I do not watch TV, except occasionally when somebody else is watching it and I take a peek for a minute or two. I find it monotonous and too commercialized for my taste. There is always a different show playing that ends, marking the beginning of another one. The hobby of watching television is one that is never-ending. People get sucked in into their apparatus and do not come back for hours at a time. Like video games and computers, a TV is full of brain cell-killing footage that is carefully arranged into alternating sequences consisting of 5 minutes of commercials and 1 minute of a certain show. This set arrangement ties someone to a couch as they live in fear of missing a second of their beloved show and turns watching it into a responsibility. We then hear things like the following: “I’m sorry girl, but I can’t meet you to work on the project ‘til 10 ‘cause Gossip Girl is on tonight.”
On the other hand, I do truly enjoy watching movies, especially after a long week. It is through movies that I can relax, and depart from my own world leaving all stress behind for a couple of hours. Movies serve as a medium to understand other people and cultures, even if it is through the eyes of a fictional character. When watching a film, we get to live someone else’s life and experience their experiences. We get to watch someone else’s problems develop into solutions because in the cinematic world nothing remains unsolved and as human beings we enjoy watching that. It is like if our own problems disappeared.
Movies have had a positive as well as a negative impact in my life. I have been disappointed after watching Dear John, where what is destined to be a lifetime of love takes a turn and ends up with the girl marrying someone else and raising their child—that is not even her own—while the guy—whose father had recently passed away—ends up alone. Meanwhile, in The Notebook, the protagonist chooses to be with the love of her life over being with her fiancée, and it ends with them passing away together while they sleep. It is obvious that I prefer one movie over the other. While watching Dear John I shed tears of anger and disappointment at the female protagonist, during The Notebook, I did so with eventual happiness and relief. Therefore, while it is the evoking of emotions that I look for in a film, its outcome is of importance to me.
Movies are also filled with hidden meanings and symbolism, while TV shows are not meant to stimulate your intellect. While analyzing the film Letters from Iwo Jima I learned about how media shapes how the public perceives a certain issue. We can take the movie The Passion of the Christ as an example. Almost everyone cried during that movie and left the theater promising themselves to be better Christians. The fact that the Pope approved of this film and promoted it made it popular among Christian-Catholic people. On the other hand, The Da Vinci Code, a film that questions Catholic beliefs was considered “of the devil” by a lot of those same people.
