I have a confession, it’s not that bad I suppose. It’s that I am a huge movie buff, yep there, it’s out in the open now. I love them, all genres, any decade, as long as it’s got frames and a story I’ll probably enjoy it. And I especially love writing about them, as seen here, here, or here. But the more I watch movies, especially American blockbusters, the more I start to see how wrong life is portrayed on the big screen. It’s a problem, a big one, one that leads to the ruining of lives, in fact. What? You think that’s an overreaction? Let me explain.

i.Movies tell us that Being good in life is enough to be successful
Here is something that all of my older readers know, and it may come as a disappointment to some of the younger readers out there: In life, people only care about you so much as what they can get from you. You are worthless to a boss if you can’t work, just like you’re worthless to society if you can’t follow the rules. People are nice to you if you produce good work, and this sucks sometimes to hear, but for the most part it’s the honest truth.

Two Offenders:

Movies don’t portray life like this, they always portray some slacker character who has a good heart deep down failing at life until somebody recognizes his good will and subsequently makes him awesome. Which leads me directly to my next point:

ii. Movies tell us that to solve all our problems, we simply should just do nothing
Success falls from the skies in movies, and to be successful you most likely just need to be fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. And for “good people,” karma comes around and rewards you simply for being that “good person,” (See point #1). But countless times in movies we see our hero just floating along on the path of his/her story just trying to figure out who they are and what they’re doing in life and then bam! Some mysterious plot device drops from nowhere that solves all of their problems. They don’t even have to think about it, do anything to cause it, or work in any way towards it. In the end, movies teach us the simple fact that if we wait long enough somebody else will solve our problems.

Offender: Leia does nothing but whine and moan and then when Han and Luke rescue her, she has the audacity to COMPLAIN THAT THEY RESCUED HER!

Lazy Leia

iii.Movies Give Us Ridiculously High Expectations for the Future
Movies love the happy ending, which is great for selling stories I suppose, but real life knows nothing about a happy ending. People suck, lives sometimes end unexpectedly, relationships end in horrible divorce and sometimes the orphan grows up to be a homeless person. Hey, I’m sorry, but it’s true and nothing hollywood says or does about it can change the facts.

iv.Movies Give Us an Erroneous view of Love
I wrote about the HMS effect in another article, but I’ll sum it up here briefly. It’s basically the idea that movies like “When Harry Met Sally” entice people to idealize relationships, causing many people to have an extremely high bar for relationships when it shouldn’t be like that at all. Relationships involve a mutual effort from both parties, relationships require mutual attraction from both parties and lastly relationships involve mutual love from both parties: most relationships are lacking fundamentally in one of those three areas and subsequently most relationships end in despair. Sorry.

-Ahh I know I kept this really short, and I could have expanded a lot more on these topics, BUT I’m thinking about putting a lot more work in and creating an Essay collection. Welp, sound off if any of you guys think it would be a good Idea.

-Cheers!

LP