Love the x-ray vision into layers of symbolism and analogy.
Especially agree with the assertion that the audience is meant to see the movie characters as more beautiful, more affluent, and basically better than them.
This would logically create subconscious envy. Great Britain‘s most famous art critic, John Berger, held that every publicity message, especially advertising, is intended to create envy sufficient to motivate a viewer to purchase the product to try to feel better.
::Who is the “We” in We Live in Time? Does it include people who aren’t master chefs or people who don’t have Hollywood good looks? Alma worries that her tragedy won’t move people, or won’t have meaning, unless she’s exceptional. I’m not as sure as I’d like to be that the movie disagrees.::
I think these kinds of movies works BECAUSE they're more glamorous than normal people are, because you're looking at "beautiful people" who seem to have it all—but they suffer from the same tragedy we do, or people we know do.
If Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield can go through this, then maybe God/the Universe/Fate doesn't just pick on us mediocre "normals", and there is no "divine plan" other than "Shit Happens, and it can happen even the Beautiful People."
I guess that's the more optimistic take. the less optimistic one is that they feature glamorous people because we only see the tragedy when it happens to someone it's not supposed to (ie, conventionally attractive cishet white people.)
We see tragedy all the time—we see it happen to our parents, our spouses (or exes), our children, our friends, our pets. We get beaten down with it, we see it so much.
Seeing tragedy strike the likes of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, or Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (because if I'm doing a movie like PENNY SERENADE about a poor young couple holding their marriage together in the face of constant strife, those are my first choices! </sarcasm> ), gives us a means of catharsis that we don't get knowing our Mother died without ever getting the chance to say "good-bye" to her, or that the woman we loved for forty years not only no longer wants any part of us, she might not even remember half the time who we are....
Love the x-ray vision into layers of symbolism and analogy.
Especially agree with the assertion that the audience is meant to see the movie characters as more beautiful, more affluent, and basically better than them.
This would logically create subconscious envy. Great Britain‘s most famous art critic, John Berger, held that every publicity message, especially advertising, is intended to create envy sufficient to motivate a viewer to purchase the product to try to feel better.
This was a good read.
::Who is the “We” in We Live in Time? Does it include people who aren’t master chefs or people who don’t have Hollywood good looks? Alma worries that her tragedy won’t move people, or won’t have meaning, unless she’s exceptional. I’m not as sure as I’d like to be that the movie disagrees.::
I think these kinds of movies works BECAUSE they're more glamorous than normal people are, because you're looking at "beautiful people" who seem to have it all—but they suffer from the same tragedy we do, or people we know do.
If Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield can go through this, then maybe God/the Universe/Fate doesn't just pick on us mediocre "normals", and there is no "divine plan" other than "Shit Happens, and it can happen even the Beautiful People."
I guess that's the more optimistic take. the less optimistic one is that they feature glamorous people because we only see the tragedy when it happens to someone it's not supposed to (ie, conventionally attractive cishet white people.)
We see tragedy all the time—we see it happen to our parents, our spouses (or exes), our children, our friends, our pets. We get beaten down with it, we see it so much.
Seeing tragedy strike the likes of Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, or Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (because if I'm doing a movie like PENNY SERENADE about a poor young couple holding their marriage together in the face of constant strife, those are my first choices! </sarcasm> ), gives us a means of catharsis that we don't get knowing our Mother died without ever getting the chance to say "good-bye" to her, or that the woman we loved for forty years not only no longer wants any part of us, she might not even remember half the time who we are....
Yah, I'm just a bundle of Holiday Cheer today!