Well, I finally saw Dead Man Walking.
I for the life of me don't understand why Sean Penn doesn't
get more acting accolades. Every movie I see him in he's
phenomenal, absolutely incredible.
If you see enough movies and learn enough about the movie-making
process it can detract from the simple pleasure of watching
cinema, because you're reminded of the artifice involved. None of
what you watch is really happening, it's what Baudrillard called
a simulacrum, a copy of something of which there was never any
original. It's fake.
I mean, people walk in from their lives, out of their trailers
on the movie set, get made up, and stand in front of bright
lights and perform these scenes a shot at a time, whith whole
legions of people standing around who are employed to make the
fakery as hard to detect as possible, who use well established
tricks and gimmicks, and their own skills, to make it into
something that a director can later piece together and augment
into a film that looks real. I guess it's a testament to the
skill of a good director that the viewer watches a movie and
perceives a flawless whole, a slice of reality, and it's all
pieced together from the most fake stuff imaginable.
For me, being aware of that can make it hard to enjoy some
movies, even good ones. Little flaws in the finished product
combine with my knowledge of how films are made, and consequently
here and there in the film I'll be suddenly reminded that I'm
watching actors on a film set someplace being directed in their
actions while a cameraman films them. Considerably more often if
the movie is bad.
And, you know, I'll be reminded that I'm watching the
interpretation of a set script, that certain conventions of
scriptwriting are going to be followed and that certain things
will or will not happen based upon the fact that I'm watching a
film of a predetermined length. A film that has to sell to a
public anxious to be entertained, viewers that have general
beliefs and needs that are marketed to and exploited by
producers, who are, in the end, selling a product to a customer.
All of this makes me pretty cynical about cinema in America, and
acutely conscious that I'm watching a marketed falsehood, none of
which ever happened in any real form.
I guess it's a testament to Sean Penn that I never watch one
of his performances and get reminded that he's an actor on a
stage. And it's a real testament to how good of a movie Dead Man
Walking is, because I watched the whole thing without once
stepping back and taking that cynical kind of look at the film.
It was incredible.
I mean, I'm hardly the only person in the world who looks at
cinema this way, and it's why all these levels of meta-criticism
have evolved about films, where the main point of a movie doesn't
seem to be the story itself but the way a director reinterprets
certain cliche scenes or the way a scriptwriter will ignore
certain conventions or the endless hunt to find a new way of
doing an old thing. And it's why some filmmakers seem to have
given up on making you believe the story and instead constantly
call attention to the fact that you're watching a movie.
It's also why people like me will watch movies just for one
actor or actress or the newest CGI, even if we've heard that the
movie stinks. But it's really nice to see a film every once in a
while like Dead Man Walking. I rented it because I heard that
Sarandon and Penn gave killer performances and that Robbins had
done well with it, but I really didn't expect it to be as good as
it was in the round and I didn't expect to get drawn into the
story the way I did.
