Well Fargo Banking

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?

‘The movie

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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”.

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.”