Ordinary rape and murder just doesn't make it anymore. It's much better to have ultra-violence, chainsaw massacres, X-rated Draculas, and continents sinking into the sea with the entire population lost, at the very least.
Jon Davidson, New World Pictures, on what makes a good movie
Most people who read Dante's Divine Comedy, read only the first part, the inferno, and they consider boring the other parts. Sex and crime has always captured our attention and stimulated our imagination. To stimulate our imagination it has to contain elements of present reality or it has to be apt to appear as historical, or as absurd. The question of what "does make it", concerns these three options.
ReplyDeleteThere is always a psychological need to fill in our sense of proportion. Our sense of proportion has to adapt itself to a new situation, if a new size and a new measure unit is about to define the new situation. During a globalization, which is felt by everyone (and not only by Columbus and some educated families) exactly this occures.
Fantasy is like a counterpoint to reality. It produces images apt to size and to seize reality, like a blind man groping with his stick.
In the last century through tecnology there happened changes which can allow the question "Is there something new under the sun?" Our sense of proportion is deeply stressed. It began with the World Wars, it continued with TV screens spreading around the world looking at Armstrong's "little step", now we have the internet. We receive pictures from all around the globe, we burn continuously enormous quantities of energy, we are a huge agglomerate of 6.000.000.000 human beings. And human beings always consider danger. No wonder if imagination is thirsty for experiencing proportion in daydreams.
Things like 9/11 before 2001 apparently were considered only by directors of bad movies, but not by strategists. Am I wrong?
Do we become insensible and dulled by all this?
I don't know.
I hope Jon Davidson was ironic and sarcastic. It is not true that his formula is the only successful. It is only one of the formulas which can lead to success. And ONLY if contrasting other formulas to be used.
Movies are driven up by the bids of video games. My forecast of a happy ending is: Movies will come back to their roots with simple and romantic stories, this will break the spiral of violence.
ReplyDelete@cs
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree. I only was asking myself, before this will happen, which might be the "positive emotion to elicit" that can make overdone horror attractive? Is really only negative emotion involved?