Cinema is hands down one of the biggest influences on us. That colossal screen that homes in wonder has been toying with our lives ever since we were kids. Something we turn to for an escape can also keep us in line, keep us from drifting away. Every thought, every action of ours, drenched with a heroic mindset, as if we were the protagonists of our own story.
Cinema and the Stories We Borrow
If we didn’t know what love felt like, the big bad-ass screen offered us an image of it. If we didn’t know what to do, the talking wall taught us what to pick. If we didn’t know where to go, the story in the wall pointed us towards something. Our lives, smeared by its boisterous presence. It is like a religion that keeps us in check inadvertently.
Of course, a film cannot give everyone the same life. Yet it can give us a picture to chase. The rain becomes romantic because we have watched two people fall in love beneath it. A railway platform becomes a place for last chances. We begin to look for a background score in an ordinary goodbye. The world stays the same, but we carry a different set of images through it.
That is where the brush begins its work. It does not build the road beneath our feet. Instead, it colours what we think the road might lead to. A small town can seem like a prison in one story and the only place worth returning to in another. Neither picture is the whole truth. Still, both can settle inside us before we notice.
Who Told Us What a Life Should Look Like?
No one on this wretched planet of ours has a complete map of one’s destiny. What is life’s ultimate goal apart from crumbling down to nothingness? Who told us to build? Who told us to live? Who told us to do anything? What if I decide to slay a day by doing nothing? Would it change anything? Who is to judge?
Who is to say that I wasted it? But you never told us what to do! How can it be called futile? If living is the only thing that matters, didn’t I just live?
Then that gigantic thingy guides you towards a groove. It nudges you into professions and pursuits you didn’t have a clue about. Suddenly the clueless you jumps off your seat to pursue a life the screen aggrandized. Out of the blue, you have a purpose. And lo! You are caught in a wretched cycle once again. You follow a thing that found its way into your head because a story you could relate to fed it to you.
There is beauty in that nudge, but also a question worth asking. Do I want the work, or do I want the glorious scene in which everyone recognises it? A film can compress years of practice into a few minutes. We walk away with the applause ringing in our ears. The patient, unremarkable days are harder to carry home. Inspiration becomes more useful when we can tell the dream from the effort it asks of us.
What Cinema Lets Us See in Other People
Cinema has the power to project the living in a flamboyant way. It has the power to exalt the downtrodden too. It can imagine the future, let you visit the past, or make you pause beside someone you would otherwise have hurried past. Sometimes its greatest gift is smaller than a heroic speech. It is a moment in which another person’s silence begins to make sense.
A close-up asks us to stay with a face. A long silence denies us the easy escape of an explanation. Even an awkward conversation can hold our attention when the camera refuses to leave it. For a while, somebody else’s discomfort occupies the centre of the room. We may not agree with the character. Nevertheless, we have to consider what the situation feels like from inside their skin.
That does not mean every film makes us kinder. Stories can also flatten people into convenient villains or turn hardship into pretty scenery. The same tool that brings a stranger closer can make a stereotype feel familiar. So the question is not simply whether a picture moved us. What did it ask us to overlook while it did so? Whose life stayed outside the frame?
An Escape That Can Bring Us Back
A story could be a projection of someone’s imagination, of society, or of fantasies from a child’s head. It can lead us through dark lives, heroic deeds, unexplored fears, and unattended places. It can speak truths or dress up lies. Sometimes I wonder whether the whole spectacle is a big plan to keep us engaged with other lives so that we forget ours!
Yet forgetting ourselves for a while need not mean abandoning ourselves. We can return from a film with a question we had stopped asking. Perhaps we call someone. Perhaps we notice a familiar street differently. Or perhaps we simply get through a difficult evening. My earlier essay, Movies: Taking us away from the mundane since 1895, approaches this same hunger for something beyond the ordinary.
The important thing is to return. No ending on a screen can make our choices for us. We have to test the feeling against the life waiting outside the theatre. For more ways of looking closely at stories and the choices behind them, explore our film analyses. Watching with attention can be as rewarding as surrendering to the spectacle.
Letting Cinema Paint Without Handing It the Wheel
Perhaps that is the bargain I want with cinema. Let it astonish me. Let it give a shape to a fear or introduce me to a possibility. But let me keep the right to question the picture. A beautiful frame is a way of seeing, not a commandment. The brush can paint our roads in colours we never knew existed. Walking them, however, is still our job.
