Surprisingly few people know: movies are not like real life.

In Hollywood, they can’t just *suspend* disbelief, they have to have it leaping out of a helicopter while being shot at.

Via J.E. Sawyer, another good example of how real life is NOT like action movies.  I remember that Cracked did a great article about this sort of thing once.  No wonder we have a “gun culture” in this country; our movies depict them as having magical powers!

It reminds me of the movie Last Action Hero.  A lot of people hated it, but personally I thought it was brilliant.  If you haven’t seen it, what happens is: Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a generic action movie hero in a movie-within-the-movie.  Then he gets magically transported into the “real” world, and is confused when all the stuff he did in the movie world doesn’t work.  Like, there’s a scene where he shoots at a car the bad guys are in, and is shocked when it doesn’t explode.

Still, that’s why people watch movies: to see stuff that doesn’t happen.

5 Comments

  1. I think that’s a very interesting idea and not just with gun culture. People have certain expectations in terms of life, success and how people should look in real life and when those expectations don’t match what they see in movies and magazines they are disappointed.

    The last action hero sounds like an interesting movie to watch and I will definitely look into it.

    1. Oh, and also, you make a very good point about movies and such shaping expectations in general. I guess it is kind of similar to the problem of, say, people’s standards of beauty getting distorted by photoshopped models in magazines.

      1. Yes, that’s why I though to mention magazines as well because that tends to happen but only to certain people. I think Gerbner did a study of how TV news influences people’s worldviews as well as movies, you should check it out. However, take it with a grain of salt and read the critique as well because while the study is interesting it does have some flaws.

Leave a Reply to mysterious man from the shadowsCancel reply