We had a full house last night for an Oscar’s party of sorts (TV is upstairs in a little loft area so people weren’t forced to watch). I was sad because Titanic couldn’t win again; it was such a great film that they really ought to give it Best Picture every year in perpetuity. I was confused when a neighbor sung the praises of the movie Rushmore and its genius director, Wes Anderson. The movie was fun but if there were profound ideas in it, I’m not sure what they were. Books, on the other hand, have been much more thought-provoking for me. Is there any reason to expect that books are a better source of serious thinking than movies? One possible theory is that people who have profound thoughts shy away from the committee and group work characteristic of filmmaking. Even if Joe Director finances a film himself and has 100 percent authority he will still spend a tremendous amount of time and effort communicating his ideas to subordinates, many of whom will misunderstand what he says. Thoughtful writers, by contrast, tend to be solitary figures who stay at home in the Connecticut woods (Philip Roth, Edward Tufte). One of our friends is a truly brilliant and original scientist (i.e., more or less average for Cambridge). This tenured professor says “I don’t like to read, write, or teach.” What does he enjoy doing? “I like to think.”
Would anyone like to take up my neighbor’s position that Rushmore is as profound as any book?
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Would anyone like to take up my neighbor’s position that Rushmore is as profound as any book?
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Well, I could argue that it is more profound than some books but I would generally agree with you that a lot of books have more depth, just as a lot of movies have more depth than some books (for example, pulp fiction books might not compare to say, the experimental movie works of Bunuel and Dali, or some of the great movies of all times)
I can’t defend Rushmore, but David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” made a much deeper impression on me than almost any novel except Gravity’s Rainbow… and I don’t think his insights (about hypocrisy and decadence, to oversimplify) could have been conveyed so well in prose.
I’m definitely a serious reader (though I’m not a Philip Roth fan) and own something north of 1500+ books.
That said, I would certainly argue that many films are as thought provoking, often more, than many books.
A few reasons.
Like a short letter vs. a long one, a film is, when done well, a dense yet compact medium – screenplays are much shorter than the average book and much much shorter than many “great” books. With this compression can, in the case of many hollywood films come banality, but in the best cases (a David Mamet movie for example) the compression means every image and word counts – often more than once.
– Images and sounds offer additional senses to the words that are spoken in conveying thoughts and ideas. For some thoughts and some ideas this is not very helpful (interior monologues are rarely well conveyed on film) but for many, many others the images and the sounds of the film are critical elements illustrating and enhancing the thoughts and the story.
– people learn in different ways – some by doing, some by reading, some by hearing. Films offer another means of engaging people – which works very well for many, less well for others.
Take one of the Oscar winners from last night – the best Documentary, “Born Into Brothels” – this is a great film (highly highly recommend seeing it – especially for anyone who loves photography) but nearly impossible to contemplate without the visual component. It is a film about image and the creation of image – about finding and discovering beauty in even the most dire of places (red light district of Calcutta).
A book has been assembled of the photographs from the children about whom the documentary was made – and while the still images are powerful, moving and very beautiful, the film uses sound and very skillful editing to great effect to enhance the appreciation of the images – you see moving images then the still image that was captured in that moment – something impressive and amazing even without the context around the film.
(see http://www.bornintobrothels.com for more info and to support the charity the film’s producers have set up)
Shannon
Film-makers often want to deliver a message, but practical and commercial concerns prevent them. Films are typically expensive to make, so the message has to be watered down in order to reduce the likelihood of offending part of the audience. There are exceptions, of course (e.g., “Passion of the Christ”)…it is a gamble.
The message has to be simple enough for a person to appreciate by the time the movie is over. One can not reasonably expect a viewer to fork up a second ticket to understand the finer points of the movie.
It does not help when people like Samuel Goldwyn (of MGM, obviously) pronounce “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”
More generally: “Leave politics/sex/religion/etc. out of art.”
I’d say that film is not a very good medium to convey abstract, complex ideas, which is what you are talking about. OTOH, the best movies can capture slices of life and states of mind, and put you “in the middle” of an experience in a way that words can almost never capture. For example, go watch “Memento” or “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” and tell me if you don’t get from them insights about love, memory and identity that you could perfectly call “deep”.
Like PaulJ said, movies can be profound without conveying complex ideas. They can be profound in the way the poetry can. If you wanted to be analytical about it, you could summarize Housman’s Terence in one sentence: Life sucks so plan for the worst. Would you really argue that that poem is not profound despite the fact that it contains no complex message at an analytical (rather than emotional) level? I loved Rushmore because of the characters. It’s like stepping into the mind of a very strange and interesting person for a few hours.
Philip: what do you mean by “a book”? Do you mean a novel? The Feynman Lectures on Physics? Scripture? A dictionary? A collection of short stories? A screenplay?
Me, I’ll happily take what I got out of “Conan the Barbarian” over what most English-speakers seem to get out of Nietzsche.
I think some of the confusion I’m seeing here (which Philip seems to have deliberately evoked) has to do with the phenomenon of people using the TV as background noise and movies as escapist entertainment. By analogy: if your whole experience of music is using whatever genre of pop music you’ve learned to prefer from your friends as background music, you might have a hard time imagining someone seriously listening to music. Let alone finding music thought-provoking. Same goes for movies.
Would any of you seriously argue that a painting or photograph or symphony cannot be as thought-provoking as a novel?
The ability of movies to reach a broader audience, and to create a group experience, allows them provide for more profound discussions than books (it’s really difficult, once outside of school or a book club context to find an immediate friend who is reading the same book as you. And it’s hard for me to recall everything in a book that I really loved a year after reading it). For instance, nearly everyone in my circle has seen Hotel Rwanda, which you’ve blogged about, but very few have picked up Philip Gourevitch’s excellent book on the same events. Thus, without the movie, we would be less enabled to engage in a dialogue about the situation in Rwanda in 1994, or in the Congo today.
Books have been around for 500 years and writing for even longer, but movies less than a hundred. Perhaps profundity comes with age. Movies are like a “preparadigmatic” artform – they don’t stand up to critical analysis so well, but have very powerful emotional influence, because they are a new and not completely explored medium.
Rather than Rushmore, I would recommend “Amores Perros” – a few years old but I just got around to renting it.
Rushmore is just as good as Goodbye Columbus (the book, since you used Roth as an example & I am a fan of both). The scene where the Bill Murray character visits Max at his dad’s barber shop, which is obviously not the brain surgeon’s operating room that the kid lied to everyone about has a moving balance of dry humor and sadness.
Compare fiction with fiction, look at an art form for inherent value, not simply as a husk to transmit ideas. (Not that ideas are absent in Roth or Anderson). The Life Aquatic, Anderson’s new film, has some raw humor and pathos equal to Roth’s mature work containing similar themes, say Zuckerman Unbound. The honesty and futility of the Murray character in this work seeking “revenge” as well as the farcical aspects of his efforts are very much akin to the protagonist of The Joke, by Milan Kundera, whose hero goes for revenge by attempting to cuckold an old enemy.
‘The movie
I’d always been preferred books and assumed they were more interesting because an individual is more creative than a committee. Over the last 2 years, I’ve chnaged my mind. I’ve been working with a very talented and highly intelligent web designer. He prefers films to books and get much more out of films than I do. This is because he thinks visually. Perhaps people from a geek backgrounds (like PhilG) are predisposed towards books because they are more atuned to the written than visual?
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