“
Books are ALWAYS better than movies! They are ready when you are. You are a participant and not a mere observer. You make the decisions what things look like, or ought to. You are gaining skills reading not just being fed somebody else's interpretation of the story.
”
”
John Leonarz
“
Come on, just for an hour till we finish the movie. You can meet my lizard.
It takes a few seconds of silence for me to realize how that might be interpreted.
That's not a line. I have an actual lizard. A bearded dragon named Stan.
”
”
Karen M. McManus (One of Us Is Lying (One of Us is Lying, #1))
“
It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen
”
”
Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation and Other Essays)
“
When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time.
”
”
Elizabeth Berg (Home Safe)
“
Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it’s still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.
”
”
David Lynch (Room to Dream)
“
To hear an artificial intelligence, interpret ancient scriptures with greater clarity than most pastors has her spooked like a Stephen King horror movie that gets inside your head.
”
”
Guy Morris (Swarm)
“
She was now afraid to yield to passion, and because she could not yield to the larger impulses it became essential also to not yield to the small ones, even if her adversary were in the right. She was living on a plane of war. The bigger resistance to the flow of life became one with the smaller resistance to the will of others, and the smallest issue became equal to the ultimate one. The pleasure of yielding on a level of passion being unknown to her, the pleasure of yielding on other levels became equally impossible. She denied herself all the sources of feminine pleasure: of being invaded, of being conquered. In war, conquest was imperative. No approach from the enemy could be interpreted as anything but a threat. She could not see that the real issue of the war was a defense of her being against the invasion of passion. Her enemy was the lover who might possess her. All her intensity was poured into the small battles; to win in the choice of a restaurant, of a movie, of visitors, in opinions, in analysis of people, to win in all the small rivalries through an evening.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Ladders to Fire (Cities of the Interior #1))
“
I gave her as much as I had, but it's like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much blood you want to see. A book gives you permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret.
”
”
Caroline Kepnes (Hidden Bodies (You, #2))
“
Jokes and movies, comic books and professional wrestling, television shows and news programs—they all present dramatic interpretations of facts and fiction in the format of a narrative for the same reason we put chairs in cars.
”
”
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
“
Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you.’
I could see that Rosie could not place the line from The Bridges of Madison County that had produced such a powerful emotional reaction on the plane. She looked confused.
‘Don, what are you…what have you done to yourself?’
‘I’ve made some changes.’
‘Big changes.’
‘Whatever behavioural modifications you require from me are a trivial price to pay for having you as my partner.’
Rosie made a downwards movement with her hand, which I could not interpret. Then she looked around the room and I followed her eyes. Everyone was watching. Nick had stopped partway to our table. I realised that in my intensity I had raised my voice. I didn’t care.
‘You are the world’s most perfect woman. All other women are irrelevant. Permanently. No Botox or implants will be required.
‘I need a minute to think,’ she said.
I automatically started the timer on my watch. Suddenly Rosie started laughing. I looked at her, understandably puzzled at this outburst in the middle of a critical life decision.
‘The watch,’ she said. ‘I say “I need a minute” and you start timing. Don is not dead.
'Don, you don’t feel love, do you?’ said Rosie. ‘You can’t really love me.’
‘Gene diagnosed love.’ I knew now that he had been wrong. I had watched thirteen romantic movies and felt nothing. That was not strictly true. I had felt suspense, curiosity and amusement. But I had not for one moment felt engaged in the love between the protagonists. I had cried no tears for Meg Ryan or Meryl Streep or Deborah Kerr or Vivien Leigh or Julia Roberts. I could not lie about so important a matter.
‘According to your definition, no.’
Rosie looked extremely unhappy. The evening had turned into a disaster.
'I thought my behaviour would make you happy, and instead it’s made you sad.’
‘I’m upset because you can’t love me. Okay?’
This was worse! She wanted me to love her. And I was incapable.
Gene and Claudia offered me a lift home, but I did not want to continue the conversation. I started walking, then accelerated to a jog. It made sense to get home before it rained. It also made sense to exercise hard and put the restaurant behind me as quickly as possible. The new shoes were workable, but the coat and tie were uncomfortable even on a cold night. I pulled off the jacket, the item that had made me temporarily acceptable in a world to which I did not belong, and threw it in a rubbish bin. The tie followed. On an impulse I retrieved the Daphne from the jacket and carried it in my hand for the remainder of the journey. There was rain in the air and my face was wet as I reached the safety of my apartment.
