Post-September 11 Film Viewing, Revisited (1 Viewer)

[DaveGR]

Hehe Right Jeff. Goodtimes.

And Yes I do believe emotion is a normal reaction to films,thats the point of film, To draw out those emotions,wether it be laughter,or crying,or whatever,but when you get up,you know its just a movie. I agree with emotion during a film. Very true.
But When its all said and done,when a person dies who I like on film,I feel, but when a person dies that I know,its on a completly different level, as im sure is true with anyone.

 

[Scott_lb]

John,
I agree with you- I think wasn't clear in my post. I actually am glad that these two brothers were able to capture this horrific event on camera, and am aware that there were actually filming for an entirely different reaon (the firefighters). By "disgusting", I meant the actual actions that took place by the individuals on the plane and the consequences that followed. I simply cannot stomach watching multitudes of people jump out of a building from the 100th floor because someone thought it would be a great idea to fly a jetliner into a building to prove a point. I'm glad the event is on tape- it serves as a reminder of just how cruel people can be and the consequences that can follow.

 

[Josh Lowe]

So who was offended by the building exploding in Matrix Reloaded? It seems like some people are out to find a tragedy to rule their lives.. 9/11 apparently fits the bill. Letting a tragedy rule your life and influence your decisions on things as trivial as posters and movies is a little extreme, if you ask me. Maybe if you're a WTC survivor or lost a loved one on 9/11 I'd understand a little more..

Besides the WTC, the Pentagon was also attacked as well as the fourth plane that crashed in PA. Is Airplane now in bad taste because it makes light of airline tragedy? Where does this end?

Movies aren't real, I don't see the need to avoid watching them just because something similarly tragic happened in real life. What about any number of war movies with realistic depictions of violence and death that mimicked real life events? Or over the top "fun" violent movies like Kelly's Heroes?

They're just movies, folks.

3) Star Wars killed thousands of people (Stormtroopers and Imperial functionaries in fun, family themed PG entertainment 26 years ago. And we all cheered. Because it's just a movie.

Star Wars killed millions or perhaps billions of people when the Death Star vaporized Alderan in between jokes like "Let the Wookie win" and "A little short for a stormtrooper, aren't you?" Where's this hatred being aimed at "American cinema" for this film? I smell an agenda.

 

[Chuck Mayer]

Star Wars killed millions or perhaps billions of people when the Death Star vaporized Alderan in between jokes

The Alderanados (sp) were traitors and deserved to die by the billions

I cheered then as well

Hahahahaha,
Chuck

 

[Andrew 'Ange Hamm' Hamm]

Maybe I'm getting a little too "deep" here. Please keep in mind that I'm studying for a Master's Degree in Theatre right now, as an actor and a playwright, and that I'm accustomed to picking apart the minute details of critical theory. If I'm getting too intellectual and boring, just ignore me or tell me to shut up. Still, this remains a kickass thread.

I'm hearing a lot of repetitions of the same points:

1. "It's just a movie."

2. "You can't let the events of 9/11 rule your life."

3. "What's the difference between different kinds of movie violence?"

I feel I've answered all of these in previous posts, but let me try again.

1. No such thing. Art is art, art is real, and movies are most definitely real. Symbols have tremendous power, and filmmakers know that. Some use those symbols to create a lasting effect, some use them for only momentary effects with no long-term emotional commitment or consequences. I think I have just recently realized that I have no time for the latter. All movies have their throwaway moments of amazement, thrill, or laughter. It's just that B&B films such as Armageddon consist of nothing but those moments, two hours of them strung together like a music video. Like I said before, going to the movies (or to the theatre, or to the gallery, or opening a book) should make your brain turn up, not down. All artistic endeavors should. It's possible to have a big, fun adventure movie without shutting all logic and moral sense off.

2. In my lifetime I have lived within spitting distance of both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and I am going to be affected by 9/11 for the remainder of my life. So are you. Everyone is, to varying degrees, regardless of how much denial you're willing to live in. That doesn't mean "the terrorists win." I'm not hiding in a closet with bottled water, plastic sheets, and duct tape. But this is probably the most significant geopolitical event since the fall of Saigon, and it happened just up the road from where I used to live, and from where my family and best friends live and work. Guess what: the world is different now. Movies, television, theatre, and other performing arts are reflecting that, and so are the viewers' perspectives. That's really what this thread is about: my realization that my perspective has changed so much. Armageddon was just the catalyst.

