Your Life Is Not Like the Movies
Like most storytelling, movies are made of lies we really want to be true.
Real Life is Far More Complicated Than a Movie Can Possibly Depict
As affirming as not is to see racists as unbearably evil monsters, people who are uncomfortable with gays, and CEOs of Mega-Corporations as the Spawn of Satan life is just not a binary proposition. Black and White, Good vs Evil thinking is that of children who aren’t capable of understanding context, perspective or the complexity of adulthood.
Could “Green Book” depict the events of that road trip with the viewpoints of every possible aspect of history? Sure, but it would be eighteen hours long and completely unwatchable by any paying audience. “BlacKkKlansman” was mostly true except for the part that painted the police as allies against white supremacy and its protagonist as a Freedom Fighter despite his infiltration of Black Power Movements in order to destroy them from within but Christ, that’s an entirely different movie and you didn’t make it, did you? “Don’t Look Up” is the “Crash” of today—jarringly one-note, filled with charismatic performances used to hammer a virtuous message that it’s everyone not watching who is at fault.
Hollywood is there to sell movies and morality tales that boil all of our complicated reasons and choices down to that of Frodo vs Mordor are the movies that sell. If you’re looking for movies to expose the truth as you see it, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Your Abs Will NEVER Look Like That
Unless you starve yourself and workout ten hours a day, every day, with a paid personal trainer hired to torture you into submission to crunches and egg whites, that Brad Pitt stomach in “Fight Club” will never be yours. Even Hugh Jackman gets a pudgy dad-bod when he’s not filming a Wolverine film so calm the fuck down and enjoy your Oreos, fatty.
We Do Not Love the Outside of the Box Thinker
There are countless movies made celebrating the outlier, the person hired to shake things up, the “Think Different” Steve Jobs wannabe, the guy who invents the thing that changes the world but reality tells us that we pretty much hate that guy/gal. The only movies that demonstrate our built-in resistance to the Person With The Grand Ideas with any kind of fealty to how it really goes are along the lines of “Tucker: A Man and His Dream,” “Requiem for a Dream,” and the movie stocked with the premise that the only way to pull oneself out of the bureaucracy and System is to lose one’s mind, “Brazil.”
The teacher that challenges the system gets squashed by it. The politician who makes a stand gets destroyed. The activist who defies the government is assassinated. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be like that person but know in advance it probably won’t go so well for you.
The Police Are Not That Science Friendly
First, looking at the conviction rates across the country do not support the brilliant policing and sleuthing shown on film. Second, the science behind things like CSI is fictional in such a way as to be almost Marvel comics made-up.
The fact is that most police officers rely on fax machines, the hope that the badge will cow suspects into compliance, and brute force to get the bad guys (and the occasional innocent guy) along the road to jurisprudence and protecting and serving. Cops today are far more like substitute teachers in a high school than secret agents or indefatigable detectives.
Animals Are Generally Not Cute and Are Psychopaths If They’re At All Like Humans
If your cat was the size of your Volkswagon, it would fucking eat you like it does a bird on the sidewalk. Dogs routinely eat their own shit. Your pet fish has a brain the size of a BB. If the movies showed animals as they are rather than anthropomorphized laugh riots or inspirational figures with the voices of top-notch comedians, they’d all resemble the insane homeless with multiple fetishes and obsessive disorders.
Try that one, Pixar.
Nature Is Not Our Friend and Having More Babies Is What Is Killing the Planet
“Save the World!” we cry. “We’re Destroying the Planet!” we proselytize.
Have you seen the planet? I mean, outside of your paved cubicle of SELF Parks and highways and Taco Bells? It’s fucking BRUTAL. Nature gives no shits about us and, in the nonstop cycle of birth and death and disease and creatures designed to eat us from within, from without, and in every manner someone could be digested, it is hellbent on our individual destruction. Ever played “The Oregon Trail?” Goddamn!
For every “Ferngully” fantasy, there is a “Day After Tomorrow” so you’d think that the movies have it right in their dystopian depictions of planetary destruction but you’re wrong. The planet is going to be fine… without us. The more realistic demise is not of the rock we live upon but the species we inhabit. It it won’t be because we burned too many fossil fuels or forgot to recycle plastic. It will be because we can’t stop making more of us.
