Many years ago I worked as a manager in a local movie theater (as in: as semi-unskilled job for a high school senior…). I took this job mostly because I had (and generally still do) love movies. There had always been something about the experience in watching a movie which was almost magical for me. This was just before I had even heard of Coleridge’s term: willing suspension of disbelief.
I have wondered about how many specific kinds of experiences can be shown to be this ‘out of body’ experience. I have found that, for me, this takes place when watching movies, the theater, reading fiction (and even on some occasions non-fiction), listening to music, and on a few rare occasions even when experiencing great, or notable architecture.
The reason I am writing about this today is that this ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is either part of or related to a lot of experiences we partake in, and one rarely if ever hears about this process. Why does it exist, what are the antecedents to this sort of experience, and are there some soon to be future extensions of this idea?
While it has never happened to me, I can imagine being in the thrall of a great story teller… I can imagine that Homer (of some similar Greek bard) may have been able to render his audience into an almost hypnotic spell with the throes of Achilles.
The thing about even this very ancient example of epic poetry is that it works on the same level as any modern fiction. Once you are ‘in’ this ‘experience’ you can live vicariously there. I know that if you watch people leaving movie theaters you can easily see this taking place, if only as an after effect to some blockbuster thriller. Often men walk out with a bit more swagger, and seem more ostentatiously ‘protective’ of any female acquaintance they may be leaving with. This is more than merely homage to ‘Walter Mitty’, or even homage to day dreaming.
If you think about it, many of these modern entertainments resemble most closely our dreams versus any sort of reality.
I have always found that looking at movies in a more critical manner can, as often as not, show us what some of the dreams of the movie’s time are. This is a sort of non-rational way to see what is important for any culture at a specific time. For example, this method of evaluating movies could easily prod you to consider questions like: “why are there so many musicals in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and so few since then?” “Can simply looking at the number of movie westerns in a given decade signify anything of importance?”
I guess, as a teacher, what I am thinking about is, why do we spend so much time trying to teach critical evaluation skills about literature but not cinema? I think that while there are many similarities in how both forms operate, the differences still exist (there are things which one can do in a novel which would be impossible to recreate in a movie, and vice-versa…
So, as a close to these vague thoughts, I wonder why literature is covered in k-12, but other forms of aesthetic output (such as: Cinema, Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Theater) are not presented to students in the same way…
