I just bought a copy of ěThe Adventures of Robin Hood.î I bought it because Iíve been feeling swashbuckly of late. I tried renting it first. I called Blockbuster and asked, ěDo you have a copy of ëThe Adventures of Robin Hoodí with Errol Flynn?î
The young man who answered the phone said, ěHarold Flynn?î
ěErrol,î I answered through gritted teeth. I put a bit more emphasis on each letter than necessary: ěE-R-R-O-L.î
Needless to say, they didnít have it. Nor did any Blockbuster within a ten-mile radius of my house.
ěWe do have the Kevin Costner version,î one video store clerk offered, trying to be helpful.
That movie tried so hard to get the costumes right, the battle scenes right, to make everything plausible and realistic, and was so incredibly dull. In ěThe Adventures of Robin Hood,î thereís never a drop of blood in any of the fights; even the sound effects in the big battle scene are wimpy. Instead of a good, healthy ěCLANG!î as the swords collide, they go ěclink.î Yet it was a total thrill to watch. Maybe realismís not the best indicator of quality.
Weíre short on swashbucklers these days. I consider it an indictment against our culture. Realismís the thing, especially on TV. I donít watch any of the ěrealityî shows. I canít decide if Iím fighting a moral war against this tide of entertainment or an aesthetic one. I think they are bound together. The main reason I donít watch is that they donít entertain meóan odd thing to say as Iíve never seen any of it. Iíve not sat through a single ěAmericaís Funniest Home Videos,î ěCops,î ěSurvivor,î or ěAmerican Idol.î How do I know that I wouldnít be entertained? Thatís where I fall back on the moral argument. I say, in reference to ěSurvivor,î I will not commit my eyeballs to the glorification of scheming. I can find moral grounds for rejecting the whole lot of them.
Having just watched ěRobin Hoodî and rejoiced in its oh-so-unrealistic battle scenes, I have refined my sense of what is appalling about the relentless pursuit of the real: itís so belittling. My biggest fear is that no one notices. Weíve kicked out the counterpoint of the realistic, which is the fantastic. Thereís precious little contact with the stuff that elevates our vision: magic (not card tricks), romance (not cyberporn), ritual (not Monday Night Football), heroism (not giving blood every couple of years). The quest for ěrealismî gives us very small things. Realism is the opposite of ambition and idealism. It is only interested in how things are and never the wide, dizzying expanse of what they might be.
I don't mean by this comment to denigrate experimental forms of cinema or performance art, which I think are a separate matter (and I assume their creators mostly would think that too.) But, as one who *has* watched Survivor and Cops now and again, I think "reality TV" also has another effect: it creates the impression that art ultimately dissolves into nothing more than training a camera on someone. That really, there's not that much to it after all, and the people who were telling us otherwise for centuries must have been some kind of oppressors.
To be on TV, to be a celebrity, you used to have to be able to do something: sing, dance, act in a drama, carry us into a wider and more mythic space. People are now on TV because they're on TV and are celebrities because they're celebrities. So we are slowly teaching ourselves that nothing has any more claim to be art than anything else. That there's no point honoring, say, real musical, poetic, storytelling gifts -- or those who have spent decades honing them -- because it's really more fun to watch people drive into telephone poles anyway.
I know, I sound like a curmudgeon. Better go catch an episode of "Battlebots," quick.
Posted by: leelah at September 11, 2002 07:20 AMGoddess Eshtine--what you've identified is the leaching-out of MYTH from our society. Think back to myths across cultures...they hero always gets a magic this or that, the hand to hand combat last for hours over ramparts, ditches, trolls caves, and magic mountains. Could anybody REALLy swordfight like Erroll Flynn against four bad guys at once? NO! But by suspending belief, we enjoy the spectiacle--they MYTH. The hero is made more, uh, heroic, and the bad guys more bad. The last swashbuckling movie of MYTHIC proportions may have been THE PRINCESS BRIDE.
Posted by: Kit Gefallen at September 12, 2002 05:49 PM