It's All in the Mind
BY JIM YOAKUM
The mind, unlike the brain, that otherwise useless lump between your ears, can fool you. It sometimes sees one thing while your brain is seeing another, or what you think is ‘another’. I’m talking about watching movies or, rather, re-watching them and re-evaluating your opinion, good or bad. Case in point: No Country for Old Men. When this movie first came out I thought it was a lot like casual sex: long and slow and went nowhere with a bad ending. But, after viewing it several times afterwards, I became convinced that my brain had seen one movie while my mind had seen another. What my brain had perceived as long, slow and boring, my mind had later transferred into a complex and deeply-rewarding film which can only reveal itself on repeat viewings. Unlike casual sex (which is quick, immediately gratifying and involves no emotional commitment) No Country is like sex with a French acrobat: it’s twisted, complicated and requires a visa.
The exact opposite is true of Inglorious Basterds, which I first felt was a breath of fresh air from the corpse that has become ‘the war movie’. Bad-ass Jews go on a rampage and kill Hitler – what a fantastic revenge fantasy! But the next time I watched it, I don’t know, something changed. I now saw Brad Pitt’s lantern-jawed performance as hammy as a Smithfield and, by the third viewing, I felt the entire premise was nothing more than a cartoon version of war played by cartoon cardboard cut-out characters. It was no more a breath of fresh air than any WWII movie starring Audie Murphy or John Wayne. What had happened? The movies were the same. Had the brain watched one movie and the mind another? Which opinion could be trusted?
Orson Welles once said of movies “A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” I’m not sure what that says about the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino, both are considered screen poets, so maybe the difference lies in myself and what I consider to be the ‘truthiness’ of the movie once its been truly digested. But, again, maybe trying to find truth in movies is a fool’s game. After all, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” Brain versus mind. Which do you watch with?