The Voyeur Within
What is our relationship to film? What is it that we cherish about sitting amongst one hundred other strangers, in the dark, watching theatrical drama play out on a sixty-foot screen? What is it about the experience, and the medium, that captivates us to the extent we allow other human beings, pretending to be other human beings, shanghai our mental and emotional space?
It is stating a fact so obvious as to not bear repeating, but we are a curiously visual creatures. Perhaps it is tied into our survival apparatus, but I do not wish to digress into a biological or anthropological tract here. Needless to say, we are voyeurs par excellence. So, it really should come as no surprise that we will watch practically anything presented to us. But this begs the perennial question: why?
Perhaps the question is more rhetorical than anything else. Why, indeed. WE watch, perhaps, because we have been assured, via the Aristotelian structure of drama. That is, we expect some kind of reward as indeed a reward has been woven into this thing called a narrative. It may be the case, as some filmmakers and writers have attested, that there is no inherent meaning in the subject matter we watch or absorb. Petronius, Tarkovsky, Camus, and Sartre come to mind.
If we have yet to understand the basic mechanisms of why we watch films, how can we hope to understand why we wish to be watched in those films? This gray area is being exploited, for lack of a better word, by companies like Yoostar, who have made it possible now to replace Humphrey Bogart and John Belushi and Harrison Ford in the films that made them famous.
We owe technological advanced much praise and thanks. Now, a simple green screen and software program allow the likes you and me to mask over those stars of yore. Now our provincial accents and mannerism can be added to the tension of confronting Ingrid Bergman or Dan Aykroyd or Rutger Hauer. The results can be both humorous and poignant. To be sure, watching yourself fumble through improvised lines would make anyone howl with delight.
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