”
”
Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project (Don Tillman, #1))
“
When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog's being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery -- Ivan Pavlov's explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn't even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person -- not a dog professional -- could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin's performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary.
”
”
Susan Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend)
“
Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.
”
”
Clive Barker (Cabal)
“
One is not required to like a movie in order to learn from it. Our personal views provide a legitimate perspective, as long as we recognize and acknowledge how they may color our interpretation.
”
”
Richard Barsam (Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film)
“
When you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents. A man looks like a man, a man with a large bicep looks like a man with a large bicep, and a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama" looks like a man with a large bicep bearing the tattoo "Mama."
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books, just as an egg becomes one of potentially a million different people when it's approached by a hard-swimming and frisky school of sperm.
”
”
Mohsin Hamid (How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia)
“
I gave her as much as I had, but it's like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much of the blood you want to see. A book gives you the permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret. Your Alexander Portnoy doesn't look like mine because we all have our unique view. When you finish a movie you leave the theater with your friend and talk about the movie right away. When you finish a book you think. Love grew up on movies and I have just read her a book. I give her time to digest.
”
”
Caroline Kepnes (Hidden Bodies (You, #2))
“
Load your bookshelves with the best literature you can find. Hang beautiful, thought-provoking art work around your house. Watch history and science documentaries as well as good movies and television programs. Listen to beautiful music (which, of course, is open to interpretation).
”
”
Emily Cook (A Literary Education: Adapting Charlotte Mason for Modern Secular Homeschooling)
“
When I work with Godfrey, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”
The strategy of art is precisely the opposite. I would describe it this way: When you listen to a piece of music and you look at an image at the same time, you are metaphorically making a journey to that image. It’s a metaphorical distance, but it’s a real one all the same, and it’s in that journey that the spectator forms a relationship to the music and the image. Without that, it’s all made for us and we don’t have to invent anything. In works like Godfrey’s, and in works, for that matter, like Bob Wilson’s, the spectators are supposed to invent something. They are supposed to tell the story of Einstein. In Godfrey’s movies Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, the words in the title are the only words there are. The journey that we make from the armchair to the image is the process by which we make the image and the music our own. Without that, we have no personal connection. The idea of a personal interpretation comes about through traversing that distance.
”
”
Philip Glass
“
In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Sometimes there appears to be a maladjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can.
”
”
William Carlos Williams
“
Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of “fun,” constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger “high.” A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now. Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing—too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled. Where is the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power? At the low end of the continuum, in the pleasure of a fleeting moment.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
Cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you, states of mind that run through daily life as surely as a fault line. Chandler’s “mysterious something” was a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise that identified itself with Los Angeles at a particular time, what we call noir. On the one hand noir is a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom. This fruitful comingling gave birth to movies like Double Indemnity, directed by Vienna-born Billy Wilder and scripted by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novella. The themes — murderous sex and the cool, intricate amorality of money — rose directly from the psychic mulch of Southern California. But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it’s a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the sense like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day. Noir — in this sense a perspective on history and often a substitute for it — was born when the Roaring Twenties blew themselves out and hard times rushed in; it crystallized real-life events and the writhing collapse of the national economy before finding its interpreters in writers like Raymond Chandler.
”
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Richard Rayner (A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age)
“
A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.
