John in Real Life

[Ed. Note: Funny how writing works. I had a long post in the works for tonight on another topic entirely, but found myself hitting a wall partway through. So I dug up this one which I started awhile ago. Hope the pinch writing works alright.]

Sometimes inspiration just strikes. As I showered yesterday, I was hit out of the blue by a realization about my movie preferences. For some reason John Cassavetes came into my mind; I thought about his monumental film A Woman Under the Influence; about why, great as the film is, I have held it at a distance and refused to really embrace it. Cassavetes worked primarily as a filmmaker of ultra realism, striving in all things to be faithful to "real life".

The film certainly can be painfully true to life (and consequently very hard to watch), but even at its finest it fails to capture a certain something about the experience. Why should I fail to connect to it when I love documentaries so much? I suppose the fact that the events in documentaries actually happened could contribute to this preference. Then again, my interests range far beyond mere history to the truth about the human condition, so why should I be constrained by matters of fact?

No, the reason that documentaries work for me in a way that ultra realistic films do not is quite simply this: good documentaries always capture the unexpected moments of life. I am thinking of that magical, heartbreaking scene in Hoop Dreams when the father of one of the boys challenges him to a game of one on one, and all the bitterness of their relationship plays out on the blacktop. Or the lynchpin of Gates of Heaven, when Errol Morris interrupts the story of pet cemetaries to let an old woman ramble on for several minutes about her grandson. It can be as simple as the moment in 14 Up when the cameraman pans away from Suzy's face to record a dog chasing a rabbit, or as significant as a killer admitting onscreen to his crime. These are the wild and wooly moments of our lives that really ring true, the unexpected swerves and nosedives that make life worth living.

It is precisely these moments that fictional films can never -- by definition -- capture. In fiction there is always some conceit driving the film, always some direction. Even if all the dialogue is improvised, the general plot moves forward and the actors must still play roles; they are not truly themselves. Because of the constraints of the medium, you simply cannot capture the sly, strange moments of life.

This is not so much a problem in general fiction films, whether they be genre pieces or straight dramedies. It is when the director swoops in close to real life that the problems begin. When you collapse the space between screen and viewer, dangerous things happen. I suppose this is why part of me still prefers hand drawn animation to "realistic" CGI (or medieval painting to Renaissance). When you ape life too closely but lack an essential ingredient, the result is offputting and is more disturbing than something clearly not real. Think about cyborgs: no matter how much they may resemble humans on the surface, dig deeper and you find essential differences; the fact that they come so close yet fall so short makes them unnatural and creepy in a way that, say, forest animals could never be.