Fight Club, Film, and How They Affect the Rest of the World

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in my opinion, truer words were never spoken.

With the right image, presented the right way, and in the right context, you can change a person's entire experience of perception. The right image can change minds. The right image can shake worlds, and in the hands of a skilled image-handler, nations and entire continents can be brought to the truth.

Or, the truth can be squashed. Or repressed. Or stripped of all its essence, twisted and mangled beyond all recognition and used to specatular, terrifying ends.

With the right image, presented in the worst ways and for the worst intentions, you can change a person's entire perception of what is right and just. The right image can change people. It can ruin lives. And in the wrong hands, the right image can bring nations and entire continents to the brink of war and destruction.

Films, therefore, like Fight Club and Amelie are a thousand times more powerful. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a film is worth a thousand words per second. That's what films are, really; nothing more than a series of pictures and images. They're just photons dancing on a screen, spinning and flashing, brilliantly luminous before our very eyes. They may even be beautiful, or hideous, and may be accompanied by sonorous melodies or cacophonies of noise and auditory violence. Pleasurable or unpleasant, in reality we know that they don't matter. They can't help us, or hurt us.

They're not real after all.

Logically, we know all this; we know that they're just pictures. They are imprints, really; shallow duplications of something recorded far, far away in some time past. They're not real; and even if the events they portray are "real" or did "happen," by virtue of being recorded, we at least have the safety and security of knowing that it happened in the past. As beautiful or realistic as they are, films are just echoes of the past at best; mass-produced memories and hollow recollections vainly trying to pretend they're still real.

But whatever we think we know, images are powerful. Images can change the world. They can even change the very fabric of reality, or at the very least our perception of it.

Film is probably the most spiritually touching experience mankind has ever developed. More than any other media, films captivate us and immerse us in a way that defies rational thought. You can't deny that Tyler Durden exists, or that Amelie is really turning into a puddle of water before your very eyes. By definition then, that makes them real; for who though we might not
like to admit it, nobody sees something and immediately assumes "This must be a hallucination."

(It's no accident, by the way, that both Fight Club's audience and its protagonist are surprised to learn that the object of their fixation is just a figment of the protagonist's imagination. Duped by the hallucination of an imaginary character? Oh, the shame of it all...)

"Suspension of disbelief," is never an issue with movies; at least, not to all but the most tragically instantiated and boorishly unimaginative. But even then, when people call out in things like "That couldn't happen!" or "That is so fake!" in the middle of a movie, they are not doubting the reality or probability of what they see; they're resentful at the inconsistency of what they see with reality. In fact, by complaining about a movie's reality or believability they are in fact testifying to and supporting it; after all, the movie never said it was real, and so ascribing its images degrees of validity is to admit that there is something about it that begs to be looked at as somehow existing to begin with.

(Regardless, people who talk loudly in movies need to be escorted out of the theater. And then shot in a dark alley...)

To me, films provide a window into the realm of possibility; or more to the point, an emergency exit out of the realm of reality.

People really mean it when they start talking about "movie magic." They are magical, and even better is the fact that they make that magic real. Through the lens of a camera, a cameraman sees the world as it is in that instant, and captures it in that instant. But, through the reflection of that instant through the lens of a projector, the film shows the viewer how the world was, and by extension, what the world could be again (or in the case of speculative fiction, could be some day). Moreover, films also provide a contrasting agent against which present reality can be examined. In seeing what "was" in a film, the viewer is seeing an alternate reality different from their own, and so doing, is able to look "back inside" to their reality having gained the perspective of another (the proverbial "through a glass, darkly" scenario). The importance of this can not be overstated, because as Cartesian philosophers enjoy pointing out, opportunities to reliably examine reality or entertain changes to it are exceedingly rare from within, if they happen at all. And on the rare chance that reality is changed in some meaningful way, even rarer is the soul who is able to examine it or analyze it in time, instead of simply reacting to those changes as they happen.

Thus, films allow us to see what we would not otherwise see, and show of things that we would not otherwise have paid attention to. They remind us of what has happened before, give us hope or caution us as to what lies ahead, show us how to see the here-and-now reliably and, most importantly, give us the power and the will to change all of the above (albeit for better or worse).

"In Hollywood, anything is possible."

Truer words were never spoken.