”
”
Ellen Meloy (The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest)
“
I just lay on the mountain Meadowside in the moonlight, head to grass, and heard the silent recognition of my temporary woes. Yes, so to try to attain to Nirvana when you're already there, to the top of a mountain when you're already there and only have to stay -thus to stay in the nirvana bliss is all I have to do, you have to do, no effort no path really no discipline but just to know that all is empty and awake , a vision and a movie in God's universal mind(Alya-Vijnana) and to stay more or less wisely in that. Because silence itself is the sound of diamonds which can cut through anything the sound of holy emptiness the sound of extinction and bliss, that graveyard silence which is like the silence of an infant's smile the sound of eternity, of the blessedness surely to be believed the sound of nothing ever happened Except God(Which I'd soon hear in a noisy Atlantic tempest) What exists is god in his emanation, what does not exist is god in his peaceful neutrality, what neither exist nor does not exist is god's immortal primordial dawn of father sky9this world this very minute). So, I said stay in that no dimensions here to any of the mountain s or mosquitos and whole milky ways of worlds Because sensation is emptiness old age is emptiness. T's only the golden eternity of gods mind so practice kindness and sympathy remember that men are not responsible in themselves as men for their ignorance and unkindness, they should be pitied, God does pity it, because who says anything about anything since everything is just what it is, free of interpretations. God is not the attainer, he is the farer in that which everything is the abider one caterpillar, a thousand hairs of God. So, know constantly that this is only, you ,God ,empty and awake and eternally free as the unnumerable atoms of emptiness everywhere.
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Lonesome Traveler)
“
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communications like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain.
Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write.
(Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo.
(When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe — except for the dissident minority — cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.
”
”
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy)
“
As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black
”
”
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
“
When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
The worst thing your brain could do is reinterpret your reality into a whole new movie with each new bit of information. That would be exhausting and without benefit. Instead, your brain takes the path of least resistance and instantly interprets your observations to fit your existing worldview. It’s just easier.
”
”
Scott Adams (Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter)
“
This interpretation of the Gold Rush as a fun-filled and affirmative adventure survived through numerous celebrations, including the 1949 centennial. It lingered in the movies (Gabby Hayes playing the comic prospector) and continues to sustain the ongoing revelry of a flourishing antiquarian drinking fraternity, the Ancient Order of E Clampus Vitus, founded in 1857 and revitalized in 1931 by historian Carl Wheat, which places plaques at historic Gold Rush sites before adjourning to a nearby saloon.
”
”
Kevin Starr (California: A History)
“
Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.
”
”
Wong Kar-Wai
“
I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.
”
”
Monica Byrne (The Actual Star)
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*I’ve always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel’s, Kaufman’s, and Ferrara’s). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen really bears out this sinister interpretation. If you’re one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you’re more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You’re reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are they inhuman? Of course, they’re vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don’t have a sense of humor, they’re unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That’s a rather species-centric point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it’s a stretch to say it’s what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions—love, joy, happiness, amusement—come negative emotions—hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. For instance, with all the havoc that Donald Sutherland causes in the Kaufman version, including the murder of various Pod People, there never is a thought of punishment or vengeance on the Pod People’s part, even though he’s obviously proven himself to be a threat. They just want him to become one of them. Imagine in the fifties, when the Siegel film was made, that instead of some little town in Northern California (Santa Mira) that the aliens took root in, it was a horribly racist, segregated Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the heart of Mississippi. Within weeks the color lines would disappear. Blacks and whites would be working together (in genuine brotherhood) towards a common goal. And humanity would be represented by one of the racist Kluxers whose investigative gaze notices formerly like-minded white folks seemingly enter into a conspiracy with some members of the county’s black community. Now picture his hysterical reaction to it (“Those people are coming after me! They’re not human! You’re next! You’re next!”). *Solving the problems, both large and small, of your actors—lead actors especially—is the job of a film director.
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Quentin Tarantino (Cinema Speculation)
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it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness.
The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.
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William Charles Redfield (Letters from an Actor)
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Throughout his argument, Stewart was adamant that because it was a corporate-funded, prolonged attack of Clinton’s capacity for office, and that it was intended to air on television, Hillary: The Movie was subject to the ban on electioneering communications. Since candidates had previously elected to air extended “infomercial” ads in the past (most notably, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996), the government’s position was that a communication expressly advocating the defeat of a candidate was certainly electioneering, regardless of how long it lasted. Stewart said, It may be rare to find a 90-minute film that is so unrelenting in its praise or criticism of a particular candidate that it will be subject to no reasonable interpretation other than to vote for or against that person, but when you have that, as I think we do here, there’s no constitutional distinction between the 90-minute film and the 60-second advertisement. The government’s rationale was that the film clearly met the definition of “express advocacy” that the Court had outlined in WRTL, since the only reasonable interpretation of the film was that it was encouraging viewers not to support Senator Clinton. This assertion was part of a crucial exchange in the argument. To Stewart’s claim that an ad and the film were functionally equivalent, Justice Kennedy was quick to respond that “If we think that … this film is protected, and you say there’s no difference between the film and the ad, then the whole statute must be declared” unconstitutional.
