CNN special contributor A.S. Hamrah, a film critic from Brooklyn, thinks we’re attracted to the film The Artist because of our desires for more things tangible in a digital age.
I think he’s probably right, but I don’t see technology as counter to our nature. As Hamrah even suggests, technology may provide use with both the cause and the cure.
The Artist is a silent black-and-white about the transition from silent to talking films—talkies. It comes at a time when we’re transitioning from projection films to digital and 3-D, and it’s evidently scratching and itch because it’s up for 10 Oscars.
“As digital imagery takes over the movies, filmmakers and audiences seek to reconnect to an analog, hands-on world,” Hamrah writes. “One in which machines are understandable and fixable.”
He has an excellent point. For all our emphasis on the mind and thought, humans tend to forget we’re animals as well. The mind can’t make the body forget about itself—not a body whose main purpose is to exist and thrive in a very physical, tangible way.
The mind’s wanderings are secondary to our body’s need to go on, and our instincts take over whenever there’s doubt about survival, overriding the mind quite easily and surprisingly (just ask people who’ve endured extreme hardships and done things they never thought themselves possible of to survive).
And the thing is, our natural selves need tangible, need to touch and feel. While our minds are understandably bewildered and awed by the magic we call technology, our natural selves don’t really care.
But to say that technology is ruining us or taking us away from our true nature is to simplify the point. While this is certainly happening to some degree, we’re also quite aware that it’s happening. And we’re not idly standing by while it does.
Stay tuned for the second part of this post…The Artist vs. Avatar
