Movies About Movies

Cruising through the iTunes App Store to see what is available for stereo 3D cinema, my brain glazes over. Technique doesn't seem as interesting as it once was. The technical basics in grasp, it is time to move on to what really matters: "The Story."

Let the stereo 3D technicians fret over implementation, I'm the auteur!

Ha! Vanity preens before the mirror of delusion.

Laboring over story ideas with ironic detachment, watching movies with ironic detachment, viewing everyday life with ironic detachment, reading my own blog drafts with ironic detachment, shaving in front of the bathroom mirror with ironic detachment, I'm coming to realize that ironic detachment is the thread that weaves through my perception of everything.

Ironic detachment is exactly this sort of inner exile--an inner emigration--maintained with humor, chic bitterness, and a sometimes embarrassing but abidingly persistent hope.(R. Jay Magill Jr., Chic Ironic Bitterness, The University of Michigan Press, 2007)

I'm not so inclined to chic bitterness as R. Jay Magill, Jr. proposes. Blunt truth will do.

Can stereo 3D express ironic detachment as the auteur's vision? I think this would be very hard to do and I very much doubt anyone has attempted it. It is hard enough to conceive a compelling story that way.

Any movie, even as a treatment or screenplay, will more likely be about movies than about life. The ambition to make movies and the infestation of the imagination with cinema tropes are one and the same. Cinema and TV are perhaps the most derivative of media.

"The Story" has to be a movie story. It has to be structured by time-tested rules. Its production has to be conducted by industry-tested rules. It has to succeed by audience-tested rules. To create a story is to follow the rules of storytelling, rules that derive from a century of cinema, five centuries of printed books, and thousands of years of oral tradition.

The rules of storytelling in any form have become detached, not always ironically, from reality. Life does not happen the way we tell it and show it. A reporter for the New York Times can write a story that wows his editors, not despite the fact it is all made up, but because it is all made up. Story trumps truth anyday.

I have a problem with this. The problem is very similar to the reason most scientists and engineers don't bother with movies except when their brains need a rest, but then they don't get any rest because they find too much to criticise. Scientists investigate how the natural world works, engineers design how the built world works, and both declare after nearly every movie they see, "The world just doesn't work that way!"

Wouldn't you know that the stories I want to tell are about how the world of science and engineering actually works, and I want to tell this truth with fiction, and I want to do it in stereo 3D? Don Quixote would be proud of me.

So, I'm standing alone on the plain, looking up at an immense mountain I wish to climb, can't see any good routes, and haven't much time left to make the journey. But I have some magic in my pack that withstands any fate. I have ironic detachment.