A few months back, I saw the much-maligned The Fourth Kind. I was fascinated the entire time, though not by the alien abduction plot (it was pretty familiar, except for one sort of ballsy little twist.)
What I found interesting was the film’s use of split screens showing the film’s reenactment of the “true” story on one half and “real footage” from home video cameras on the other.
It wasn’t that Unsolved Mysteries-style telling of the story that interested me, in itself. It was the… well, I guess the art direction, if you get right down to it.
For example, a number of scenes take place in a psychologist’s office. The film shows reenactments of some hypnosis sessions, alongside the psychologist’s video records of the sessions.
The offices are similar, in a number of ways, but not the same.
In the fake office, everything is beautiful. The room is huge and the furniture is set in the centre–plenty of room for cameras to move around. The two places where characters will sit are backed with attractive but non-distracting features, such as a fireplace. Soft light comes in through a pair of open windows.
Uh, open windows? In a shrink’s office, on the ground floor? Not to sound paranoid, but some psychologists’ patients ARE paranoid. They wouldn’t like that. Besides, are your sessions anyone else’s business? Your employer’s, for example?
But this is the fake movie office, and that’s kind of the point. When the split screen comes up, we see the real office. It has a lot of similarities, but it’s a real room. Imperfect. Not designed for filming.
It’s strange… I spend so much time looking at rooms on TV and movie screens that I forget how ridiculous they are. When I’m in IKEA (which is rarely. Get off me.), I notice where cords should be and aren’t, and what basic parts of a living home have been removed so as to make the space look tidy. I think about what would happen if my dogs spent ten minutes in that room. But I don’t tend to think about that when I see TV and movie rooms.
We’re all very aware that TV and movies show us unrealistic body types. We know that it can take hours to get a twenty second shot and that people spend hours in make-up before going anywhere near a camera. We know about body doubles. We know that actors have the time and money for personal trainers and surgery. And still we think (especially if we’re girl-people) that we should look that way.
How often do we look at the sets of a show or movie and think they aren’t realistic? I’m not talking about the Batcave or that prison where they keep Magneto. I’m talking about supposedly average living rooms. Do we stop and think, wow–you never see cords, or an outlet? You don’t, usually. You don’t see marks on the wall or plants with dead leaves or anything that isn’t utterly perfect. You do on reality television, so that’s something–but you don’t see a real mess even on shows where, come on, you know there’d be one. Big Love, for example. How many kids are running around those houses? And there’s not a single scuff on a single wall? I don’t care if Bill does own a hardware chain or if Nicki is a handiperson. They would not be able to keep up.
I was pleasantly surprised by the normalcy of the home in Paranormal Activity, though of course some bitchy movie reviewers who are shallower than the gloss on their lips just had to pipe up about the ugliness of the window treatments. How offensive, that a young couple should have $20 curtain rods from Home Depot instead of, I don’t know, carved ivory with panda-fur trim. And how appalling that they might not have had the services of a professional decorator.
I can see why the reviewers would expect that, though, because it is the standard. That’s what we’re used to seeing. Even the homes of characters who are supposed to be poor tend to be shabby in a tidy and coordinated way. Lucky Louie went the other way with their bare-bones set, making it worse than most people’s apartments, but even that exaggeration was far closer to the places where I used to babysit than is most of what I see on TV.
As a viewer and home owner, I’m disturbed by the realization that, while I’ve been trying to steel myself against the unrealistic demands on my physical self, I’ve been thoughtlessly absorbing the demands on my home. Not the obvious things, like fancy new cars every year and huge houses for everyone in New York. I know better than that. But the little things… the lack of clutter or dust or smears on the windows… those things have worked their way into my brain and made me look at my house in a way that probably isn’t fair to either my house or me.
As a writer, I’m curious about sets and their effect on the audience. Do we want to see perfect houses for the same reason that we supposedly want to see perfect bodies, which is that it’s a fantasy and an escape–maybe even a chance to project and pretend we’re something “better”? Or do we subconsciously want to see people whose homes are like (or better still, WORSE than!) our own?
Would it help us get into the stories to see realistic places onscreen? Or do we find it easier to get immersed in a story when the sets are bland and clean–nothing to block the shots or draw focus or interfere with the action? Nothing that would make us notice the home and, in so doing, notice that it wasn’t our home and we weren’t in the scene.
Weigh in, if you would… and let me know if you know of a good cleaning person in Edmonton who doesn’t charge a million bucks an hour.
Hey, I said I was trying not to have unrealistic expectations. I didn’t say the sinks weren’t kinda grungy around the taps or that there weren’t dust bunnies under the computer desk. You know how it is.
Current Bedside Reading: Catherine Crier, Final Analysis: The Untold Story of the Susan Polk Murder Case
Commentary: You would think, if a guy really wanted to kill himself, that he could find a faster way than becoming a shrink, diddling a teenage patient, marrying her, and making her progressively crazier for decades until she finally got around to murdering him. But I guess some people will go to any lengths to have someone else do the deed for them.
My iPod Is Singing: “There’ll be faerie lights, as bright as any city night.”