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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The sexuality of the character I played in Dog Day Afternoon is a complex thing. What I interpreted from the screenplay was that he is a man with a wife and kids who also happens to be in an affair with a person who identifies as a woman, and who today we would understand is transgender. But knowing this about him didn’t excite me or bother me; it didn’t make the role seem any more appealing or risky. Though I may be a kid who started in the South Bronx, I had been living in the Village since my teens. I had friends, roommates, and colleagues who were attracted to different people than I was attracted to, and none of that was ever rebellious or groundbreaking or unusual. It just was.
Perhaps at the time of Dog Day Afternoon it was an uncommon thing to have a main character in a Hollywood movie who was gay or queer, and who was treated as heroic or worthy of an audience’s affection—even if he did rob banks. But you have to understand that none of that enters into my consideration. I am an actor portraying a character in a film. I am playing the part because I think I can bring something to the role. As far as I was concerned, Dog Day Afternoon was just cool, a continuation of the work I had been doing my whole life. It was inevitable that an audience would have certain feelings about me because of the choices I made, and the slings and arrows were going to keep coming either way. I try to stay away from things that are controversial, and I find myself in controversies anyway. If people think that I helped to advance a particular issue of representation, that’s fine. If there is credit or blame to go around, I don’t feel entitled to any of it. All I know is, I play a role to find as much humanity as there is that I can portray.
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Al Pacino (Sonny Boy)
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I do this in two ways: First, I explain what is known today about phenomena seen in the movie (black holes, wormholes, singularities, the fifth dimension, and the like), and I explain how we learned what we know, and how we hope to master the unknown. Second, I interpret, from a scientist’s viewpoint, what we see in Interstellar, much as an art critic or ordinary viewer interprets a Picasso painting.
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Anonymous
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Sixth, show a deep acquaintance with the same books, magazines, blogs, movies, and plays — as well as the daily life experiences — that your audience knows. Mention them and interpret them in light of Scripture. But be sure to read and experience urban life across a spectrum of opinion. There is nothing more truly urban than showing you know, appreciate, and digest a great diversity of human opinion. During my first years in New York, I regularly read The New Yorker (sophisticated secular), The Atlantic (eclectic), The Nation (older, left-wing secular), The Weekly Standard (conservative but erudite), The New Republic (eclectic and erudite), Utne Reader (New Age alternative), Wired (Silicon Valley libertarian), First Things (conservative Catholic). As I read, I imagine dialogues about Christianity with the writers. I almost never read a magazine without getting a scrap of a preaching idea.
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Timothy J. Keller (Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City)
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1 Sweet notes from my husband make me feel good. A I love my husband’s hugs. E 2 I like to be alone with my husband. B I feel loved when my husband washes my car. D 3 Receiving special gifts from my husband makes me happy. C I enjoy long trips with my husband. B 4 I feel loved when my husband helps with the laundry. D I like it when my husband touches me. E 5 I feel loved when my husband puts his arm around me. E I know my husband loves me because he surprises me with gifts. C 6 I like going most anywhere with my husband. B I like to hold my husband’s hand. E 7 I value the gifts my husband gives to me. C I love to hear my husband say he loves me. A 8 I like for my husband to sit close to me. E My husband tells me I look good, and I like that. A 9 Spending time with my husband makes me happy. B Even the smallest gift from my husband is important to me. C 10 I feel loved when my husband tells me he is proud of me. A When my husband helps clean up after a meal, I know that he loves me. D 11 No matter what we do, I love doing things with my husband. B Supportive comments from my husband make me feel good. A 12 Little things my husband does for me mean more to me than things he says. D I love to hug my husband. E 13 My husband’s praise means a lot to me. A It means a lot to me that my husband gives me gifts I really like. C 14 Just being around my husband makes me feel good. B I love it when my husband gives me a massage. E 15 My husband’s reactions to my accomplishments are so encouraging. A It means a lot to me when my husband helps with something I know he hates. D 16 I never get tired of my husband’s kisses. E I love that my husband shows real interest in things I like to do. B 17 I can count on my husband to help me with projects. D I still get excited when opening a gift from my husband. C 18 I love for my husband to compliment my appearance. A I love that my husband listens to me and respects my ideas. B 19 I can’t help but touch my husband when he’s close by. E My husband sometimes runs errands for me, and I appreciate that. D 20 My husband deserves an award for all the things he does to help me. D I’m