How Smart is John Q. Moviegoer?

Factual Questions
1

I don’t want this is get bummped to Cafe Society, so I will ask the question first, then dabble on about why I ask.

Do Movie Directors have a standard for throwing out concepts that they think the public would not understand? Where is this line drawn?

I recall “The Matrix” ‘there is no spoon’ scene brought up questions about viewers knowing about Concave and Convex reflections, and asking if Neo’s image should be right side up or not.

Many Amnesia Movies must Wrestle with this (Memneto, Paycheck, and I assume 50 First dates) but It only makes me wonder where the IQ line is, or is most of it highly over-simplified, and taken on faith?

2

Us in the newspaper biz keep things targeted to a sixth-grade level. Looking at Verhoeven, I suppose Hollywood is willing to target a much more diverse audience.

Seriously, how can you compare 2 Fast 2 Furious with Citizen Kane? Or `grade’ a spy movie with reams of plot and junk science? I can follow abstruse technical discussions, but overly-complex characterizations (think romance flicks) just leave me out completely. Obviously, assigning one number to a film is absurd.

If you look at The Matrix, the basic philosophy is chewed-over Platonism and, thus, goes back a few thousand years. Any minds it blew were either uneducated or markedly stupid. (I think most educated, intelligent folks have stumbled on Plato’s cave on their own, and have made their own peace with it.) But looking at all of movies ever made? Well, we got 2001 (meditations on humanity, progress, and the nature of evolution) and Debbie Does Dallas (hubba-hubba). And that’s just movies made in this country, in the 20th century, that achieved a modicum of popular awareness.

3

I don’t know that there is a factual answer to your question: that is to say, that there is a published or agreed-upon standard of intelligence that filmmakers use to justify certain conventions or to introduce certain plots. In many instances, the question isn’t whether the moviemakers feel a certain change will escape the intelligence of the audience, but if a concept will translate well to film and produce the desired effect.

There are a large number of gun owners in the United States, for instance, who know perfectly well that the Hollywood sound effects for guns have been beefed up and modified specifically for purposes of making the film sound more real. Ben Burrt, the sound designer for the Indiana Jones movies, wanted to know what kind of sounds to create for Indiana’s revolver. He went to the director, Steven Spielberg, and asked, “Does his hat ever come off?”

The answer was no. The movie was a cartoonish adventure that wasn’t meant to be realistic. So Indiana Jones ended up with a handgun that sounded like a Winchster rifle. Larger than life. Most people know that revolvers don’t make that sound, but we accept it in the context of the film.

Every driver is familiar with how difficult it is to find parking; Hollywood insists that it show us that the hero can find parking right outside the front entrance of the busiest hotel in New York. Most of the US is familiar with a computer screen; Hollywood shows us a simplified version of a computer interface where you simply type ACTIVATE MAIN PROGRAM

4

Grrr, posted too soon. Darn Tab key.

At any rate, it’s not a matter of mere intelligence or of knowing a detail like how a reflection looks in a spoon. Good storytelling means that if there is a detail essential to understanding the film, you casually introduce the idea well before you need it. There are a certain number of things that films assume (guns require bullets, cars require fuel, fires are hot and orangey, electricity is sparky and blue, the Eiffel Tower means Paris, gravity works downward) that filmgoers know.

Other essential details should be introduced and then explained. The possibilities are too numerous to mention. However, the long-ago reign of Alexander the Great is explained early on in The Man Who Would Be King because it is essential to the plot; the nature of a phone modem is shown in repeated performance in WarGames at a time when many people had never seen or used one; the HMS Titanic sinks at the end of the film so we are shown the modern-day undersea wreck at the start to jumpstart the suspense; in Hollywood Confidential we are reminded that Veronica Lake was a film star for the benefit of people who do not remember her.

Unfortunately, this has led to a certain predictability, because movie audiences may have come to things to play out according to plan. Or we have been taught to expect that if we’re not told about certain details, we won’t enjoy the film more by knowing them. For instance, O Brother, Where Art Thou? has fun parallels to The Odyssey and West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo & Juliet and Galaxy Quest is a parody of sci-fi in general but Star Trek in particular. Without knowing this, you might simply watch a goofy sepia-toned movie with George Clooney wearing a funny beard and suspenders and singing a song, a movie about some Puerto Ricans who kill each other and dance a lot for no evident reason, and a film about some actors who pretend to be space heroes but who all seem kind of neurotic. You don’t get as much.

Movies like The Matrix aren’t inherently more intelligent than other kinds of storytelling but in order to change the nature of reality in a creepy way—the basis of the film—you have to be sure the audience notices what you’re doing or the effect is lost. Movies like Memento require you to see things before you are taught to understand them (but in that film, it’s deliberate). The dilemma for the filmmakers is not so much how intelligent the audience is, but how do you tell a story with a great twist without giving it away before the Big Reveal. They’re playing with the nature of storytelling, really. They’re walking the very fine line between a great, intelligent film with wonderful unforeseeable twists and a two hundred million dollar whooooosshhh that tanks at the box office.

