The Lobby Room

Isn't film the Lobby in our lines that we can sit in the dark sometimes with friends, acquaintances, or alone and become whoever we want whether we are sharing it with anyone or if it is simply in our heads? If we could put aside the word, "film" and see it as a lobby a waiting place where our fantasies become a reality for 90 minutes, we could realize it's a place the brain can explore as it does possibly in the dreams state. Maybe this is way to abstract, but think about it. What do you do during a movie? Do you see yourself through a character maybe nor the main lead but someone in the film? I know I do.

Film producers hit gold when they created the whole Hollywood light. Average people idolize actors (when they are merely doing their job), the theater is a small vacation, people will pay a fair amount to view a movie, and people get to forget who they are for the time being. So the producers gets something and the actors get something and so does the audience. But what do they they get? Different things (answers may vary): Producers may get money, actors may get the thrill of being in the limelight, and the audience may get feeling whoever the fuck they want to be.

The audiences probably the most important to talk about right now simply because that is probably the majority of most folk. Isn't the point of the movies (the great thing about the movies) is to get away from ones own life? When someone like yourself leaves the theater you forget that the actors are just average people because in your head they have become the characters they just acted as. When you leave the theater you boy is shocked that the world is still spinning round that the people surrounding you did not experience what you have just experienced in the past hour or two. When you leave the theater behind, your fantasy may continue as the day goes on.

Now let's go over some themes that happened in Grand Hotel and then compare it to a newer film, the Social Network (not really a spoiler). In the Grand Hotel you get the lobby analogy full blown; you experience it on the screen as you are also experiencing it subconsciously as you sit in the movie theater with your expensive butter popcorn and large cherry coke. You realize that life is a repetition. Each character experiences something a bit different, but really life is all connected to each other. At the end of the film it smacks you in the face with a bit of hard pressed reality. A new married couple walks through the doors. As life in the lobby continues a bit of new light files in. This new couple is almost a metaphor for the next generation. They bring happiness and new ideas, simply because they haven't experienced as much as the people that have gone before them. And so it goes...

Now we brought up in class how we can't compare old films to new ones. but really film hasn't changed not the concrete important stuff. Acting style circulates, producers die and reappear, film style recycles, the only real change is editing and how our brains process the information. So now let's relate to the Social Network.

Last night I ad the opportunity to see an early showing of this new and exciting film. I realized that we strive to live off of someone else life because somewhere in our mind we think maybe (maybe it is) better than our own. The thing is we rush to the movies to watch a character who did something really truly amazing, but even he wasn't really content with his life. You get two different view of the character, Zach. The first scene he truly makes an ass of himself and you get this idea spun around at multiple times. You also see that he just isn't scene. By the end you pity him almost. You feeling sorry for him puts him on an invisible pedestal that he may or may not deserve. So what am I getting at? If you were friends with Zach or somehow connected to him in real life would you still idolize him? Or would you see through him? Has film given us almost the super human power of seeing the best or worst out of someone because you are seeing them from an unbiased view point? The end result for me is that film gives me the ultimate escape because I get to think in a way that I don't normally get to experience unless I'm watching a movie mostly because when you have an opinion on a film no one can honestly criticizes you. Because you can say you're right or wrong (they can but who can say they're right)

So why don't we just go sit in a lobby and start experiencing life as a film enjoying what we have created for ourselves instead of what a made up character on a screen creates for us. we can do it all on our own.