sometimes amazed at how thoughtful my husband’s gifts to me are. C 21 I love having my husband’s undivided attention. B I love that my husband helps clean the house. D 22 I look forward to seeing what my husband gives me for my birthday. C I never get tired of hearing my husband tell me that I am important to him. A 23 My husband lets me know he loves me by giving me gifts. C My husband shows his love by helping me without me having to ask. D 24 My husband doesn’t interrupt me when I am talking, and I like that. B I never get tired of receiving gifts from my husband. C 25 My husband is good about asking how he can help when I’m tired. D It doesn’t matter where we go, I just like going places with my husband. B 26 I love cuddling with my husband. E I love surprise gifts from my husband. C 27 My husband’s encouraging words give me confidence. A I love to watch movies with my husband. B 28 I couldn’t ask for any better gifts than the ones my husband gives me. C I love it that my husband can’t keep his hands off me. E 29 It means a lot to me when my husband helps me despite being busy. D It makes me feel really good when my husband tells me he appreciates me. A 30 I love hugging and kissing my husband after we’ve been apart for a while. E I love hearing my husband tell me that he missed me. A A:_____ B:_____ C:_____ D:_____ E:_____ A=Words of Affirmation B=Quality Time C=Receiving Gifts D=Acts of Service E=Physical Touch Interpreting and Using Your Profile Score
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Gary Chapman (The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts)
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Even so, in life the key word is intuit; movies have the raw power to convey thoughts visually, through action; plays, via dialogue. While all three can be incredibly compelling (especially life), ultimately, they still leave us guessing. In prose, those thoughts, clearly stated, are where the story lives and breathes, because they directly reveal how the protagonist is affected by—and how she interprets the meaning of—what happens to her. That
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Lisa Cron (Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence)
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Do you actually hear confessions in your church, Father, actual spoken confessions? For that matter, does any priest anymore, at least as the movies depict them, the little lattice between confessor and penitent, its delicate chiaroscuro screening the priest's profile and veiling the lips of the sinner? Surely Freud himself, when he positioned himself behind and out of sight of his recumbent patients, sought a similar partial anonymity. How we analysts must envy you, your belief in redress, in the promise of absolution and redemption. How clean the words sound compared to our own impure remedies: recollection, interpretation, speculation, suggestion. Strange, isn't it, how we have both sealed ourselves in small, half-lit chambers, both in the service of gods who share nothing but the name of Love.
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DeSales Harrison (The Waters & The Wild)
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He makes a noise I can’t interpret but that vaguely reminds me of a movie I watched recently with a cranky billionaire hero who catches a strange woman waxing her beaver in one of his many mansions.
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Pippa Grant (The Secret Hook-Up (The Copper Valley Thrusters, #6))
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For someone possessed by a heavy pain-body, it is often impossible to step outside his or her distorted interpretation, the heavily emotional “story.” The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such but is taken to be reality. When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don’t even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible.
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Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
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Sontag said, "Life is a movie, death is a photograph." My argument with Sontag is this: a photograph freezes a capsule of time, but it also fires the imagination. In front of the camera, people invent new selves, enact their passion and desire and fancy. Faced with the object of the photograph, people freely interpret what they see, use it as a doorway into the past, sparking new imaginings." (The Light Between Us)
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Elaine Chiew
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The artist shouldn’t be able exactly to say what he or she is doing. If you can say what you’re doing, you’re not producing art. Art is … well, you can say, art bears the same relation to culture that the dream does to mental stability. Your dream doesn’t say what it’s about, it just is. You can interpret it, and that’s helpful sometimes, just like movie criticism is helpful, but the dream is something that extends you beyond where you already are. That’s why it isn’t verbal thought, it’s something else. It’s like a pseudopod that’s going out into the unknown. That’s what art is. And the artist who subsumes the artistic vision to the ideological framework is putting the cart before the horse. It’s actually a sin, I would say, it’s the ultimate of creative sins to do that, because you’re harnessing the greater to the lesser. It’s like, yeah, you understand things, and you tell a story about what you understand. No, no, you tell a story about what you don’t understand. And then you pull everyone into the story. The story’s an exploration in that way.