3. No offense, but the Shakespeare and Star Wars parallels just make no sense to me. Star Wars is not in any way realistic, and that is expressly what I'm talking about here: realistic mass destruction portrayed as tongue-in-cheek. The Stormtroopers who are killed are "black hats," they have no faces, they have no characters. The people in Star Wars who die don't look like your neighbors or people you might meet on the sidewalk, and they don't die in ways that we have watched on television news. And the humor is nothing like a B&B film. If you can't see the difference between realistic tension-breaking humor (common in action films) and the B&B "humor," I'm not sure I can explain it to you.

As for Shakespeare, I just don't see it. Even the most humorous characters in Shakespeare's violent History plays treat the violence seriously. Falstaff is full of bluster (and wine) during the climactic battle in 1 Henry IV, but when he has a moment alone with Hal, he utters the play's most famous line: "I wish 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well." (V.i.) Likewise, the comic soldier Fluellen in Henry V is disgusted when the French sneak behind the English lines and kill the pages: "Kill the poys and the luggage? 'Tis expressly against the law of arms; 'tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert..." (IV.vii.) Shakespeare and his contemporaries used violence and comedy side-by-side, but the threat of death was taken very seriously at all times.

I'm not trying to start a crusade against movie violence. I'm just saying that I don't think I will ever be able to watch a movie that treats humans as cartoon characters, violence-wise, again.

 

[Josh Lowe]

As for Shakespeare, I just don't see it. Even the most humorous characters in Shakespeare's violent History plays treat the violence seriously.

Your statement was "The "line" I'm talking about is using human tragedy as a vessel for mindless entertainment."

And that's precisely what Shakepeare's plays were when being originally performed. Performed in markets during the day to provide mindless entertainment for the masses of people, often filled with lots of bawdy and crude sexual references and over the top tragedy to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I love Shakespeare and "he" is my favorite writer, but let's be honest about what his work was in its purest and original form.

 

[Holadem]

But this is probably the most significant geopolitical event since the fall of Saigon

Sorry, I had to take exception to that. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR are far more significant and impactful on the world (as in that insignificant space outside of the US borders AND the US) than Saigon and 9/11 put toghether.

--
Holadem

 

[Glenn Overholt]

I saw the towers for a few seconds during a movie a few nights ago, and I cringed for a few seconds, recalling the utter horror of 9/11. I don't think that I would have cringed any less if the buildings were in another country, except that the news coverage would probably have been a lot less, and the stations here would have played it down.

Since then, two governments have fallen, and there will probably be more before it is over. I don't think that one wall and the U.S.S.R. can compare, as there were not any deaths associated with it, especially 3k in one morning.

Having said that, I know that the movies are not real, but they are supposed to affect us, or we would not like them. Unfortunately for some of us, seeing any building destroyed (even in fun) that was anywhere close to a real disaster such as that can hit home like it shouldn't. If you can look at a shot of the towers and not be affected by it I think that you should think again.

Glenn

 

[Ray Warner]

Ange, fantastic arguments all the way around, though I agree with Holadem on his point.

But, I'm a little taken with your argument that movies, being art, must therefore be taken seriously. I'm completely speaking for myself here, but a good chunk of the reason I enjoy movies as much as I do is for the suspension of belief that they allow. While symbols may have trmendous power, it's also critical to approach these symbols from the correct viewpoint if you want them to have the desired effect. This extends even to "real" movies; I've heard Jackass: The Movie described as brilliant and a sure sign of the downfall of human civilization, sometimes in the same review.

By the same token, style over substance can be pulled off if done correctly - Pulp Fiction, Evil Dead, Pitch Black, even Gangs of New York all spring immediately to mind. A movie need not have any "deeper" meaning to be enjoyable. There's a metric ton of violence in these movies, and they seem to approach it with about as much emotional weight as any of the slipshod popcorn movies that have death on a greater scale. It seems a little weird, given the events of Sept. 11, that human tragedy is used for human entertainment, but it comes back to a cardinal rule of storytelling: You need conflict to tell a story. Whether you want to approach this in a reserved form, where a single gunshot can seem incredibly violent in the context of the film, or do it Rambo-style and let God sort 'em out, there has to be some level of danger for anyone to care much. Violence is the quickest, easiest, and (arguably) the most effective way to go about it, since it's something everyone can relate to even on an instinctual level.

Then again, I can rally on and on about context all I want, at the end of the day it's still personal opinion. If 9/11 has opened your eyes wide to the point where meaningless violence is more disturbing to you than the average layman, there's a pretty good argument that this is a good thing. It doesn't affect me the same way, however. If anything, it's more cathartic than it ever was.

On a side note, I've had a little more experience with real-life blood and gore than most people who aren't in some kind of medical profession. This story is a pretty gross, so the easily sqeamish may want to stop reading, but it makes an interesting point, so please give it some thought. I'm not trying to gross anyone out, but after this happened, my view on movie violence was permanently altered:

Until I was around 13, I was very squeamish to movie gore. I disliked blood, killing, and violence in general. It's not that it really bothered me on a personal level or anything, but I was really the only kid I knew who genuinely wasn't interested in seeing all these films that our parents had forbidden us to see. I watched Pumpkinhead when I was twelve and it made my stomach turn.

