The summer blockbuster season is starting
at the movie theatres, and Hollywood hopes that droves of us will go to watch
the latest crop of big-budget flicks. Even if you don’t go to the theatres very
much, you probably watch a lot of movies at home, whether on television or
YouTube. The average American watches television five hours a day, and even
when the kids are on their video games instead, they are still watching moving
pictures. Most of us spend our non-working hours watching motion pictures of
one kind or another, far more hours than we spend reading, and frankly, more
time than even our grandparents spent reading or listening to the radio each
day. We are story junkies, and moving pictures are the way we get our fix.
But why are moving pictures so popular?
Why not reading, or listening to the radio? One of the most interesting theories comes from Walter Murch, the editor of Apocalypse Now and American Graffitti. He has argued that when movies first appeared in the late 19th century, they caught on because they reminded us of the movies that were already in our heads : our dreams. For as long as we have been human, we have woken each morning to memories of visual stories, complete with soundtracks, editing ( often jump cuts) and strange landscapes and situations. Murch argues that “if we assume people's dreams were cinematic before the invention of the motion picture, then what cinema has done is to take the language of dreams and bring it under our control.” Those dreams amazed early movie goers, and perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the first silent films were science fiction. Those early films of adventures on the Moon with monsters and alien babes were just as strange as the dreams people were used to inside their heads. (Martin Scorsese’s wonderful film Hugo captures this period of early film making really well). In time, movies branched out to encompass all forms of the human experience.
I like Murch’s theory, but I think that
there were other forms of movies in our heads before the movie industry
arrived. I am thinking of the movies we call memories. There are many types of
memory of course, and not all play out as mental movies. Memories of the deep
past can flash simply as images – think of that first date with your
significant other, or when you first learned to ride a bike. Those are
glimpses, less like the full movies of dreams. But more important, I think, are
the memories we use to stitch
together what we are doing right now. You walk into the kitchen to get a
cup of coffee. That action makes sense to you because you are living in the
movie of having just been in the other room where you were talking to someone.
You may object that this sense of being
alive right now doesn’t feel anything like a movie, it is simply reality, the
present. That is what it feels like, I agree. However, it feels real because
your mind is stitching together this moment with everything that has happened
in the last half hour or more. Think of what happens when that process breaks
down, as it does for people with Alzheimers. They find themselves in the
kitchen, but they can’t remember why. The present is cut off from two minutes
ago. They have now, but it doesn’t make any sense, it is the end of a story
that appears to have no beginning, so it isn’t a story at all. It is just
confusion. Their internal movie isn’t working, so they can become confused about
who they are, or where they are. It is a terrible condition, but it proves in extremis that we rely on an internal
movie simply to make sense of the here and now, every second of the day. We are
all living in a mentally created movie, where we are the star, and if we forget
the plot, we also lose our identity, and our sanity.
The difference between us and those with
Alzheimers is that our memory is working properly. Alzheimer’s attacks a part
of the brain known as the hippocampus, where memories are not stored, but
sorted. This is where short-term
memory is turned into long term memory. Tragically, this is the first part of
the brain that is targeted by the disease, so that short-term memory itself is
compromised. They cannot remember what happened in the last two minutes, so
there are no events to be placed in long term storage. They get stuck in the
present, with a huge gulf between now, and the deep past, which they retain
from before the disease took over.
In healthy people, the hippocampus acts
like a film editor. It reviews the footage of the day, and decides what will
get into your personal movie, and what boring details will get lost forever.
This may be why most of our memories of childhood are about exceptional events,
but we can’t remember a typical day in any detail. At the time, the normal was
in good supply, but that day you broke your arm seemed more important, so it
got stored in deep memory, becoming part of the movie of your life.
In the Middle Ages, they had a way of
gaming this system to force people to remember important events. If a town was
hosting an important event, like the investiture of a new mayor, a boy would be
brought around to witness all the official events that day, the signings, the
oaths, etc…Then, at the end of the day, they would suddenly throw him into the
river. After they fished him out alive, the astonished child would go to bed.
That night, his brain decided to store all the events of the day leading up to
being thrown in the river, on the assumption that knowing what preceded the
near-drowning would help to avoid having it happen again. Decades later, that
boy, now an old man, would still remember the events of that important day in
the city’s history, serving as a kind of living record. ( Thanks to James L. McGaugh's book, Memory and Emotion, for this strange fact).
This internal form of movie making helps make sense of why motion pictures have become so common in modern life.
We like movies because we have always had movies in our heads, as memories, as dreams, and as our sense of the present moment. So, in this early part of the 21st century, we have become motion picture junkies. We fill every moment we can with moving pictures, whether they come in the form of tv, movies, YouTube videos, or video games. We do it at home, and when we are commuting. Even on the street, it seems most of us are talking on the phone or checking emails, keeping us jacked into the bigger story of our lives. We have shown that our internal instinct for stories is leading us to spend as much time as possible in external stories, often in the form of moving pictures.
Ironically, this fascination with external
stories may be interfering with our ability to create our own internal movies.
Remember the hippocampus, our internal film editor? It works best when you stop
taking in new experiences. Our memories are sorted during down time, when the
mind isn’t doing much of anything. Daydreaming, lying around, staring out the
window on the streetcar, and most of all, sleeping. The hippocampus doesn’t
work well when our minds are constantly taking in new information, like
checking our emails every few minutes, in between YouTube videos and Facebook
postings. All that constant digital activity that is so normal in our lives now
is actually really bad for our ability to form memories.
People who multi-task do far worse on
cognitive tests than people who don’t. People who get less than seven-nine
hours sleep ( which statistically is pretty much everyone) on a regular basis
harm their brain’s ability to form memories. 50-100 years ago, everyone got up to two hours more sleep
per night than we do now. Our reduction in sleep means the next day you can’t
remember that new employee’s name, or what time the meeting will occur. Our
addiction to stories and moving pictures is keeping us up too late at night,
undermining our ability to make lasting memories.
The irony in this is that our devices are
making personal memory less important. Our digital calendars can tell us when
the next meeting is, and our massive personal photo collection in our phone or
computer can show us exactly what we were doing on that first date. You could argue that with a universe of
data and memories in the cloud, we can afford to lose some personal memory. It
is a fair trade. But that misses the fact that what makes us special as
individuals is our ability to stitch together events and information in novel
ways. That’s the essence of creativity, the mixing of different things together
to make a new idea, a new technology, or a new business strategy. That creative
process only works if you have the information in your head, so your mind can
come up with new connections and combinations. It can’t all be in the cloud.
This is new territory for everyone, so I
don’t have a simple answer. But this much is clear: our brains like to dream,
to have down time. Out of those fertile fields come our best ideas. Staying
jacked in undermines that creative process, the way in which we bring something
new and wonderful to the boardroom, to the kitchen table, to our friends at the
bar. We shouldn’t let our fascination with stories and movies get in the way of
us making our own stories and movies in our heads. Who knows, if you unplug a
bit more you may become the person with ideas others tweet about:)
Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary
filmmaker in Toronto. www.milton2.tv
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