This article is going to be quite a bit different from my previous ones, whereas normally I talk about specific aspects of films and film making techniques, today I want to talk about the world of a movie character. Specifically, what if the worlds within the movies are real, and what if the characters can see the cinema screen? This was initially inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey (yes, I'm still talking about that) and the interpretation I read about it that makes the most sense is that the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey is actually a cinema screen. I'm not going to go in detail into why I consider this to be an accurate interpretation, Rob Ager goes through that in depth on his website (www.collativelearning.com check it out), but what happens in the movie because of this and what it could mean for other movies.
Consider for a moment how most films are structured: the camera only shows the audience the important events. This makes plenty of sense, if your movie character is driving cross country you don't to show the countless hours of boring driving, you want to show the few sporadic, wacky events that drive the plot. This also means that most of what isn't shown is not particularly important. Of course there are exceptions to this, in a murder mystery the details of the murder aren't shown, but rather recovered later through hours of boring detective work. But, by and large, the important events are shown on screen and boring stuff is cut out or sped through. Now, lets take a look at "The Dawn of Man" segment in 2001: A Space Odyssey: the pre-humans are living out their lives, boring, content, fighting over water and eating grass. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, even the jaguar attacking one of them is still pretty run-of-the-mill for their life. The monolith appears. On the surface it appears as if the monolith is speeding up evolution, increasing the thinking ability of the pre-humans so that they stumble upon the idea of using tools, in this case a bone club to smash in the brains of other pre-humans or tapirs. This use of tools leads to not only dominance over the rival tribe but also to the eating of meat, which was the defining factor that really allowed our brains to grow. However, what if the monolith didn't cause them to figure out how to use tools. What if the pre-humans were already going to figure out tools on their own and the monolith, much like a movie camera, was only there during the important parts. Well, this casts the entire rest of the movie into a different light.
Think about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey now when Dr. Dave Bowman goes through the monolith, through the stargate, and lives the rest of his life in a human zoo, finally dying and reemerging as the evolved being the Star Child. That only makes sense though if the monolith is still a device to speed up evolution, but what happens if it represents a cinema screen? Dave Bowman literally flew his spaceship through the cinema screen and broke out of the movie. This explains why he was able to watch himself in third person in the zoo. At the end he doesn't die and become the Star Child, he becomes the director of his own movie. Dave Bowman essentially becomes a god in his world, able to change events as he sees fit, just like a film director.
Taking this train of thought to other movies, what if the characters in any movie can see the monolith, but the director is simply not letting them acknowledge it? I know it sounds a bit crazy but going under the assumption the worlds movies portray are real, what would that be like? As a movie character you would live your entire life knowing that nothing was really important if the screen wasn't present, and once it did show up you would instantly know that something important and potentially life changing was about to happen. I think that would cause some serious psychological stress. Of course there is another option and that is your life skips over anything with the cinema screen present. You would live your life from important event to important event and everything else would be so much brainwash. Here are some clips from the show Doctor Who that do a great job showing this kind of life.
Granted, in Doctor Who the woman, Donna, was actually in a virtual reality simulation, but the idea is the same. Living life from one important event to another and skipping over the boring stuff would be awful. Life is defined by monotony. Movies may be fantastic adventures in every form imaginable, but having a persons entire life condensed into an hour and a half of important scenes is not the way the real world works. And what of Dave Bowman? The would-be movie hero who becomes a god in his own world. Would that really be a good thing? There would no longer be any mystery or wonder, nothing to discover, because he could literally change the course of human history in his world he wouldn't have anything to live for.
Movies are amazing, but it's a good thing they're not real.
