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Subscribe to "moviewise: Life Lessons From Movies" on Substack for long-form essays (some humorous) on the wisdom revealed in movies. Read about the life lessons or guides to life depicted in popular films that can be applied in real life (so you don’t have to learn them the hard way).
You know what your problem is? It’s that you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
—Davis (Steve Martin) in Grand Canyon (1991)
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Feel Better With Movie Therapy: 5 Great Movies, 5 Powerful Life Lessons For Mental Well-Being
The beauty of movies is that they model behavior. They allow us to experience another person’s life: live their frame of reference, see their point of view. It is as film critic Roger Ebert wrote, movies are “powerful empathy machines.” It even goes further than this because movies are also the embodiment of our collective knowledge. The collaborative nature of making and producing movies means that when there is a message expressed, it is likely upheld by multiple people who believe others should hear it.
Clearly then, there is a lot of wisdom to be learned from watching movies. If you think about all the resources, all the money, all the people, the heart, energy, and thought that needs go into making a feature length film, it is reasonable to consider what the main message is in a film. Why go through such a public medium with the hopes of reaching a large audience, if the creators, the auteurs, didn’t have something significant or valuable to say? Yes, some movies are just mindless entertainment, but even these reveal some truths about ourselves and our lives.
Meanwhile, great movies leave you thinking about ideas and beliefs. While it is possible that the filmmakers did not set out to transfer wisdom, they nevertheless gave us a product of the mind for the mind. And although our tendency to look for meaning where there isn’t any may get the best of us occasionally, sometimes it is infinitely clear that we are meant to learn something from watching a movie. And what’s easier than learning by watching? We humans are very good at that.
Indeed, we are a social species that has used storytelling as a means to connect to one another, to teach and learn from each other, since before the beginning of civilization. The prehistoric cave paintings that date back 40,000 years in Spain (El Castillo) and 30,000 in France (Chauvet) are the progenitors of modern movies. Why did our ancient ancestors immortalize images of large wild animals such as horses and bison, and imprint human hands on the walls of caves? Could the reason be the same one that drives filmmakers to immortalize moving images on the screen? Like the cave paintings, perhaps movies are trying to communicate something. Movies are truly a treasure trove of insight into the very core of human existence.
These insights, these guides, are the Life Lessons chronicled on moviewise. Film criticism is a public service profession. A good film review is a reliable guidepost that informs of the good and the bad. It can point people toward movies that are not only well made and entertaining, but also insightful in a way that leaves viewers satisfied and perhaps wiser.
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February 11th 2019
Movie Lists! | Guides To Life | Movie Therapy | Ready To Laugh | + Guest Posts