On the first day of History 452 (America during the Progressive Era), the prof, as an icebreaker, asked everybody to introduce themselves, and tell the class what the best movie they saw that summer was. As people spoke, different movies came up. Schindler's List. Casablanca. Several film festival type things that nobody who was not in the theatre at the time would ever have heard of. A couple foreign films. Then it was my turn. "My name is Calvin and the best movie I saw this summer was The Fast and the Furious". The prof blinked for a moment, as if stunned. Then she nodded sagely. "Ah yes, the quintessential summer movie", she stammered as she quickly turned to the next person in line.

I appear to have a different approach to movies than some people. I don't look for meaning in movies, I don't look for lessons, I don't look for statements about life. I watch movies for one reason and one reason only. To escape. To me, that's all movies are. A tool to escape for awhile. I don't look to see if the characters are believable or not. They're fiction. If they're believable, I'll believe them. If not, I won't. I don't go around looking for mistakes. If there are inconsistencies, well, I'll suspend my disbelief. After all, I want to be entertained, not shown real life. If i want to see real life.....well, I do indeed have a real life that I can look to for reference. If I want to think about life, I'll think about my own life. No need to think about the lives of the director and cast who made the movie. I'm not dumb or anything. I can catch allusions, metaphors, and hidden innuendo and multi-layered scenes as well as the next person. It's just that, when all is said and done, I don't particularly want to see all these things in a movie. What I want, is for the movie to entertain me.

Well, I guess maybe this isn't so different from other people. Everybody wants to be entertained. Maybe for me, the difference is that I am entertained better by violence than anything else. No complicated plotline, no global metaphors. Straight up action. Or whatever. I find other things entertaining too. There's been a few comedies which have entertained me. Some stuff like that. And it's not like I shut out this deeper meaning stuff too. Once in awhile, some deeper meaning type movie strikes a chord in me, and I do respond to this, rather than repressing it. It's just that I do not go out looking for it.

Evidently, to my fellow arts students, this viewpoint was bizarre beyond belief. Oh well.

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