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Jordan Peterson
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The weakness of many novels and films can be seen in the fact that one is forced to interpret them ironically to find any depth in them (mise en abyme is an effect of the same kind).
One is everywhere trapped between a literal and an ironic reading. A more or less conscious calculation that aims to disorientate any value judgement. It is particularly flagrant in the field of art, where this studied vagueness as to how a work is to be read has supplanted illusion and aesthetic judgement.
Deep down, however, it is reality itself that has become so banal and insignificant that it has induced us into an ironic reading. It has become so homogenized that it breaks off from itself into a parallel reality. It is out of nostalgia that we embed it in another order: in the face of this insignificance, we are forced to hypothesize a more subtle realm beyond, a dimension beyond our grasp. A critical masochism by which all the speculative arts have found success.
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Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
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Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of “fun,” constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger “high.” A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now. Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing—too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person’s capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled. Where is the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power?
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then - love lost for the good of the world - and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. No movie can last if it cannot find new things to say to new generations. Captain Renault, the one gray character in a black and white time, would’ve been amused.
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Aljean Harmetz (Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II)
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A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.
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Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)
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Thinking about the projector as a performance tool, a display mechanism, a playback machine, a decompressor of content, an image-enlarger, a sound amplifier, a recording device, and an audiovisual interface carries far richer interpretive possibilities than thinking about it as the poor cousin of the movie theater. It also helps us to explain more about why film has long mattered across many realms of cultural and institutional activity. Critically shifting how we conceptualize what a projector is and does opens a window to a wider array of other media devices that performed the work of storing, decompressing, and yielding content, as well as interfacing with users, viewers, and analysts. Drawing on innovations in precision mechanics, chemistry, optics, and electrical and eventually acoustic and magnetic engineering, projectors catalyzed alternate ways of presenting recorded images and sounds, converting celluloid and its otherwise indecipherable inscriptions into visible and audible content, usable data, productive lessons, and persuasive messaging. In doing so they shaped performance and presentation for audiences of
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Haidee Wasson (Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture)
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the military classified Patent 2,292,387 as top secret and, in the 1950s, gave it to a contractor for the construction of a sonobuoy that could detect submarines in the water and then transmit that information to an airplane above using Hedy’s unjammable frequency-hopping idea. Later, the military and other private entities began to make their own inventions using this interpretation of spread-spectrum technology—without any recompense to Hedy, as the patent had expired—and today, aspects of her frequency-hopping idea can be found in the wireless devices we use every day. Hedy’s role in these advancements was unknown until the 1990s, when she received a few awards for her invention, recognition she considered more important than the success of her movies.
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Marie Benedict (The Only Woman in the Room)
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Flat paintings are so commonplace that we seldom ask why flat representations work so well. If we really experience the world as 3D, an image seen in a flat picture would distort jarringly when we move in front of it. But it does not do so as long as it is flat. A folded picture, in contrast, distorts as we move around it. Our ability to interpret representations that are less than 3D indicates that we do not experience the visual world as truly 3D, and has allowed flat pictures (and movies) to dominate our visual environment as an economical and convenient substitute for 3D representations. This tolerance of flat representations is found in all cultures, infants, and in other species, so it cannot result from learning a convention of representation. Imagine how different our culture would be if we could not make sense of flat representations.
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Eric R. Kandel (The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present)
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The system of racism begins with ideology, which refers to the big ideas that are reinforced throughout society. From birth, we are conditioned into accepting and not questioning these ideas. Ideology is reinforced across society, for example, in schools and textbooks, political speeches, movies, advertising, holiday celebrations, and words and phrases. These ideas are also reinforced through social penalties when someone questions an ideology and through the limited availability of alternative ideas. Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence. 14 Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing.