5

I’ve been thinking the very question myself the last couple of days. I recently saw Abre Los Ojos, and discovered that Vanilla Sky was a remake of it (yeah, I’m out of movie touch a couple of years – I have TiVo; I don’t watch commercials hence don’t know about movies until Netflix recommends them to me or I catch 'em on HBO). So I watched it, too.

The latter definitely seemed dumbed down compared to the former, although there were some touches in the newer movie that I liked as compared to the older. Mostly the end, though, of Vanilla Sky was really, really dumbed down.

There’s the other extreme, though – keeping on the Tom Cruise theme: I like Tom Cruise movies. And Stanley Kubrick’s great too. But what the hell was Eyes Wide Shut about? Was it pretentious above my self-regarded intelligent capabilities?

6

There is a tendency in commercial filmmaking to aim for the Lowest Common Denominator because that means more people can understand your film (and pay for the priviledge of doing so).

Looking at the bell curve of audience intelligence, it doesn’t take much dumbing down (from the median) to add a whole heap of bums on seats. Each dumbing down, however, will add fewer bums than the previous dumbing down.

Eventually the movie will be so dumb that everyone can understand everything about it, but this will have a negative effect because we do actually need some kind of brain candy to go with the eye and ear candy. This is why many films involve twists, even if they have turned into cliches (the baddy is actually the goody’s boss).

So the target is a slightly dumb film as this will pull in the most punters while retaining some measure of think-pleasure.

On the other side of the curve is art-house cinema, which values the cerebral bits over the potential audience count. It also goes for unusual (i.e. not-well known) topics over familiar ones. Some of these get so esoteric that they can only be shown at film festivals because there aren’t enough people who can watch it in order to generate a general release.

I used to be a film critic.

7

Indeed. It’s to the point now where I just can’t watch major movies anymore. I spend the whole movie pointing to the screen and saying, “That’s not logical. That contradicts everything they told us 20 minutes ago!”

The one thing I insist on in a movie is consistancy. If the movie tells me that the mani characters have wings and can fly, I’ll accept that. But, I don’t want to later see one of those characters killed by being pushed off a parking garage.

And, I don’t like seeing things that are grossly illogical without some ackowledgement of that illogic and some attempt at an explanation. Like when the Borg fight through the entire Federation fleet to get to earth and then travel back in time. Any race with a half ounce of intelligence would travel back in time first and then travel to earth with no resistance at all. At least give me some lame explanation like worms holes are only next to the earth or some kind of gravity field is needed.

8

We’re drifting ever further away from the idea of a factual answer here—an exact calculation of how intelligent the movie audience is assumed to be—so I submit (on a tangent) that simply using a movie cliché we’re not necessarily dumbing the film down, or that they aren’t necessarily dumber because of clichés.

Movies use a lot of visual and auditory shorthand to convey information about characters and locations as economically as possible. This is why—for instance—the Rogue Cop Who Doesn’t Follow The Rules drives a beat-up station wagon that is full of food wrappers and the Good Cop Who Is Close To Retirement drives a nice, clean vehicle. In half a second of screen time, they can characterize each hero and leave room for more important things—hopefully for snappy dialogue, clever clues, airtight logic, unforeseen twists, and the evil antics of a well-played villain.

That many movies don’t actually include the snappy dialogue, clever clues, etc., is a sign that Hollywood has come to respect the visual and auditory shorthand more than the other elements that make a good film.

The list of easy shorthand images is endless: we show the Space Needle when we mean Seattle. We show a character using an iMac because it shows that person is a creative-type who doesn’t follow the crowd. We give characters their own musical themes. We sometimes use costume and put certain characters in certain colors. We put the Shy Girl Who Becomes A Beautiful Princess in glasses and unflattering clothes. We used to use cigarettes to show suave and sophisticated heroes. Now we use cigarettes to show eccentric sidekicks and dastardly villains and femme fatales. It’s all part of the visual and auditory vocabulary of film.

Don’t get me wrong, I think films have become dumber in many ways, mainly because I don’t believe Hollywood learns the right lessons from successful films. Titanic was a long, sprawing historical-disaster chick-flick with some cool special effects at the end. What did Hollywood learn from this? Two words: Pearl Harbor. Film vocabulary is easy to replicate, snappy dialogue isn’t. Using a cliché allows you to cut valuable minutes from the running time and spend that time on something else.

It’s too bad that so many movies choose to use that time on a bachelor party or a strip club or a series of gasoline explosions instead of, you know, characterization and dialogue and plot. boofy_bloke is right: it’s all about getting butts in seats. Plot doesn’t always do this, sadly.

