My Objection to Film and Fiction

Disclaimer: To my friends (you know who you are), that read this. I do respect your decision to participate in leisure activities such as these, and my goal with this blog is not to rustle some feathers, but to share my opinion about the matter.

Jared

Film

It probably started when I saw the movie, “The Day After Tomorrow”. I was actually enjoying the movie, until it reached the end. It had perhaps the worst ending I had ever seen. Hollywood threw away this movie with the horrendously farfetched, and unrealistic ending to a supposedly, “End Of The World” movie. The way the film ended, in one way, made me slightly annoyed, and even angry. From then on, I quickly discovered that film was over-rated. I began to critically consider the plot of every movie that was advertised on television. I discovered that the vast majority of them had little or no plot at all, and most of them would have been unrealistic, and full of script lines that would never be uttered in regular conversation. The next bad movie I saw was, “Seeker: The Darkness Rising”. I was shooted by one of my friends to go see it. With my now more critical analysis of films, I was reluctant, but I accepted. It was the most boring fantasy movie I had ever seen, with a very lame plot. This only helped to develop my objective views towards film. The next movie I saw was, “The Illusionist”. At that point in time my views were solid, but to avoid becoming a social reject, I watched the movie with my friends. We were half way into the film when my ride arrived for me to go home. I wasn’t complaining. Once again, a very boring movie, with lame magic tricks. I saw snipits of other movies, but then finally decided that I was never going to waste my time again watching this garbage. Some of my friends justify their movie watching decisions by stating that they are, “art forms”. To me, “She’s The Man”, is not an art form. I began to realise just how much of my time, my life, would have been wasted if I was an avid movie watcher like many of my friends. To me, time is a very valuable thing. The most valuable thing that you can offer to someone is your time. And to simply throw away your time by watching poor excuses for acting, for hours on end is not the most useful way of using one’s limited time. However, I was not concious of how my views would affect those around me. I often get into the position of pushing my views onto my friends, and sometimes frustrating them because of it. Although no-one has said anything yet, I feel I may have done just that with this obsession of mine. Today, I generally keep my views to myself, but explain them to people just so they can understand where I am coming from, and then let them make up their own minds about it.

Fiction

I reject fictional material, such as novels for many of the same reasons. I see them as a bigger waste of my life than movies. And as a Christian, I see not beneficial reason for spending several hours of my time reading something that isn’t real. I had a pastor from an American church come to preach at our church, LifeStream Christian Fellowship. One of the things he said, which I have paraphrased, was, “People are spending all their time reading novels, you don’t need to read them, all you need to read is the Word of God.” I wasn’t reading novels at that time, but that put the final nail into my “novel coffin”, and that was the end of that. People often justify novel reading, by saying that it increases your vocabulary. This is a very shallow argument, because reading in general increases vocabulary. One of my friends questioned me by asking, “Well, why do you listen to a song?”. As a musician, I get a lot out of listening to music, because it helps to improve my playing, and writing. The act of reading fictional material is only useful if you desire to be a writer. If that is, indeed, what you aspire to be, then go for your life. I will encourage you in that. What aggravates me even more is when people around me start to compare non-sense that they read in novels to real-life scenarios and experiences. I hate it just as much when it happens with film also. It doesn’t matter to me in the slightest if it is a really good, well thought out story. If it is fictional, I am not going to read it, because it is sucking time out of my life, and I don’t know how much of it I have left. That’s the long and the short of it.

A somewhat aggressive post, but that’s the way it goes! If you have any questions about anything convered in this post, feel free to contact me. I hope this has been an inspiring read! Thanks as always.

Talk to you soon,

Jared