The Good in Everyone

It’s Sunday night as I type this, and I find myself in a strange headspace. With such a short amount of time until Christmas Day, my heart feels warm and open. However, with a pretty nifty ice storm smacking into my hometown, my head feels clogged with worry and nervousness for my friends and family trying to get around and get warm.

Why am I telling you this? Maybe because I’m about to go on a strange tangent and I want to lay all my cards on the table.

This afternoon, I got into a brief conversation on Twitter about what sort of year it was in film. A good year? A bad year? Somewhere in between? I eventually bailed out of the discussion. I did so primarily  because I didn’t feel like Twitter was facilitating the conversation all that well, and also because I sensed something else at play. Laced into the tweets was a tone of “Don’t suggest”. As in “don’t suggest title x, y, and z”, “don’t suggest I didn’t get it”, and “don’t suggest I watch it again”. A fair position to be sure, since it likely comes from hearing one or more rebuttals already.

Still, the position that it was a bad year in film runs counter to my own belief to the contrary.

I could write entire paragraphs about what delighted me, what surprised me, what engaged me, and what inspired me – but I’m not going to. For starters, I already have. Thumb through the back pages of this site and you are like to find post after post on a film that made an impression. It’s why I watch and why I write. I watch in the hopes that something will make me laugh, make me cry, or make me think. Always. Whether it’s something I’ve never heard of, of something I’m watching for the twenty-eighth time, I always enter into it from a place of passion and a place of humility. Doing so is what allows me to take what I take from cinema, and taking what I take is what prompts me to write.

So what does that have to do with the conversation, or how good or bad 2013 was at the movies? Only this: That film only gives you what you let it give you, and perhaps the state of things has just as much to do with the audience as it does with the art.

This isn’t to suggest that mainstream Hollywood isn’t phoning it in, since I would agree that they are. However, to that end I’d suggest that they have been for a long time. For many years now, the studios have primarily been interested in cooking a bigger and better cheeseburger – one that can allow them to brag “Over 80 Billion Served”. Once in a while these offerings will do something different, but that’s not what they’re out to do. Understanding that helps keep the expectations in check, much like knowing what one is in for when they walk up to the cheeseburger stand. It might seem like it satisfies a craving, but hours later when one is feeling queasy one can’t say they didn’t see it coming.

What this is to suggest is that maybe, if one feels like they are in the midst of a bad year, it comes down how one chooses to spend their time. Perhaps it’s time to swear off certain genres, certain directors, certain methods of delivery. Perhaps it’s time to find a new tastemaker, someone whose preferences align better. A lot of these critical voices can take joy in knocking around what is bad, but if they’re worth their salt, they’ll also talk-up what’s good. The inverse is also true – that it could be time to stop listening to particular voices. It could be that they love things you don’t, that they are too easy or too hard on what they watch, or they are coming to the medium from a totally different place. Heck, that person could be me – and if it is, happy trails. I won’t take it personally.

Or perhaps it’s time to go one step further: perhaps it’s time to do something else.

I say that from a place of curiosity, since many people who spend hours upon hours devoted to the medium are still able to take good things away from it while a small cluster are not. I say it as a person who understands that we are only put on the earth for a finite amount of time, and that said time might be better spent doing any number of other things than sitting in a dark room for two hours and watching flickering lights. I also say that as one who believes that it’s what we do with the rest of our lives that give the films we watch their swaths of sorrow, joy, beauty, and weight.

In the end, they are just movies…pretty pictures…distractions…trifles. They can come together in good groups and bad groups, but much of that is dumb luck. What’s not dumb luck is individual perception, and that perception is shaped by so many other things. If one side of the bargain isn’t pulling its weight, perhaps it’s time to pay attention to the other side. Or perhaps it’s time to strike a new bargain altogether. After all, as a wise man and good friend once said:

“…go to the park, or read a poem, or eat some french fries with a girl. You’ll be exactly as far along in your appreciation of cinema as you would have been if you’d seen X movie.”