Why we watch film
“You can sing a song to 85,000 people, and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.” - David Grohl
I think this quote captures the purpose of art quite succinctly; it is created to communicate a story, an emotion, a moral lesson, but every person that experiences it still feels something slightly different. Without art, life would be boring. As a medium that combines both sound and visuals to tell a story, films are one of the most important.
So why, exactly, do we continue to create and experience them? We watch a trailer and know that we want to see the full story unfold, then spend inordinate amounts of money just to sit in a dark room for hours. We decide whether we loved or hated it, and most people we meet soon after are duly informed of our opinion.
I think our desire to create and consume film ultimately comes down to three main overlapping motivations; we want to be entertained, we want to escape from our lives for a little while, and we want to be made to feel something.
All films are entertaining to some degree, but certain genres lend themselves to this purpose more than others. Action films regale us with stories of elaborate, dangerous missions and feats of physical prowess beyond what we could be capable of, with characters often succeeding against odds that seem insurmountable. James Bond defeats villains, bullet wounds and near-death experiences, Vin Diesel flips a car off a cliff and walks away unscathed, and Tom Cruise hurls himself indiscriminately from the tops of buildings, over and over and over again. These films are at their core thoroughly unrealistic stories created purely for entertainment, and we accept them as such. We know what to expect when we go to see an action film, and to experience anything else would be alarming and somewhat disappointing.
Comedies have a similar creative purpose. They present over-the-top characters in ridiculous encounters with each other, designed to make us laugh no matter how unrealistic the situation. Often the jokes they make become familiar shorthand for the films themselves, a way of connecting those who have seen and appreciated them together.
We spend time with friends and often complete strangers enjoying the unfolding of these stories on big, bright screens and in glorious surround sound, all to be purely and completely entertained. Wrapped up in this need for entertainment is a desire to escape. We all want to get away from our lives sometimes, to forget about the people and the work that must be dealt with when we come back. The more fantastical and outrageous the film, the further way it is from our everyday lives and the more we can use the plots and characters presented to us to get lost in their world for a little while. We can anticipate and experience the character’s actions, their mistakes and their triumphs, without the consequences that those actions would bring in the real world.
Finally, we appreciate the things that films make us feel. A good film told well is one where each frame, set piece and line of dialogue distils the themes of the story and helps us to understand the characters. Such well-crafted art is an immersive experience that can be devastating or uplifting depending on the story, but will always succeed in making you feel something. Not all lives are happy, and neither are all films, but being able to feel a fictional person’s plight, to become invested in the workings of their lives as they play out in front of us allows to connect to something outside of ourselves. Through films, whether they are made well or poorly, or whether the emotions they elicit are pleasant, we can escape. All art has some value, even if it’s only to one person.
In the end, we all have our own reasons for wanting to see a film or two, and our own personal opinions on whether what we saw was good. What does a certain film do for us that it might not do for someone else? Who knows. At the end of the day, a group of people will make a film for a million people to see, and they will all watch it for a million different reasons.