That lessened between 13 and 15, but at age 15 I accidentally went through a 9-pane glass window on the back door of my parent's house. Omitting some nasty details, I severed one of the main arteries in my right wrist and nearly took the hand off.

We've all heard the stories of severed arteries spurting blood several feet, and probably seen movie depictions of it, right? They're bullshit, all of them. In real life, it's a lot worse.

When all was said and done and I was safely in the hospital, my father wound up with the unlucky task of cleaning up the room where this had happened, and he wound up (somewhat morbidly) taking a few pictures because he couldn't believe how much blood there actually was. When he showed these to me a few weeks later, I laughed out loud. It looked incredibly "fake". Had I seen it in a movie, I would have been cracking up at the stupidity of it. "Nothing ever looks like that in real life."

After that, violence in movies never looked right to me. It made it much easier to take, even made it funny most of the time, because it just looked so wrong! There's exceptions to this, but it put even the most vapid and violence-laden films at enough of an arm's length that they no longer bothered me in the slightest.

I'm 21 now, and that still stands with me. Unless a movie is out-and-out reality footage, I'll be more mortified by what it's trying to depict that the level of authenticity with which it goes about it. So, when we get something like Sum of All Fears which is obviously not trying to portray any real emotional heft, the discomfort of the idea of a nuke going off sails right over my head. It becomes something like The Bride hacking up dozens of O-Ren Ishi's bodyguards in Kill Bill. It's a plot device, and those people were written into the script in order to be killed, which served to propel the plot foreward.

But, that's just me and my viewpoint. I figured I'd pitch it in.

 

[MarkHastings]

To all that think movies are "just movies", answer these 2 questions:

1.) Why did they push off the release date on Arnold Schwarzenegger's film "Collateral Damage"???

Hmmm? Perhaps because it dealt with terrorists blowing up a building in NY and was going to be released around 9/11/01?


2.) Why did they push off the release date on film "Phone Booth"???

Hmmm? Perhaps because it dealt with a snipper and was going to be released during the exact same time of the D.C. Snipper shootings?



If you still movies are "just movies"...think again because even studios realize that movies have a deep emotional impact on people.

And to compare movies like Star Wars (for example) and why all those people can die, yet we don't have any gripes...let me just say that I can easily listen to a metal song and sing "Kill your mother! Kill your Father!", but I doubt that I'd be wanting to listen to that same song after one of my parents funerals.

It's called "perspective".

 

[Andrew 'Ange Hamm' Hamm]

This is turning into a completely different discussion than I originally intended. Isn't it great?

And that's precisely what Shakepeare's plays were when being originally performed. Performed in markets during the day to provide mindless entertainment for the masses of people, often filled with lots of bawdy and crude sexual references and over the top tragedy to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I love Shakespeare and "he" is my favorite writer, but let's be honest about what his work was in its purest and original form.

I don't know of any literary or archeological evidence that indicates Shakespeare was consciously creating "mindless" entertainment. I also doubt you'll find many theatre scholars (myself included) who would consider any of his tragedies "over the top" in any context. I do, however, know that all of his contemporaries and many of his successors were creating plays that were simpler, sloppier, and far more mindless than his. I know the context of Shakespeare's audience as well as anyone and better than most. "What shall we do today, darling? Troilus and Cressida or the bear-baiting across the street?" I also know that immensely popular entertainments can easily have lasting value without sacrificing much in the way or honesty or artistic integrity. Shakespeare's ability to blend bawdy humor with tragedy, switching genres and styles from scene to scene, while also putting in a plug for the merits of women and the downtrodden is not a self-conscious effort to create popular entertainment: It's sheer artistic genius the likes of which have arguably never been seen anywhere else. It's also a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Shakespeare, Plautus, and Tennessee Williams are good examples of extremely popular entertainment with lasting artistic merit. So are Spielberg and Cameron, makers of thrilling adventure stories with real humanity. It can be done, and I think it should be done more often.

Ray, your repulsive story made an excellent point. Life-changing experiences might predictably change our lives, but the way they are changed is often a mystery. Some find violent films to be cathartic now. I sure do; I just watched Die Another Day for the first time and thrilled to every moment. It's the artistic core (such as it is) of Armageddon that I find objectionable. I don't know how I can make it clearer than I already have.

I probably should have mentioned this before, but there's no way I'm going to crusade against violent movies. I'm playing a tiny little part in a martial-arts flick shooting in Richmond this summer.

