Films always have a story to tell. Most of the time, they try to be as realistic as possible, since realism allows viewers to immerse themselves in the story.
However, how can viewers tell that a film indeed captures reality? It is because a certain ideology prevails over a society that decides what is real and unreal. Reality is a social construct manifested in what is known as culture, something which can be defined as “the [ultimately] coherent pattern of beliefs, acts, responses that we produce and comprehend every day” (Kolker, 1999).
Thus, films indeed tell a story. They tell of a certain culture, a certain reality that audiences can relate to precisely because it has been socially constructed.
Because of its ability to closely capture reality, film becomes an ideal medium to capture the culture of today’s society. However, the concept of culture can only be understood by taking into account the different subcultures that comprise it. After all, “no one element can be taken for granted. The whole is made of its parts” (Kolker, 1999).
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane personifies this concept by telling the story of Charles Foster Kane from many different perspectives, showing the multi-faceted personality of a single man. However, none of the people interviewed really knew Kane in his entirety. He seemed to reveal certain sides of himself only to certain people, in the same way that everybody is a son or daughter to their parents, a student to their teachers, and so many other things while remaining one person. In the same way that a person can never be totally understood, so it is with culture. There is simply no way of understanding culture in its totality because even subcultures have further divisions, such that one cannot distinguish the head from the tail. It is just too complex to gain a full understanding, something the reporter in Citizen Kane realizes in the end, as he gives up in his quest to solve the mystery of Rosebud, and consequently understand Charles Foster Kane for the man he had been.
The film Velvet Goldmine brings the audience into a world beyond society’s heterosexual norms. Here is a world where it is perfectly all right to be a homosexual. It’s a world where a love triangle can be composed of a man torn between choosing between a woman and another man. It is a world the audience is unfamiliar with, and this unfamiliarity translates to the feeling of unreality they have.
However, who is to say that being homosexual is unreal? That loving someone of the same sex is wrong? Such things are decided upon by prevailing ideologies in society, and Velvet Goldmine pushes these ideologies to the limits. Although the film adheres to the clichés that gay people tend to be ostentatious –what with Brian Slade’s blue hair and body glitter—it shows that beneath all that glitter lies someone just as human as the next heterosexual man. Brian Slade, Curt Wild, and Arthur Stuart are all men who just want to change the world, but only end up changing themselves. These, together with the longing to love and be loved in return, are dreams of every person, regardless of his or her sexual preferences.
Thus, Velvet Goldmine proclaims that the world it draws for its audience is just as real as the world the viewers know. It is a subculture that exists within the dominant culture: it may be a minority, but it exists nonetheless. The film makes people aware of its existence as a reality.
Unlike Velvet Goldmine, which draws a picture of a world that is real, yet ignored, the film Pleasantville draws its audience into a world that is very unreal. Where the real world is colored with its diversity, the world of Pleasantville is literally black and white: it is simplistic and idealistic, free of violence, danger, and dilemmas.
However, this is a television reality. Unlike film, where the darkened movie theater allows the massive size of the screen to overwhelm the viewers and suck them into the story, television is more difficult to immerse oneself in. When one watches television, he is aware that the television set is amidst many other elements that constitute reality, like the whir of the electric fan perhaps, or the ringing of the telephone. This difficulty in immersion is shown in the very way David and Jennifer enter the world of Pleasantville: they get in through a magical remote control. For the audience, they become more aware of the falseness of Pleasantville’s reality precisely because of the difficult immersion process: they are distanced enough from this world to see that it is a very simplistic way of looking at a very complicated world.
Pleasantville is black and white because its culture is black and white. Everything that constitutes their reality is something they have grown accustomed to, like the women staying at home and doing everything they are told, and the basketball team winning every game. Color begins to appear only when people begin to stray from what they had grown accustomed to because of certain things they discover about themselves. For most of the teens, it had come in the form of sexual awakening. But for the adults, it was in discovering emotions they did not know they had, such as anger or love. As people slowly become colored for different reasons, the diversity begins to emerge. The world that Pleasantville represents –which is the simple world where peace reigns—becomes the world the audience knows: diverse, complex, colored.
Thus, colors come into Pleasantville because society is slowly changing. And these changes are not shallow ones: the mere fact that color appears where there is change means that these changes are not so insignificant that they can go unnoticed. On the contrary, they are glaring and obvious. But Pleasantville shows that change is not necessarily bad. In fact, social change –and consequently, change in culture—only translates to growth: suddenly, people know that there is something outside of Pleasantville, that they can go to college, that they can leave their husbands when they’re not happy. Ultimately, social change translates to a personal growth just like the one David undergoes in the end.
What Pleasantville does, then, is to reverse the process. Instead of showing the audience reality for what it is, it shows an unreal world: the peaceful and problem-free world every individual wishes for. And it is through this unreal world that reality creeps in, that the artist begins to add the colors slowly, so that the audience can see just what constitutes reality: sexuality, emotion, difference in opinion, and, in the end, a limitless opportunity for growth.
By being easily accessible to the masses, these three films –as well as films in general—belong to popular culture. But more than just belonging, these films actually depict certain parts and characteristics of popular culture.
Pleasantville shows how popular culture is a means of escaping the real world, as it transports David and Jennifer to the less-complicated world of television. Citizen Kane shows how popular culture becomes mass culture through the circulation of newspapers which, as they carry stories about his life, turn him into something part of the popular culture as well despite his being a part of society’s elite and his appreciation for “high” culture. Velvet Goldmine exemplifies a work of popular culture that is gender specific, as it gives light to the homosexuality that
exists within the dominant culture of heterosexuality. In doing this, it shows the side of popular culture that is deviant and the corresponding value judgments that such a film spawns.
Finally, different forms of popular culture are shown using a medium that belongs to popular culture as well. Through these three movies, film as a medium of popular culture is able to depict the effects of television (Pleasantville), newspapers (Citizen Kane), and music (Velvet Goldmine) on society at large. Newspapers reflect what a society deems important, or specifically, what those in power deem important: as Charles Foster Kane says, “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” Music appeals to the emotions, and as Curt Wild gyrates and writhes on stage in Velvet Goldmine, it becomes a medium where one can let go of his inhibitions and simply be himself, allowing the music to consume him instead of vice versa. Television shows the paradox of immersing oneself into a show while maintaining distance at the same time, and the phenomenon of sharing the TV-viewing experience with millions of other viewers across the globe, much unlike the contained space of a movie theater that unites viewers in a single movie-viewing experience.
All of these media –newspapers, television, music, and film—are part of popular culture because they are easily accessible to everyone. But film proves to be the medium that unites all four by showing just how these different forms of popular culture contribute to the dominant culture at large. In a sense, there is a certain mutualism that exists: film is able to provide insights about the dominant culture, and it is these insights that contribute to the further growth and development of pop culture and the dominant culture to which it belongs.
Conclusion
Films project certain parts of culture, but they never succeed in depicting the entirety of culture, as well as the entirety of reality. In truth, there is no such thing as a total reality, or a total and absolute way of understanding culture. Culture is made up of an infinite number of subcultures; reality is made of an infinite number of elements. Trying to understand it all would make one go insane. Personally, I’m content with focusing on certain aspects of culture and reality that films choose to depict because films seem to send the message that it’s okay to look at the smaller picture sometimes, because that’s the key to understanding the bigger one.
Films, then, are a key to unlocking the mystery of the biggest motion picture of all: life.