* Making use of our conventional wisdom in the movie industry
** Sifting fact from fiction in the movies we watch
*** Aha! An Eureka Moment
Aha!
But then,
just after the
unusual moment,
she forgot what she
was about to say to Jim.
Sagacity, or sapience, the quality of being wise makes me think of Gandalf from The Lord of The Rings, Yoda, as well as Master Shifu from Kung Fu Panda. Conventional wisdom is a generally accepted body of ideas and explanations, which is known as orthodoxy in religion. Last week, we looked at how hard-wired behaviour is, and that we are graced with the ability to think, and to look around the wall. As well as using our intuition and judgement in day-to-day activities. Different cultures in the East and the West conceptualise wisdom differently, though industries which are majorly commercial, like the film industry, portray another type of wisdom, a more general and constructed type of wisdom. Today I’ve taken tidbits (copied) from a podcast (TED Audio Collective) by Franklin Leonard, titled “How to challenge conventional wisdom—and change any industry”. It’s pretty neat, and shares some thought-turning ideas about the extent to which conventional wisdom shapes the genre of movies that are successful, and why movies and their actors are so popular in the first place.
Dear Patient Reader,
*
In his talk, Franklin Leonard talks about the conventional wisdom of screenwriting merit, and how the screenplays of potential movies are sorted out and disposed of. Decoding all of it using his own experience as a film producer in the American film industry, Leonard emphasises how much all of us rely on our conventional wisdom. He talks about topics like “films about black people don’t sell overseas”.[1] To, “female driven action movies don’t work because women will see themselves in men, but men won’t see themselves in women.”[2] Or, “movies about women over 40 that are on screen heroes have to conform to a very narrow idea about beauty that we consider conventional.”[3] Isn’t a woman over 40 more of a hero than a 21 year old? Overall mainstream film preferences, that translate into blockbusters, are a testament to how conventional we are. “We live in very strange times, but for the most part, we all live in a state of constant sorting of the content we consume. There’s an overload of information, and an overload of stuff to assimilate. And so as a rule, we tend to default to conventional wisdom.”[4] Technically, we’re using our conventional wisdom as a coping mechanism to the things we aren’t used to. Point being, that the conventional wisdom we use on a day-to-day basis may be acting as a contradiction to who you really are as a person.
**
How do we sift fact from fiction when using our conventional wisdom to decode a movie? Separating the actor and glory of the action or horror, from the script. By taking away the fiction, the fact is that the script may be really good, or maybe not so much. “How much of our conventional wisdom is all convention and no wisdom?”[5] It affects the movies or serials we could be watching. The ones that actually correspond to our likings, curiosity, and personality. We idolise actors and actresses, though usually look past asking ourselves, “Was the script good?” And I think an important opinion I took from the podcast is that a movie doesn’t have to be diverse to be good. It can be great with a full cast of bisexual white men, transgender black men, or straight Asian women. It doesn’t make so much of a difference if you take the huge effort of taking your conventional wisdom coat off for a painful hour or two. And that it’s really not about superhero movies and big franchise movies, though yes they’re top-grossing, but that other movies that may not be so good exist, and are watched by pools of people around the world. Thanks AI for the subtitles with your errors we understand anyways. It’s all about context really. If we watch on the screen that the Golden retriever peed on the mailbox, the mghfgjhgiuf (the words that don’t make sense) means that the Golden retriever peed on the mailbox. We look for things that we love and we watch them. We know the genres we like, the quirks we like seeing, those that we are able to relate to in real-life, in movies and in actors portraying their own version of their character’s script. We know the kind of setting we like, the lighting, and overall vibe. The writers we like and their screenplays.
Like in an action-packed screenplay, moments of joy, moments of sadness, and moments of exhilaration can be felt in a more natural movie, too. Moments from a film that prompt you to laugh, or to cry. And after a movie is finished, we think about what we just watched. It’ll stay with us for some time, a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Then we’ll forget about it. But then, there’s also all the movies that we do remember. That have left their impact on our conventional wisdom and imagination. The ones where fact and fiction sift together into our memory bowl.
***
The Aha effect, or Eureka effect, exclaimed by Archimedes and exemplified by Newton and Einstein, can be experienced by anyone. You don’t have to be a mathematician or scientist to realise something you’ve been breaking your head over. Eureka (εὕρηκα), which is Ancient Greek for “I have found it”, substitutes for any flash of insight, no matter the situation. “Studies by neuroscientists show that the kind of insight contained in a eureka moment is actually the result of a much longer creative process. We first use our analytical minds to turn a problem over and over in search of a solution with no success. But when we finally relax, give up thinking, and turn our attention inward, the insight suddenly arrives.”[6] Like when you finally remember the name of the person you’re talking to. Or, when you finally remember where you’re supposed to go this evening after racking your brain for a streak of memory.
Think of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. “In a tip-of-the-tongue state, a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can’t retrieve something at the moment it’s probably stored somewhere in our memory, and if we work at it with some mental sweat and relaxation, we’ll get it.”[7] Tip-of-the-tongue moments actually reveal the brain’s organisation. Forgetting words that we were on the cusp of saying is a really common occurrence. A professor of psychology, Dr. Bennett Schwartz, says that “Memory is a mess. Information is stored in all different kinds of the brain; visual information is stored in visual parts of the brain; auditory information is stored in auditory parts of the brain. And the goal of the memory retrieval system is to bring this all together. Schwartz likens our memory to a teenager’s bedroom; they know where everything is but it’s a complete mess.”[8] That is not so charming, but I’ll take it.
Well, that’s all. Have a good week ahead, bye.
P.S. It is so hot.
P.P.S. Next week’s post is ‘Why do we watch TV?”, which flips through the reasons behind why we do, and its relation to momentary pleasure.
References
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/how_to_be_a_better_human_how_to_challenge_conventional_wisdom_and_change_any_industry/transcript?language=en
[2] "Ibid". [1]
[3] "Ibid". [1]
[4] "Ibid". [1]
[5] "Ibid". [1]
[6] https://deepenglish.com/lessons/the-eureka-moment/
[7] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91284151
[8] "Ibid". [7]
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