As for the Saigon thing, I'll grant that was overstated. I was kind of trying to make a point: 9/11 was really big, big enough to change the lives of billions.

 

[Max Leung]

It's sheer artistic genius the likes of which have arguably never been seen anywhere else.

You mean in the context of England? I'm sure you don't mean to ignore great works from China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Japan (a novel written by a lady-in-waiting at the royal court), Greece (Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, etc.), ad nauseum.



This discussion reminds me of how a group of teenaged boys sniggered and laughed out loud during the battle scenes of SPR. Having never lived a "meaningful" life, everything to them was a big joke in the movie. I'm sure, 10 years from now, they'll think differently of SPR, when their hormones are reigned in and when they live a life where they finally have something to lose.

 

[Bill Williams]

I have to agree with John's posts earlier about Independence Day. The way the first act ends, back in 1996 was extremely intense to watch, but at that time it was on-edge thrilling. But when 9/11 happened, as the Trade Center towers fell, the one thing that went through my mind was David Arnold's music from that sequence in the film, and it was just downright frightening. To this day I've not been able to watch ID4, and I don't know if I will again.

As for the Spider-Man teaser trailer, I was able to get that on a magazine DVD, Movie FX, and it was extremely haunting to obtain that trailer. I had e-mailed the editor of the magazine about it, and he informed me that it wasn't supposed to be on there, that he thought his magazine was getting the full theatrical trailer instead. He only caught the error after the DVDs were produced and he had been testing it for sound quality. Thankfully, the studio didn't blackball him for what appeared to be a distributor's error, but it's there on the disc in full glory.

Nowadays, whenever I see a film from the last 30 years set in NYC, it's hard not to take a "Where's Waldo?" approach and try to spot the World Trade Center in it - films such as When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, the Superman films (as New York doubled for Metropolis), even Saturday Night Fever come to mind. It's extremely discomforting to take that approach, I have to admit.

 

[MarkHastings]

Just like I can't imagine hearing the words "Pearl Harbor" and only think of a nice tropical location.

I mean, how many even have trouble with the number 9-11. I can't help but think of the WTC if a cash register rings up $9.11, or the lottery numbers are 911, or anything else that turns out to be that number. :frowning:

 

[Marvin Richardson]

If you still movies are "just movies"...think again because even studios realize that movies have a deep emotional impact on people.

There's an easy answer for both of those, and it has nothing to do with movie studio executives caring a whit for the emotions of the audience...they knew that people who might otherwise go see their films would not because they would not want to see a movie that was so close to something that really happened, and they would therefore lose money. It's all about money.

 

[MarkHastings]

It's all about money.

Of course it is, but just because those scenarios could be argued with the studios money making, doesn't mean that it is 100% that way. I'm sure there were a lot of people that had enough compassion to hold off on the release.

Hollywood isn't 100% heartless.

 

[Josh Sieg]

Movies are stories. They depect how we as humans handle certain situations. Some good, some horrible. They're not meant to harm people. Compare movies to art, depending on your taste, you might like it, or you might not. That decision needs to be made by yourself, not movie reviews, or whatnot.

If people are taking offence to Armageddon, for whatever reason, thats their fault.

Are people crying about MASH because it took place in the Korean war?

Maybe I'm just a young kid who doesn't know much, but I would take the approach by saying, its a movie, if you don't like it, don't watch it. I'm sure if I could see through your eyes, my opinion would change.

Just to clear up, I wasn't being sacrastic at all. Just stating my opinion.

 

[David Preston]

I was just telling my wife the other night it's not the horror fims that scare me it's one's like Sum of all Fears that really could happen. I'm talknig about the bomb at the football game. Not Ben Afleck surviving that bad helicopter crash. I really like that movie it is among my favorite I have.

 

[Andrew 'Ange Hamm' Hamm]

You mean in the context of England? I'm sure you don't mean to ignore great works from China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Japan (a novel written by a lady-in-waiting at the royal court), Greece (Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, etc.), ad nauseum.

This is getting off topic, but...

In fact, William Shakespeare is the most produced playwright in the world, in any language, in all countries. He has been for about three hundred years. His works have been translated into almost as many languages as the Bible. Including Klingon! It is pretty much the accepted consensus opinion among international theatre scholars that Shakeapeare is the most influential playwright of all time. That doesn't make it gospel truth, but it's worth mentioning.

I should probably add that Shakeapeare is not at all my favorite playwright, nor English theatre my favorite; those honors go to Chekhov and 19th-century Russian drama. But facts is facts, and when the Minister of Culture for the People's Republic of China comes to Virginia Commonwealth University to guest-direct a Chinese play and he chooses to do an updated version of King Lear, it kind of opens your eyes to Shakespeare's wide influence.