9

[QUOTE=Fish]
This is why?for instance?the Rogue Cop Who Doesn’t Follow The Rules drives a beat-up station wagon that is full of food wrappers …
[\quote]
Actually, the Rogue Cop usually drive the same muscle car that he drove in high school. It still has all that fast-food trash in it, however.

[quote]

That many movies don’t actually include the snappy dialogue, clever clues, etc., is a sign that Hollywood has come to respect the visual and auditory shorthand more than the other elements that make a good film.
[\quote]
True. I put that down to laziness of the writers. I can see the writers say, “OK, we need a nerd in this scene–you know, with the tape on the glasses and a pocket protector.” And that’s exactly the way the final scene looks. No effort is made to create anything more than a quickly-recognizable stereotype.

It seems to come and go in cycles. Some movies do well with all flash-and-sparkle, while others do well with an impressive plot. People go to movies for different reasons. Sometimes they just want to see mindless violence and other times they want actual substance.

The real problem movies seem to split their efforts between plot and flash. So, you end up with a half-thought-out plot and some random explosions.

10

Flash-57, I would say that the real problem is that the movie production system, and Hollywood in particular, is driven by money instead of by art. The fact that they split their efforts between plot and flash, as you say, is a symptom of this.

Sure, if movie makers spent enough time and money, they could make nothing but clever films with great dialogue and fantastic characters in intricate plots with great direction and perfect pace. They don’t think that way, though. Generally it comes down to a balance between how much they estimate the film’s production will cost versus how much they estimate the film will bring in.

Writing good movies and putting good actors in them costs money and, let’s face it, some movies are never going to make more than fifty or sixty million dollars, so why put the extra effort into them? There’s only so much market demographics to go around; there’s only so many 18-36 year old women who would go see this movie, so do we really have to put our best writing in here? Spending more on production just means we’re spending our profit margin. Maybe if we put some explosions or a football-game-subplot into it, we’d draw in more market, maybe some 18-36 year-old men, but…

Also, there is the law of diminishing returns. Sure, you could spend a lot of money polishing the script of an Armaggeddon or a Lethal Weapon 4. Making the movie 5% better might net you 6% more ticket sales. At what point are you throwing money away? At what point have you maxed out your likely ticket sales? At what point does the gamble of real money spent outweigh your projected but not-yet-in-the-bank ticket sales? And given that people watched Armaggeddon anyway, why should the Hollywood system even bother to make better films? What would be the point?

They’re doing what anybody would: they’re putting forth minimum effort for maximum return. If we continue to watch crap, they’ll continue to cut corners and make progressively worse crap.

When we go see movies like The Lord of the Rings trilogy in massive numbers, Hollywood attempts to dissect the film into its most basic (cheapest to replicate) elements. Five year production schedule? Attention to detail? Constant rewrites? Soliciting input from fifty years of devoted fans of a legendary piece of literature? On-set linguistic experts? Extensive location shooting? Inventing new mo-cap technology and virtual character animation? Virtual sets? Epic three-movies-at-once production schedule? No, too expensive. What’s cheap to replicate? High fantasy—buy the rights to something some hack has already written—a couple of pretty boys—we’ve probably got some swords in the costume shed here somewhere—add in some sexy girls in tight clothing, that always works, and besides, it makes auditions more fun—lots of fights and violence, we could do that—boom, we’ve got a blockbuster! :rolleyes:

I dread to see what Hollywood will learn from The Lord of the Rings.

Meeko, did you want to clarify where you were taking your factual question about the intelligence of moviegoers? I’m not sure there’s a solid figure we can give you, so perhaps you could explain where you were going.

11

Wow, if ever a gross overestimation of John Q. Moviegoer existed, this is a perfect example of it.

I’m not saying “The Matrix” was a hyper-intelligent flick, but I’ve run into scores of people who “didn’t get it.” These are people I wouldn’t consider to be stupid or slow; they simply haven’t been exposed to some of the “what if” scenarios posited by the Wachowskis. But at least they’ve been exposed to ideas which weren’t already active in their brains, and maybe that will get the gears turning.

IMHO, I think anything that stretches the mind even a little bit to be a good thing, because it can lead to people exploring other modes of thought and (more importantly) more intelligent cinema. The guy that might never see Aronofsky’s Pi might pick it up because the themes are similar to The Matrix, and so forth.

Films can satisfy such a wide range of emotions and needs within people. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to classify films by intelligence factor, because people watch movies for differing reasons.

12

I guess I wonder whether the film makers knew themselves, or whether they could use concave and convex without also having to talk about spoons.