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Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
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There’s a reason that the world is predicated on good and evil,” Śakra responds clearly and gingerly, “in so much that I can say, everyone is composed of those elements. Realistically, there is never a solid good or evil. That's why fictional representations of those tropes are so comforting to the human species. We are split and that torments us, to the point that we lie to ourselves and create an antithesis of reality to go on believing. In all actuality, an audience at a movie theater knows that what they're seeing is fake, but they like to pretend that it's real. Those in the know try to nudge them along––because too quick of a revelation will lead to an existential crisis that will leave the recipient broken, or worse. Nevertheless, evil is universally understood by the general populace, while good is often left up to interpretation. Evil is just as gray, but social constructs purvey a fundamental sense of knowing.
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H.E. Rodgers (Juniper's Tree, Pt. 1: Apotheosis)
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Perhaps to be human is to struggle one’s whole life to find some solid ground to stand on and then die never coming anywhere close. And perhaps that’s not even a bad thing. To know the true meaning of life and self is to do what with it? End the mystery? End the game? What then? Perhaps one day we will find some unifying theory of everything and perhaps somehow this will make everything better, but what are the odds that we still care about the point of life after we’ve found it? Imagine a movie in which you knew exactly why and what everything was from the start. Imagine a life, if we found a theory of everything or an equation that connected the mysteries of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and we understood the very core of how and why the universe worked, what difference would this really make in terms of the meaning of life. Would two different people still not watch the same movie and experience and interpret two different things? We would of course all agree that it’s a movie and on how the movie works, but when it comes to meaning, there will always remain a perceptual layer completely relative to the individuals observing it. Because of this, if we found the overarching ultimate truth of existence tomorrow, half the world would not believe it, and the other half would fight for it. And as a whole, we would be no different. And if somehow the whole world did agree upon one truth, what then? Utopia? What then? The truth we seek when considering the quality and meaning of our lives is not an outward truth, not a truth that resolves the questions of the universe, but a truth that glimpses inward and assembles into a stable self that can be integrated seamlessly into our perception of the whole around us, a truth we can’t ever truly have. Truth is not even the right word here, there is no right word here. That’s the point. I sit here writing, thinking about my being, about the strange relationship I have with this life and this plane of existence. I think about how alive I feel right now while writing. How potent this moment is. How insane and beautiful it is. How important it has been to me in the past. Thinking, writing, talking, and reading about earnest experiences and attempts at living. Personally, the direct confrontation with the challenges, complexities, sufferings, and plights of the human condition have provided me with some of, if not all of the profound, potent, and beautiful moments of my life. And I wonder if I would have ever experienced any of those undeniably worthy moments if life made sense. If it didn’t hurt and overwhelm me… How beautiful would the night sky be if we knew exactly where it went and how the stars got there? Would we ever be inspired to create art and form interpretations out of this life, what would I have written about? What would I have read about? How would I have ever found love or friendship or connection with others? Why would I have ever laughed or cried? What would I be doing right now? Would there be anything to say? Anything to live or die for? I don’t feel that my life would have been any better if I had known any more of what it was all about, in fact I think it would have only worsened the whole thing, we seem to so desire certainty, and immortality, a utopic end of conflict, suffering, and misunderstanding, and yet in the final elimination of all darkness exists light with no contrast. And where there is no contrast of light there is no perception of light, at all. What we think we want is rarely what we do, if we ever got what we did, we would no longer have anything. What we really want is to want. To have something to ceaselessly chase and move towards. To feel the motion and synchronicity with the universe's unending forward movement.
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Robert Pantano
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[U]nder “Entertainment and the Media” there is no specific mention of any rating system. This is not to be interpreted that the Church approves of R-rated or any other inappropriate movies. It is simply a recognition that there is increasingly great risk in tying ourselves to any rating system. Those that have been historically safe to use are not so anymore. Rating systems are constantly in a state of flux. Second, the rating system used in the United States does not apply to all parts of the world. As an international church, our people need to be taught principles they can apply no matter where they live.
There has been a general coarsening of media standards throughout the world.
In my home there are many shows on television that we simply do not watch.
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Cecil O. Samuelson Jr.