Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Different works of art engage the intellect at different levels, certainly. But the best work at multiple levels simultaneously. Sympathetic characters draw watchers deeper into the movie, at an emotional level, in a way that pure ideas cannot.

Similarly, as a visual medium, showing things happening rather than explaining them has much more impact. Using dialogue (or worse, monologues) to explain something is weak storytelling; it's not making full use of the medium, and won't have the same impact as it could otherwise have. Other exposition techniques, like flashbacks, are often cheap - they can appear to make things momentous not because they're part of a story, but because they have some convenient echo in something jammed in precisely to deliver the echo.

There's much more to good movie-making: lighting, cinematography, and especially the soundscape, as technical elements that both paint beautiful pictures, and draw the viewer into the "realism" of the scene portrayed, usually by subtly overemphasizing reality.

They're definitely not half-baked ideas.

Take Fight Club as a simple example. It's both about adrenaline-pumping aggression and destruction, and a critique of masculinity. If it was only the first, it would be mindless; if it was only the second, it would be dry and boring. By combining the two, you get both juicy entertainment, and food for thought for the masses. Making something properly entertaining - more entertaining for the average viewer than e.g. a philosophy textbook - needs more than just ideas.

"Similarly, as a visual medium, showing things happening rather than explaining them has much more impact."

I agree, but here's one of Hamilton's complaints:

"I'd barely gotten my head around the fundamental framework of the host/architect/subject relationship before I was being told about "totems" that anchor dreamers to the real world and "kicks" that wake them up..."

Nolan showed some of these things visually in the opening sequence before explaining them explicitly when Page was introduced: an architect (Lukas Haas) had introduced himself; we were shown what an architect is supposed to do (the wrong carpet); and we were shown a "kick". I thought these things were fairly intuitive, but it's a good job his script exposited them explicitly, or apparently Hamilton would've been completely lost.

Perhaps sometimes a little weak storytelling is good for the audience.

I don't doubt there's some truth to these ideas but when I read people apply them it seems like they can't see the wood for the trees.

For instance, one might feel that the architecture student's character is under-developed. If the film wasn't already 2.5 hours, I imagine they would have given this likeable character more scenes. But essentially they did show you everything you need to know about this character, because her fingerprints were all over the set design of the rest of the film. Can't get much more visual-medium than that.

And then people say emotion draws you in deeper than ideas, but here we are days after watching the film avidly discussing its ideas (the layers of dreaming and how they worked). Meanwhile a film like The Matrix which does have 'stronger' individual characters to generate emotion, was compromised by a terrible oversight in the ideas department (ie. the whole concept of humans as batteries/generators is ridiculous). A film doesn't need to engage every level equally or in the standard way to be one of the best, IMO.

You mentioned flashback, well 90% of Inception after the first scene was a flashback, except in this case for once it wasn't at all contrived, because it represented the two characters (protagonist and Japanese dude) de-orphaning their current dream-state by reforming connections to previous layers (remembering the other dreams) and then they could snap back out of all the recursions. In other words, I think the storytelling was masterful.

And what's more, the film was deeply involved in character development and human/emotional themes, because most of it was essentially exploring peoples' subconscious minds and relating that to real life matters. The anchoring struggle was the protagonist 'coming back to reality' in the sense of someone gripped by guilt/regret and being lost in their own imagination at the expense of real relationships/progress (similar to the Solaris remake in this way). Sure, maybe people think this side of the film was poor, but if they'd at least acknowledge/mention it I wouldn't accuse them of missing the wood for the trees or regurgitating standard criticisms without thinking them through.

Note: I have not seen Inception, and I plan to see it, so I am not reading your reply too closely. Nolan, on the basis of past work, is an excellent filmmaker, so I'm sure he isn't guilty of the things I talked about, certainly not blatantly. And I agree that you can't apply criticisms without properly understanding the concepts behind them, and the reason they work the way they do. I grew up in an artistic family. My mother was a theatre actress and director, and my father a songwriter and playwright, so I've been steeped in these mechanics in the practical sense, not just the academic, for a long time.

On the point about flashbacks, probably my favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America, is arguably formed out of flashbacks, or possibly even "flashforwards". The effect, especially after multiple viewings, is something like In Search Of Lost Time in they way it creates a sense of nostalgia, in its case for poorly made life choices, unrequited love, and more. So I certainly wouldn't make the accusation that flashbacks are in principle bad, or necessarily cheap, just often so, in average movies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com