Living the Movies

In the NYTBR, the redoubtable Tom Shone reviews a couple of recent books that explore the borderlands between movies and live. 

Shone points out the paradox that all movie-lovers experience. We can’t live the movies. “A life lived at a constant pitch of screwball comedy is a recipe for exhaustion. The relationship of most movie couples would not last five minutes beyond the closing credits of the films in which they appear.”

Yet we want to dream that we can, and each time we come back to the movies, we dream the same dream: “such is the movies’ unrivaled express train to the limbic brain, where Ingrid Bergman’s face appears projected the size of a mother as seen by an infant, that trying to see what the medium has done to the shape of our desires can be as difficult as trying to see the edges of the sky.”

Shone thinks the best we can do with this paradox is to laugh at our folly: “The border between real life and the movies seems to cry out for comic treatment.”

Perhaps. But tragi-comedy may be the genre we’re looking for, since there’s a loss and a diminishment embedded in the farce.