
or take experiences, disappointments, outrage, mis-understandings, love, hurt
or displacement and turn realities and feelings inside out through fantasy and
back into a possible truth too. I can see what he means because film has always
made me feel so much. Film is certainly full to the brim with passion, even if
not blatantly obvious in some cases. Interestingly though, it was through a
University class some years passed that I became interested in the very art of
being “popular”. The subject was an elective. It was simply titled “Popular
Culture” and therein we were “allowed” as part of our studies to watch Soap
Opera’s, very famous movies and television commercials. We read fashion magazines
and popular romance novels, listened to popular music and watched videoclips
and went about diving in deep as Sociologists, gender equalists (new word, my
word - same feminist motif) and training academics. I think anyone can be an “academic”
and should be. In this case the learning took place in a more formal setting,
but all of us can be our own Professors, Researchers and inquiring minds. This
subject was almost turning “academia” inside out and it was a heck of a lot of
fun. It was teaching us to question the status quo, to look for the control
centres, the mind manipulations, a handshake with inequality and ways in which
sometimes adversely, mass popular culture really hits the nail on the head to
subvert stereotypes and bring about positive change. It was a little like Rita form
Educating Rita after her dance with Peer Gynt and My Fair Lady had a garden party with Andy Warhol and turned
up to help us remember that “class” is sorta like a dirty word if we really
want to learn the most. In life the “top deck” or the “bottom deck” or anywhere
in between needs to be interchangeable and free.
It’s
interesting then, that when I sat down a few weeks ago the Movie “The Terminator”
was on the television. Believe it or not, as famous as the movie is, I’d never
given the film, or any of them therein a look in. I’m not as much into action
movies and I suppose, a huge hulking bloke with a semi -automatic weapon wasn’t
something I’d usually be interested in. I
was wrong. The movie was great. I was on the edge of my seat again. Watching “The
Terminator” and a week later a second one, there was something so viable still
to see and well yes, feel. Made all
those years ago, before the internet was born and darkened at the core in some
respects (not all though), there was something a little prophetic in the depths
of something with such mass appeal. All of it was about feeling or not feeling,
all of it was about Chaplin’s notion of machine men, with machine hearts, about
artificial intelligence gone rogue about the overarching “Skynet” (“net” even
being the word before the internet was even a thing), about love trying to win,
about someone or something doing the thinking for us. The message brought home…
great thinkers are also feelers. In some ways, in a topsey turvey way I saw the
beginnings of “West World” in Arnie as he plays “The Terminator.” Being with
love and heroisms, near kindness and loyalty and empathy, even a robot, a tin
man, a “machine” can learn to feel, to love, to want for a happy ending. Though
we can be worried about the twee aspect of happy endings in films, they are
possible, do happen sometimes, on some days in certain ways, rising from the wrestles
and wars within our world, within our minds, within our families, love still
can and should triumph.
