Carroll: The Power of Movies

 Movies enjoy a lasting foothold as the premier artform of the twentieth-century and beyond.     Differentiating “movies” from the broader categorization of “film” or “motion pictures”, the medium has a broad sense of accessibility, relatability and perceptibility to a mass audience. These can all be credited, in part, with the genre’s lasting dominance within the modern era. Distinct from more catchall sobriquets, the term “movie” refers to a film style that utilizes narrative and representative reality to engage with its viewers. Through narrative, movies engage with its audience by harkening to the inborn human curiosity of “cause” and “effect.” We are able to perceive this causality with intense clarity due to the variability of framing and focus. By being shown in pictorial form, these details mean more to us than they ever potentially could be in less overt media, such as novels or even stage-plays. Movies, in essence, have a mass appeal because of the fluidity in which we become immersed within them.

Narrative storytelling through motion pictures adopts humanity’s oldest and most ubiquitous form of information exchange (Carroll 492). Human beings tend to comprehend data most efficiently when exposed to it in narrative form, and thus, movies provide this by creating questions that are then, later answered by the progression of the film’s events. This concept of asking and answering questions is further partitioned into the concept of “micro-” and “macro-questions” (494). A movie is capable of keeping its audience glued to the screen by presenting the overall plot as a macro-question.  In And Then There Were None, the film posits the macro-question of “who will survive,” and “who is the killer,” and the plot is driven by them. The movie simultaneously maintains our curiosity in the narrative whole by peppering each scene with their own micro-questions. Why were they all invited to the island? Can the servants be trusted? Is Mr. Lombard who he claims he is? This duality of “question” and “answer,” “cause” and “effect,” describes the “erotetic model” of film narrative (494).

As we watch the film we are guided from scene to scene by being exposed to all of the relevant details necessary to answer these questions we’ve been given. Unlike other, more subjective mediums such as live theatre, movies grant a greater sense of coherence as the use of variable framing, focus, and mise-én-scene tell us, the audience, exactly what is important and warrants our fixation. In fact, many of the aforementioned “questions” are answered, most efficiently, using these techniques (490). A shot that tilts and focuses on a revolver at the bedside table hints that it is very likely going to be used in the near future -- a pan across an empty room confirms the seclusion of a paranoid character who seeks a private space. These questions and answers are “shown” rather than “told.”

It is this nature of “showing” over “telling” that truly captures why movies enjoy both a intense and almost universal engagement. Pictorial representations traverse boundaries of culture and education by showing us, visually, what could otherwise take a substantial amount of time to convey, linguistically. While other artforms and mediums may require education, cognition, or even familiarity, the ability to comprehend what is being portrayed in a movie relies, mostly, on one’s sense of object familiarity, a trait that is overwhelmingly standard for most, regardless of education (487). At its barest levels it is human beings’ tendency to relate what they see to what they feel that explains the widespread and gripping popularity of movies.