A question of responsibility

Movies are not real life. In general they do not claim to be an image of real life. They are advanced fairy tales giving us stories to give us comfort and amusement.

There is nothing wrong with this.

Telling stories is one of those basic needs little spoken of. I believe that the more difficult our life is, the more we crave for stories. Not only to flee the real world for a short while, but to give us hope out there in the real world.

So from my point of view, it is completely okay that the characters in a movie change in a way that people in real life never do, that they have passionate sex rarely experienced for most people and take on a tank with their bare hands.

However this does not mean that characters can do what ever I like in what ever manners. They need to have a feeling of reality. A false feeling, yes, but that is beside the point. Like a frog can turn into a prince in a child’s book, Peter Parker can turn into Spiderman in a movie. It is not interesting if this could happen in real life; what is interesting is if I can make it real in the world I created.

We dive into a movie aware that it is a fairy tale, accepting rules that probably are way off the map in ordinary life.

But movies have a “problem” that a book rarely faces.

They are too real.

We see real people in a real world and apart from spidermen and batmen it looks quite like our own.

It is easy to be fooled that it is justified and no problem to kill a “bad guy”, that the world is full of either good or bad people, that you can change somebody’s life with the right words at the right moment and that love is passionate every hour of the day.

A movie affects far more than a book could ever do.

It does not change a person’s life perhaps, but it lingers like some kind of truth in the mind.

For me, this is a question of responsibility.

What moral would I want to linger?