Art has existed for a long time. Ever since someone put something on the wall of a cave, there has always been visual and creative expression.
This evolved into other media such as pottery, paintings, tapestries, and other works.
Acting and storytelling have been around for a long time too. Those probably started in the caves also when someone told a story for the first time.
Many art forms, sans sound for the moment, started to come together as the 1800s turned into the 1900s and we had that great mixed blessing of modern times — the motion picture.
In 1903, actor Justus D. Barnes “shot” at the audience watching The Great Train Robbery and the lines of fiction and reality started to blur and would never be totally clear again (The Lumières’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat from 1896 also made things a little too “real” with the audience thinking an arriving train was coming right for them.).
Soon, a new people was created, either by the fans, the motion picture makers, or the personalities themselves — the “movie star”.
Rudolph Valentino wasn’t Rudolfo from Italy, he was “Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan” and audiences loved him for what they saw on the screen.
The same goes for Mary Pickford. No one wanted to know Gladys Smith from Toronto, they wanted to know “Tess Skinner”.
Film-goers searching for something looked to the movies for inspiration, wanting their lives to match the spectacles on the screen or at least those of the stars as portrayed in movie magazines and gossip columns.
Being a movie star (or a character in a movie) was glamorous, romantic, exciting, full of adventure, and most of the time, had a happy ending.
Who wouldn’t want that?
Real vs. light and shadow
It didn’t take long for fallen humanity to reach the movies. We won’t discuss them here but within Hollywood’s first decade, there was scandal, scandal, and more scandal.
It was becoming apparent that some of the figures on the screen, at least their real-life selves, were not to be looked up to as moral paragons.
More than 100 years later, people still do, however, look up to, want to be like, and emulate celebrities — whether they are movie stars, recording artists, or athletes.
Not all movies are bad. Not all movie stars are bad people. Ironically some movies that were deemed as bad or immoral in their time seem harmless today.
With the rise in popularity of motion pictures, recorded music, broadcasting, and other technologies, it’s been so easy to fall for the illusions produced.
Everything looks and sounds so good in its scripted forms, that humanity has gotten a warped sense of reality and strives for unrealistic and sometimes morally incorrect goals.
Take any Hollywood love story. Who wouldn’t want to be in a caring embrace while Max Steiner’s string music crescendos its way to a fade-out?
Ah, but there really are no violins and there is no fade-out. Life is a lot more awkward and mundane than that.
Who wouldn’t want to catch the bad guys, be labeled a hero, and make the town safe for good people to walk the streets?
Life is a lot more logistical and complicated than that.
More’s the pity if you’re doing everything right in your life but don’t realize that you are because you aren’t seeing a third-act scenario playing out before your eyes.
Movies, especially “old” ones (1930s and 1940s, NOT 1980s. Do you have any idea how painful it is when I hear people saying 80s and 90s movies are “old”?) take place in luxurious settings and have exuberant personalities.
People like those sorts of things, they are nice to look at, but they don’t have to be life goals.
Just because something looks and sounds good doesn’t mean it is good. Pleasing to the eye, much?
Getting a grip
I used the example of old Hollywood because those images still endure as an ideal or a time that was golden, now lost, and searched for.
Were those movies and that time really all that perfect?
We should challenge ourselves to turn away from the screens every now and then and look toward the life that God has created for us. It has better effects than any cinematic epic.
When we are going through struggles in life, we want them bettered and resolved in a nice scripted way (sometimes literally in 90 minutes!). Sometimes life doesn’t get better or resolve itself though.
We can look to the movies and all arts for beauty and inspiration, but they are all just an illusion compared to real life.
In some instances, maybe they represent some ideals to strive for but can never be.
There’s a film nerd term for what is seen on the screen called “mise-en-scène”.
Your life is more than “mise-en-scène”.
Your life is truth, beauty, and goodness of which art is a part but not the sum.
Don’t just eat popcorn and watch life in front of you — live it!
It may be OK to lose yourself in a created work and dream every now and then, but, as it must to all men
. . . “THE END”
Thank you for reading.
I’m praying for you.