Movie Essays and Reviews

2007-Dec-11 - The Forcefulness of Reality TV, and the dawn of Reality Movies

Going to the cinema is a nice escape for some, and it's a nice dose of reality for others. It all depends on taste. Some people will want a romanic comedy to make them feel good about things (Love Actually), some will like a fantasy where peoples' souls are in the form of animal companions (The Golden Compass), other people will enjoy a truly frightening experience that is unlike any other (Inland Empire), and some people will enjoy lifelike characters at their worst (Margot at the Wedding). Directors have different ways of pleasing or exciting an audience, and it's not a bad thing that people go to the movies to escape reality. Television is often used in the same way, but the rise of reality television has put a strange twist on things- people are escaping reality by putting on their televisions and engaging in "reality" television. Although the fact that these shows are written is supposedly common knowledge, to many people it is still unknown. Others simply don't care. The once 'real' show is now just a poorly acted and poorly plotted half hour waste, and it still engages them. With the Writer's Strike, the thought-to-be dead Reality genre will now make a leap away from it's grave. Well, at least there's always the cinema. Or is there?

Aside from the Writer's Strike causing studios to go into production with pretty awful scripts (not to blame them, though), the reality plague seems to have reached the theater. A trailer recently surfaced for a film called Look, directed by the genius who brought us Detroit Rock City and The Chase. The film takes place in post-9/11 America (of course) and follows five "private" stories of people in random cities in just a week, told entirely by security cameras. The stories range from a cheating high-school English teacher to a lawyer dealing with a sexual dilemma, which is nothing we haven't heard before (sarcasm). It's understandable that most ideas have been done before, and in order to make them fresh and original, they need to be told and shot interestingly. However, a big worry is the fact that this movie will rely solely on the security camera gimmick, and tell very simple stories we've all heard before. On a more pessimistic note, this can spawn a ton of copy cat movies that tell simple stories under the notion that it is "real" because of the quality of the footage, which is just a static crappy camera in the top right corner of a room.

    That idea of the future of film is highly unlikely, as people are more likely to buy television being unscripted than a slew of movies being the same, even if they look like that. The idea is different, too, as this isn't trying to hide that it's fiction. However, by making this film in this way, it is forcing the audience to accept that these are real people because the story is told from security cameras. Because of the low-grade quality and placement of the camera, the film tries to get the audience to be as intrigued as they are when they're watching "World's Most Annoying Baby Sitters That Keep Hitting My Kids."

    You don't need to be in the "reality" guise to make an audience truly care about characters and what's going on. Are the characters in the film Look any more real than the characters in Margot at the Wedding or Juno because the audience watching them from a security camera? Absolutely not. Many (if not all) writers pull from real occurrences in their life or in others', and they use these to construct their stories and characters. I've seen more real people in a Noah Baumbach film than in I Love New York. Sure, that example is a little rough, but the point is still made. There's no reason to use the reality backdrop to force an audience to feel for characters, and it doesn't make them any more real, it just ends up feeling very lazy and forced.

    You don't need to tell people something is real. If it is done well, they will believe it. They'll completely buy it, they'll completely care, they'll be engrossed in it. The reality appearance is just an unnecessary crutch that is a slap in the face to all viewers, it is a disparagement to all whose a viewer. Of course, by some chance, the film could be done very well. But should the audience be insulted by being told 'These are real people so you better feel for them because anything that happens to them was on that camera and that camera and they're being watched'? It's almost okay to have goofy reality shows that mean nothing, but to have a film with simple stories shot on candid cameras expect people to be intrigued off the bat, it's more than forced, it's ridiculous unnatural.

    Any and all characters are being watched, and they don't know it. This is the very subtle thing about things like television and film. It's not thought of very often, but it's true. We, as an audience, are in these characters' world and we're watching them at their best and, more often, their worst. Certain directors really show us these truly slice-of-life moments, such as Michael Haneke does in Code Unknown and P.T. Anderson in Boogie Nights. The former has the wife character dubbing over a scene while flirting with her cast mate. The scene overstays its welcome, and the original flirtatious feeling digs a little deeper than originally thought. The latter has Philip Seymor Hoffman's character trying to kiss Mark Wahlberg's, him getting rejected, and then him sitting alone in his car crying and yelling at himself for being such an idiot. A happier moment graces a character in Todd Solondz's Happiness, in which the young boy character masturbates for the first time. These moments are very private but shown to us very raw, they are largely personal but true moments of life that we rarely see on the big screen. With each of the three mentioned, not only is there the emotion that one is to feel for these characters, but there is also an discomfort in seeing these people in their most vulnerable, whether they be sad or happy. These scenes elicited the same thing that Look is going for, but without being overly gimmicky and being way more meaningful.

There is no point in seeing a film that begs to be taken seriously because it not only takes place in 'post 9/11 America where we have no privacy' (which is another sad and pathetic crutch) but because it features real stories of real people in only a week (stories, I might add, that were done way better in other films such as Funny Games and Dirty Pretty Things, and those similarities were only derived from the summaries of two of the five stories, so imagine seeing the actual stories in action). Once again, there is a chance that the film is done tastefully, but it has absolutely everything going against it, and even if it does somehow manage to work out in the end, there's still no getting around the fact that the director felt the film needed to be told like this, that he needed to make some sort of unintelligent statement on the status of America and how people should wonder if they truly do have privacy.

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Includes film essays and reviews written by Chris Bell.

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