It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion; and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion. Plainly put, we’re going to die of hunger. And disease. And exposure. Imagine an orange with a couple of ants. Now imagine the same orange with 1,000 ants. WE ARE THE FUCKING ANTS. I suppose, in the rubric of movies getting it right, Thanos had the right idea by snapping his big, purple fingers and wiping out 50% of every living thing because that’s the only thing that’ll save us.
Most Fights Never Last Beyond Two or Three Exchanges of Blows
If you base your idea of a fistfight on the fights staged in the movies, then the prospect of getting into a bar fight is almost epic. The movies would have us believe that you can take five minutes of bone crunching punches in the face, the back of the head, a chair smashed across a back. Reality comes crashing in when you realize that most (and I mean, even the really BIG motherfuckers out there) can only handle one or two of those hardcore face shots and that almost no one is powerful enough to break a chair over someone's head—chairs are made for fatasses to sit on—try to just break one over a window sill. It ain't gonna happen.
A typical real world fight looks like a couple of seven year olds flailing around and wrestling, pulling hair, slapping, and lots of yelling. And, honestly, drunk women are FAR more fierce than dudes.
The Government is Not Organized Enough to Proliferate Major Conspiracies
In the Hollywood version of the World, the government is filled with brilliant strategists and evil geniuses who can plot complicated and sinister master plans—assassinations, effective wiretapping, jury-rigging, and global conspiracies. In the real world, most government plots involve making you wait in long lines and losing your registration forms. In the real world, the Brilliant Evil Congress is filled with Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Ted Cruz.
Reality is that the true power conspiracies come from the fabulously wealthy which is why they are so often defeated in the movies—they simply do not get defeated in real life but we feel like they do because Gordon Gecko went to jail so that's like justice right?
Most Criminals, Welfare Recipients, and Drug Addicts Are Not Black
Seriously. I think it's just bizarre to hear about how frightened white people are of black people given that it has been white people who have routinely brutalized, incarcerated, and lynched blacks. How is it that we can be both the Centuries Old Bully AND the Victim?
Blacks in Hollywood are either criminals or Morgan Freeman (who started out on the Electric Company, got an Oscar playing a criminal and has since played the President, God, and Nelson Mandela.) Reality is that more whites are criminals—from car thieves to Wall Street hedge fund managers—and more whites are on welfare and collect food stamps than blacks, browns or tans. All those black drug dealers wouldn't be in prison if their clientele weren't overwhelmingly white.
Remember, no one gave a shit about crack cocaine until it hit Iowa and there are only three black people in that entire state.
Change—Real Change—Takes a Long Time
In the movies, a fat guy loses all his weight and looks like an Adonis after a three-minute montage. In real life, it takes months, sometimes years, of discipline and denial and self control to lose a bunch of weight. In the movies, if a President is handed one of the worst Recessions in 80 years, it will only take two hours in a fictional four years to effectively turn things around. In real life, it takes longer than four years for a single college student to pay off his student loans.
Change that isn't merely cosmetic takes FAR longer than the movies would have us accept. Which is why we have the collective patience of an ADHD four year old in a room full of Starburst Fruit Chews.
Romantic Relationships Take Longer Than Two Hours to Grow
In the movies, a couple meets, falls in love, breaks up and gets back together in the span of 80 minutes. It fuels our desire for things to be perfect instantly (or at least within the first month). In the movies, Lloyd Dobbler is a relentless romantic; in real life, he's a stalker. In the movies, relationships end on a high note; in real life, relationships do not END. Even when they self destruct, there is a constant dance around it for the rest of your life.
Real life is the melodrama of power dynamics, the missteps of unearned criticism and a dance of needs that simply never ends. Sex is a transaction more often than not and love is something we all want so much in our lives that we'll make it up just so we don't have to sit in a room by ourselves, pining away to pictures of our infatuation having fun posted on Facebook.
Real life, like real romance, is just messier than the movies and takes a lot longer to work at than Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Dechanel.
Honestly, the only filmmaker whose films even remotely resemble real life are those of Terrence Malick. His films are longer than you thought they'd be and only make sense after thinking about them for a long time (and sometimes they don't make any sense at all but we'll kill ourselves imposing our own narrative on them because we can't stand chaos).
They are mostly about how awful life is except for tiny moments of grace mingled in there amongst the chaos of nature and the brutality of the death sentence we all have on our ledgers from birth.