Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Relating the unrelatable (alternately titled: Why Is "Unrelatable" Not a Word???)

I like my movies and books to be relatable.

And, although my sci-fi-loving friend reminds me that, as hard as I try, I will never know what it’s like to be an old Cuban man spending weeks fishing for enormous marlin that are only going to be eaten up by hungry sharks in the end anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for some good, realistic fiction.

Some of the movies that I’ve enjoyed the most and thought to be ‘good’ are, in fact, ‘realistic,’ in the sense that there are humans and settings that look like our world and conflicts that humans in our world face.

There’s The Way, by Emilio Estevez, about a man who pilgrimages across northern Spain after his estranged son is killed in a freak accident along the same pilgrimage.
 
Martin Sheen's character walking along El Camino de Santiago with his son's ashes
There’s National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation, which caricatures an American family’s Christmas (mis)adventures.

Just getting stuck under giant log-transporting trucks...the usual way to start off the Griswold family christmas tree hunt  

There’s Stand By Me, an adventure about four boys who spend a weekend in the woods searching for the body of boy from their town.
Can I please be friends with you???

There’s Outnumbered, which is actually a tv show, but is a semi-improvised comedy that documents a British family’s everyday life.
This is actually the funniest tv show. Please go watch it now.

But, then when I think about it, there’s Midnight in Paris, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spirited Away that I also thought to be pretty ‘good,’ which aren’t exactly the most realistic.  


Thinking back to what my friend said to me about how I can’t ever really relate to the Old man and the sea any more than she can to Ender’s game, I realized that really, a good movie, a good book—essentially, a good story—just needs to tap into some part of the human condition, the connection between beings. Humanity and what we experience can be manifested in a bunch of ways, not just what is familiar to us. Whether it’s through aliens or an American family, a good movie helps us understand what seems completely foreign, obscure, and unrelatable and then, through that, helps us understand our own connection.

No comments:

Post a Comment