The Goddamn Movies

They can ruin you. The movies can ruin you because they romanticize everything - be it poverty, terrorism, the US presidential elections, diamonds, or sex - of which only the last two can be romanticized albeit marginally so, because you could be talking about blood diamonds and loveless sex, or rape.

Our minds are impressionable. Impressions are made far more easily than they are broken, and they are made on everyone. Impressions are like clay moulds that keep denting and reshaping themselves.

In an era where the ill effects of pornography are visible on the ogling faces of 13 year old boys, we've begun to think about our lives like movies, with our sorry selves being the protagonists and all the important people in our lives playing supporting roles (don't forget to include them in the credits). 


We make believe to feel better, which is an old strategy, but applied differently today: in the older days, make-believing meant fantasizing your hopes, and drawing them towards yourself by as much strength as your mind could muster. Today, it means conjuring up obstacles and breaking them down, and making tiny little things out to be so huge that unless there's a hero to slay the dragon, the helpless lady in the tower can hardly climb out.

It's easier to live in a romanticized world because it makes things seem less drastic and life-threatening. Perhaps that is a good thing to the extent that we don't go berserk and dysfunctional at every tragedy that hits; in fact, this romanticizing can actually be helpful in such cases. But as with most things, the curve dips at some point, and the benefits decrease as the cost grows - romanticizing important issues is wrong.

Take a chill pill, you'd think; movies are just for entertainment. I agree. I love watching them. I laugh, cry, criticize and roll my eyes to my heart's content. But I try hard to make sure I don't forget that they are stories. There are a lot of people out there who do.

Good movies, in my opinion, are those that leave a lasting message. Movies that convey a point, or remind you of reality, or that just stay in your head because you could relate to them so well. There are as many happy endings as sad ones, but not in the movies - in the movies, there are only (I concede, mostly) happy endings, and this can be a misrepresentation of real life.

And if our lives are indeed like the movies, then we need to know who to finally credit, when not to pull a trigger, when to wipe off hidden tears so that they don't show when the lights come on, and when to laugh at ourselves in the short lived saga that is this life.

'I...live my life as I would like it to be...like a novel.' - Isabel Allende