I saw no evidence that the film makers understood any of the ideas they allegedly explored. I guess it reminds me of that episode of Kim Possible where Global Justice is trying to figure out whether the Ron Factor is the key to her success. When Kim expresses her disbelief to her genius tech guru, Wade, he replies that it makes sense since it ties into chaos theory, “It’s next-level stuff.”

Admittedly, Ron Stoppable may indeed be a strange attractor, however I must confess that I find the idea that Ron’s je ne sai quois makes the Kim-Super Villian interaction into a chaotic system a bit hard to swallow. The Ron Factor isn’t “next-level stuff” so much as it is jolly-good fun.

It is easy to enjoy Kim Possible because it is just so silly. There is no pretension. The Matrix seems to have been billed as a much more serious affair, which makes it much less fun. As far as physics goes, this super-smart movie earned a solid Retch, which is not very high praise for intelligent viewing.

Pi seems to be another so-called smart movie that didn’t add up. I asked a mathematician friend of mine how he liked it and he made a very sour face and said, with a fatalistic shrug, “It wasn’t very deep.” Had he not known that changing the base from base 10 to something else would ruin the pattern, and that anybody clever enough can find a so-called pattern in any finite set of numbers, he probably would have enjoyed the movie quite a bit more.

I suspect that the fun in a lot of smart movies lies in viewers actually not knowing what is supposed to be going on, because otherwise they really wouldn’t enjoy it. To put another way:

13

Well, that’s obviously true, based on the dreck that arrives on screens. I guess I always assumed that every movie director wanted to create that ultimate masterpiece that is so superior that it stands the test of time. Shouldn’t they be shooting for the moon every time they sit in that director’s chair?

I hope not. I think that used to absolutely be the case 10 years ago, when we’d get 2 or 3 volcano movies or asteroid movies or animated bug movies at the same time. It doesn’t appear to be happening as much these days.

I hope it’s not just a cycle. I really would hate to see 10 “elf and hobbit” movies in the next couple of years.

14

Who says they’re not? Maybe their standards of success are different than ours.

I’m sure there are a number of directors (James Cameron and Milos Forman come to mind) who are extremely dedicated to whichever film they’re working on, who can do exquisitely detailed storyboards and who can craft the screenplay until it’s perfect. For every one of those, there’s a dozen Roger Cormans who are looking to haul in some quick bucks, a couple of Jan de Bonts and Joel Schumachers who used to be tech guys or DPs or costumers but were handed a directorship for no clear reason, and maybe one or two Tim Burtons who are cranking out films of someone else’s scripts until they get the shot at the film they really want to do.

I don’t know about “elf and hobbit,” but look to some old literature to see what Hollywood is likely to pick up. I fully expect The Chronicles of Narnia.

I know the phenomenon you’re talking about, though. I think it has to do with the way screenplays are shopped. When a script shows up (“let’s do a movie about Mars!”), the moguls look at it and say, “Pass. We can get our own guy to write a script about Mars for less than you’re selling for.” And maybe somebody buys the Mars script—and maybe not—but it’s not long before the basic idea is all over town.

Sheesh, I hate that.

15

The thing is, movies aren’t made by storytellers anymore. At least not big releases. They’re not made by studios either. They’re made by agents, negotiating deals. Someone from The William Morris Agency or some such will call up a producer at Warner to say that Mel is going to take a six month break efter The Passion has opened and then he wants to do a goofy fun flick, like Maverick or maybe the next installment of Lethal Weapon.
The producer will then call Village Roadshow to ask if they have a vehicle that might suit Mr Gibson, but the shooting needs to be done between September 15th and Nov. 30th. Preferably a lighter thing. And Mel gets script approval, 35 million and a percentage.
Then the guys at Village Roadshow start going through script and pitching ideas, in 25 words or less, no less. The screenwriting ends up, due to lack of ideas, as being ‘All new, just like…’, written by a comitte and in the end sent to a script doctor who tries to polish something dreadful. A director is hired, but then Mel decide that he doesn’t like the way the character is going, so the script is sent back for a re-write, the director gets another offer and in the end we are presented with something where the purpose was to make a product, not ell a story. It’s not being dumbed down on purpose, it’s just that therw were so many people involved, and none had a vision, that the result is just bland. This is what happened to Potter/Parker/Payback, where Gibson wanted to do a part that was a little grittier, but backed away in the end, because his character wasn’t very likable and the movie plain sucked.

And as an aside: Mel Gibsons whole career seems to be based on movies where he seeks or takes revenge.

16

Too true, The Gaspode. Add in a risk-evasion corporate mentality where nobody wants to personally be on the hook for a losing picture—combined with the inherent glory-seeking of wanting to be recognized for one’s blockbuster successes—and you get lukewarm, safe choices that are based on solid data of previous market performances, demographics, advanced screen testing, formulas that work, recycled and remade titles from yesteryear that come prepackaged with “retro” or “hip” name recognition—ugh. You get Hollywood.