Now, in Part 2, we explore why audiences reject movies that remind them that they are, well, fake.

The insistence on a certain type of realism, which in Hollywood comes down to slickness, truncates the audience’s imagination.  When everything is presented in the slickest way possible, it’s difficult to engage with film in a meaningful way – unfortunately, this is what people have come to expect.

Ask people why they go to movies, and many will tell you that they want to get out of their own heads and escape from their normal lives.  Reality is boring.  Movies are fun and exciting.  People love explosive disaster movies, epic battles, and sexy rom-coms with witty dialogue delivered by attractive Hillarys and Astons.  People even love extremely dramatic tearjerkers with overwrought and tragic endings.  What do all of these things have in common: they pull people intensely outside of their own experiences. People obviously want to be distracted…but there’s a catch: they want the intensity, the otherness, to appear as natural as possible.

What does this mean?  Basically, people don’t want to see the strings.  Slick Hollywood movies have similar pacing, perfect mis-en-scene, standard lighting styles, accepted acting styles…heck, we can all name which working actors and actresses fit best in dramas and which work better in comedies.  In order to meet the needs of the audiences fed on a particular brand of realism, movies need to stay within the lines.

Are all movies slick?  Nope.  Some are delightfully clumsy, awkward, and generally unreal.  And that’s okay.  As a matter of fact, it’s what we often prefer here at King is a Fink.

Movie artifice can be denoted by a number of things.  In a musical, there are bursts of song and dance.  In certain low-budget or amateur films, like the cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, audiences can revel in the hand-crafted mise-en-scene: cardboard gravestones, toy space ships, and overly-corseted, washed up stars.   But artifice also takes more purposeful forms: expressionistic camera angles, too slow/too fast pacing, nontraditional casting, unique lighting and set design, etc.  These things can break the spell of a movie, calling the audience’s attention to the fact that what they’re watching is not real.

Melodramas are excellent examples of movies that call attention to their movie-ness. In the 1950’s, Douglas Sirk pushed the melodrama to the nth degree, allowing his actors to overdramatize their feelings, his lighters to over light, and his costume and set designers to use color and kitsch to their hearts’ content.  For some, Sirk’s melodramas call too much attention to themselves, and are rejected.  His films look fake, yes. But they’re supposed to be fake.  Sirk was unabashed in his insistence on allowing film language to present his thoughts and provoke the audience’s response.

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I don’t know that I would have come to love movies so much if it weren’t for the pre-school-esque playfulness of filmmakers like Michel Gondry, the expressionistic angles of Orson Welles, the bold colors and colorful characters of Pedro Almodovar, the strange combination of noir lighting and overwrought drama of Douglas Sirk, the irreverence of Godard, or the outrageous crassness of John Waters.  It is the filmmakers who’ve embraced the cinema as a creative playground, those who take risks in inviting the audience to play along, that have inspired me the most.

The problem with realism, or at least with too much realism, is similar to the problem caused by tidy endings.  When movies only show reality in certain ways, the audience’s imagination, and thus engagement, is cut off.  There’s no chance to imagine, to wonder, to project, or interpret when everything is wrapped in a nifty (and all too familiar) package.

I thought I’d end today with something supremely artificial.  How’s this for artifice: a murder-mystery, musical melodrama by Francois Ozon! Yes, I know it’s in French, but you don’t have to know the language to delight in Ozon’s “8 Femmes”, groove to the music, giggle at the cheezy dance moves, or celebrate Catherine Deneuve’s stint as a back-up dancer.  Stick through it to the end to see Isabelle Huppert’s entrance as Deneuve’s uptight sister-in-law, as denoted by costume, hair-do, and…yes, over-the-top acting.

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Ready for Part 3?