realism in art -- exalting the audience

Just saw a movie about people I’d never meet doing things totally beyond my everyday experience, yet every line and every gesture seemed completely authentic and totally human, based on what I’ve seen in my own life so far. It was a significant work of art and the last by one of the premier actors of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman, but somehow it seems out of place among the comic book heroes and undead horror-comedies. It was about spies, but Hoffman’s character didn’t leap from a helicopter onto the top of a moving train or do any of the other standard spy-movie stuff like walking calmly away from huge explosions and artfully dodging bullets.

For the audience who sees both it must require an enormous shifting of gears. The action movies seem so joyously filled with conflict and mayhem following plots that lurch along made up on the go as all manner of jagged 3-D objects fly out into the audience, and folks seem to love it. As guilty pleasure some of this stuff is pretty guilty. You’d think real life wouldn’t stand a chance. Real life is slow -- waiting for elevators, smoking a cigarette, talking in a car.

What we have here are two different visions of art and life. The fantastic movies are called escapism, meaning real life is tedious and stagnant so stimulate me so much I’ll forget for a while. Afterward the traffic leaving the parking lot seems to stand still and the burger from the drive-thru tastes flat -- no kaboom, no chases. The other point of view, called realism, uses its resources to recreate a situation and plot that people with common experience can self-verify as plausibly true. They leave the theater thinking about the story, the motives of the characters, and maybe even their own lives. A fair number seem to like it this way too. 

Side by side, box-office vs box-office, it’s hard to say which one wins since they compete for the same production dollars, in the end based on ticket sales. Wouldn’t it be interesting if realism began to kick fantasy’s ass, although this isn’t a prediction you understand. Just something in the breeze suggests that an appetite for authenticity and self-verification along with the dedication of serious actors and writers might turn the tide.