Are movies like malls where we can wander and pick things of our choosing up in a chart, pay and leave happily for having found what we came for? What are our reactions to movies, especially to those which get a lot of advertising and space in media. Do we expect something of movies we choose to watch? Enjoyment, escape, dreams, stories, anything else? A surprise or something specific which we are paying for not to be disappointed but leave the theater content and entertained. Movies play an important role not only as something to be shown in theaters and on TV to pass the time but something very complex, maybe more than meets the eye. The help to create an empire of merchandise, news, extra on top of the cake and it is fun to make movies, I’m sure. So I am not spoiling the fun, I am just wondering visuals among which we live, power of business and how well organized can a machinery to make profit be. Are visuals used making our perspectives more narrow? Our possibilities in making pictures, thoughts of what can be done, why something is done and what is good?
As it is always in action movies there is good vs. bad, probably the most used juxtaposition as is the all mighty solitary hero and heroine against a mass of ordinary folks who cannot keep up the speed. Heroes and heroines can make a good story with turns that interest a crowd enough to pay to see it, if that is what is enough. What interests to such extent that up to repetition story of all mighty hero has to be told similarly repetitiously with similar kind of twist as American fathers bond with their sons by throwing ball? That a movie makes a blockbuster as planned and how a concept of blockbuster movie is so luring that it over and over again finds viewers making hundreds of millions of dollars? One can question the buzz around it but one can hardly stop it. Just like that, impossible. We are in a whirlwind of media and its choosing of visuals. Is it too obvious and more importantly are we as viewers and consumers that obvious? So it seems. To see something that could actually happen but is bigger than we are, still somehow within reach, attractive as a fantasy and a dream, maybe not as every day scene in real life but saving first America and then the World. Something already may be lost.
What do viewers witness or are viewers being used?
Jurassic Park never did it for me in any way, but here are couple of interesting articles concerning women in science, role models and movies, how movies impact the viewer:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/in-praise-of-jurassic-parks-dr-ellie-sattler “ When the park’s power fails to come back on as expected, she doesn’t sit in the emergency bunker waiting for rescue. She makes a plan and grabs a walkie-talkie, heading out to find the power switch.”
http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/jurassic-world-feminism.html