We Watch Too Many Movies
We think things are simple. Life’s complicated.
Anyone who has faced off with a willful four-year-old knows that all victories are short-lived. Anyone who has tried to lose those five pounds knows that they won’t be gone tomorrow. Anyone who got that big promotion or that great job knows that such an achievement brings its own challenges.
So, why do we think that electing our favorite candidate will solve all our problems? It’s because we have spent too much time watching movies.
First, a word from our author. I love movies. I’ve watched and enjoyed hundreds of them. My favorite is The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner Brothers, 1938) when Errol Flynn defeats the evil King John and restores Richard the Lion Heart to the throne. Good triumphs over evil. And he gets the girl!
I’ll let you into a secret about movies — they are fantasies. Historically, Robin Hood was a myth and the real person a mere highway robber animated by greed. King Richard was a disappointment who preferred killing Muslims while on crusade in Palestine. Even Prince John was not realistic as he was actually far more cruel in reality than made out by Claude Rains in this film.
Movies are contrived stories that have to fit neatly within a couple of hours or so. Since exposition is boring — that’s where the situation is explained and the characters defined — screenwriters have developed lots of shortcuts. But the biggest helper in exposition is relying on time-honored character cliches: In westerns of yore, the bad guys wore black hats. Today, they have jewels in their teeth and speak in rumbly basso voices. We all know them when we see them — that’s the point. The good guys are also obvious in their good looks and great hair (we’re dealing in stereotypes here, remember.)
Screenwriters and directors have to move things along far faster than real life. The scene and the characters can shift half-way around the world in a second or two, when the reality is a tedious slog through airports, hotels, bad food, and vile body odor. (Besides a nap, the thing I want most upon arriving after 20 hours of travel is a shower featuring endless hot water and strong soap.) But that’s not the movies.
Nor is the plot. Our recent fixation with superhero movies offers cartoonish story lines where the initial scene offers a lead in for the bad guys, the too-slow-to-be-believable awakening to the evil by the good guys, the initial clash where the bad guys win, the soul-searching of why the good guys lost ground, and finally the climatic battle on the side of the [fill in your impossible setting here] where the good guy(s) vanquish/capture/kill the bad guy(s). All wrapped up in about 98 minutes.
We walk out of the theatre to return to our “humdrum” lives where the real adventure takes place. We turn to movies to escape the intractable reality of not being old enough to do what we want, too old to do what we used to, remembering that we need to finish that project by next Friday, discover that the babysitter never got the toddler to sleep — you know, life.
But we long for the simple storyline of the movies. Good, bad, despair, hope, setbacks, advances, and ever-after victory. Sounds like modern politics because we approach choosing our leaders and what they will do in the same vein. We think that our side is good and wise and when we control the council/commission/legislature/court/House/Senate/White House, our wise goodness will pertain.
Not so fast. Whether we are the good guys or not, those with their own notions of good and bad are still around. If we want campaign finance reform, rich and powerful people will still be rich and powerful. If we want drug addiction treated as a public health issue and not a criminal one, we still have millions locked up or defined as criminals. Our public issues are complicated and always intractable in the moment. Fixing anything takes time, effort, and resources.
As we consider how the world actually works in this election season, let’s approach voting with our eyes open. The road is longer than November 3rd or January 20th. In fact, the road only opens after those dates and all the other people on the sidelines, in the shadows, and online will continue to oppose us.
Complexity rules. At best, we might clean up a mess, but there are more out there.
