I wish life was like a movie. I know that sounds stupid, and it’s an idea that has been done and overdone (often in movies), but it’s how I feel. Movies and books exist because life isn’t fair, and people always want to have hope that it will be fair. We create fictional stories because it’s how we wish our own lives or world were. In movies, cheaters never prosper, bad guys always get in trouble, and people always end up happily ever after. People find love in the most ridiculous situations. If something bad happens, it always turns out it’s ‘for the better’. A broken heart is always mended. A personal tragedy always makes the character stronger. There’s always fitting music (which obviously the characters can’t hear, but it always conveys the mood of the situation perfectly to those watching from the outside).
Evil people are easy to spot. In children’s movies, they’re the ones with crooked noses and bad hair, who often have weird voices. In comedies, they’re always the ones who look ‘too perfect’; the bitchy cheerleaders, the muscular jocks with perpetual sneers, etc. In action movies, they always wear black, have henchmen and sometimes accents. In real life, the bad guys sometimes hide in plain sight. Yes, they’re sometimes obvious, but the ones who end up doing the most damage are the hardest to spot. They can act nice and kind and wonderful, but then change in the blink of an eye with no reason, and no warning. They not only cause damage through their actions, but cause more psychological damage by making us ask why? What could we have possibly done to deserve this? And even more importantly – what could we have done to prevent it? In movies, people don’t have to wonder. Sometimes they have flashbacks; sometimes they get to change what happened. But nothing so devastating ever happens that they can’t recover from it.
People aren’t as resilient as movies make them out to be. People in real life sometimes commit suicide when things go wrong, sometimes they take out their pain on those closest to them. Yeah, there are movies made about that kind of thing, but are they ever very popular? That question was rhetorical – they’re not. They may win Oscars, but nobody would run out to buy the DVD or recommend it to their friends. The reason is simple – nobody wants to waste their time and money watching something that will only serve to depress them. People want to see movies that make them feel good. If they wanted to see suffering, they could just look around at their social group or read the newspaper – there’s more than enough suffering in the real world.
Movies exist to make people happy – hence the ‘entertainment’ industry. In movies, the right people always end up in love, while the bad guys sulk off to lick their wounds. Lonely people in movies always look tragic and yet beautiful, rather than pathetic and self-pitying. And lonely, geeky people always find love, or learn to love their lonely geekiness. And one assumes that after the final kiss and the credits are rolled, the lead couple doesn’t begin to hate each other and break up (until the sequel, anyway). We assume that after the end, it’s just that simple – nothing else happens. That entire world disappears so that nothing can screw up its perfection. Real life is not a fairy tale. Nothing leaves everyone with smiles on their faces – in real life, there’s always someone who has to lose.
And in movies, when someone misses an opportunity, it either comes back for a second chance, or something even better comes along later. Sometimes that happens in real life, but often a missed opportunity is just that – gone. It isn’t coming back. And sometimes it was the best possible thing, and now that it’s gone, your life is screwed up and you’re left thinking about how badly you screwed up. And sometimes there are even awful people around to remind you constantly about how badly you screwed up.
This all makes me sound incredibly pessimistic, I know. But I’m really not – in fact I’m so much of an optimist that it’s unrealistic. I always have the teensy hope that everything in my life will turn out perfectly like a movie. I dream about having seemingly unlimited funds, being the prettiest girl at the dance, my enemies all getting what they deserve, and having the guy I like eventually realize that he’s crazy about me, too. It’s when these things don’t happen that I feel pessimistic and begin thinking the above thoughts. And even then, the optimistic part of my brain that watches too much TV and has too vivid an imagination is still there, hoping and wishing for everything to be wonderful. So basically, real life sucks. Especially in comparison to the perfect world that exists on the screen. But I think that if we didn’t have the capacity to want that better life for ourselves, we would all just sit at home and cry all day. And by ‘home’, I mean on the ground outdoors, because nobody would be working to afford homes. And we would all look like crap and be ugly criers, because only people in movies can cry and have their makeup stay perfect and their faces not get red and puffy (unless that’s an important plot point).
So really, I would like to thank you, Hollywood. I would like to thank you for showing us the idealistic world where we all aspire to be. And if we end up looking back on our lives, knowing that it didn’t turn out at all like that perfect vision, at least we can remember the good times we had watching our favourite movies.
