So I’ve been struggling with this issue in my head since the Mulhall article on Aliens. And now after reading another film critique, I have to ask myself. “When is a movie just supposed to be a movie?”. I found myself several times when reading Mulhall underlining things and saying to myself, “No, that’s just how horror films work.”
Now this is not to say the same for the Double Life of Veronique and it’s review. But why do we as critics have to always find something? I guess I see it like if you’re looking for trouble you’ll find trouble. Are we really finding things the director put in to make us think about life and philosophy? Or, and this is what I think too often, are we creating that narrative for ourselves, and ignoring the true intensions of the author.
Again, I don’t want to take anything away from the Kieslowski’s work or his intensions, because I believe some of the metaphors mentioned in the Kickasola article where in fact intentional. But where do we draw the line between someone just trying to make an entertaining horror flick and someone trying to make social commentary about feminism. I don’t know many feminists, but I don’t remember them lining up to go see Alien. I do remember a bunch of Sci-Fi geeks with half beards and pony tails outside the theatre though. Hmm…
Maybe if there was a film that was just an empty room with a clock ticking and the second hand was moving backwards. Now there’s a film with MEANING!
..jaMEs
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October 13, 2009 at 1:39 am
Casey Addy
I think this is one of the epic questions of our time, and I believe one way we can look at it is “we see what we want to see”. So, if it’s our job to look for things in movies, we’ll end up looking at the movie with a very clever eye. But if we just want to turn on a movie and absorb it, then I think that’s an OK thing to do. We all get what we want to get out of something. And with movies, since they are so accessible to all of us, I think this readily applies.
But then that makes me think about what we were told about we are going to be getting out of the class. From Chad, we “will be changing the eye that is looking at the interactions we post on our wall” [epic citation from this blog]. With that in mind, we’ll have this type of eye when we’ll be looking at interactions now, and be able to bring about the same type of critique as the movie critics do. With that point in mind, we’ll be able to see that an interaction is more than just an interaction, and be able to pick apart the hidden reasons for an interaction, even if the maker says “I just felt like it”. This seems analogous to “a movie is just a movie”. We’ll be able to get close to see the social commentary behind the movie and other types of interactions, so I think we opened our own madness – it’ll probably never the stop – the being able to analyze everything.
Design just isn’t design anymore.