The lovely Mrs. Smith and I took our lives into our hands yet again the other day (and not just by driving on the streets of the city in which we live) and ventured out to do something we used to do pretty frequently but have recoiled from during recent events.
We went to a movie.
Yep, an actual movie in a movie theater on a big screen with a sticky floor (seriously? You guys have been shut down for what, a year and a half and you couldn't mop?) and 55-gallon drums of popcorn and tickets and everything.
To be specific in an unspecific way, we went to see the latest installment of a long-running series starring an actor who had said, publicly (and I'm sure privately, though in perhaps different language) that this is it, and he's not going to do it again.
And since it's doubtful you're reading this for the movie review (I liked it, but then I obviously like that kind of thing, so...) I won't go any to too much plot detail except to say that there's this one thing movies in general and specifically of this type tend to do. They suspend time.
At one point, we were informed that the hero had a specific amount of time (I believe it was nine minutes, but there were lots of explosions so I could have heard wrong) to do something before really bad stuff was going to happen. And during that time, he was able to confront and do away with the bad guy, climb multiple ladders while wounded, open old creaky doors and have a long, heartfelt discussion with his romantic lead before the bad stuff did, in fact take place.
In screen time, that took, roughly the last third of a two-hour movie. But, for the sake of the narrative, it took nine minutes.
Now I have yet to become one of those people who ruins a film by whispering loudly that there's no way a car can have all those gadgets on it and still not weigh so much the wheels wouldn't even turn or point out the hero showed up with a backpack and has appeared for dinner in a freshly pressed tuxedo. I mean, a certain amount of belief suspension is as essential to enjoying a film as that soft drink large enough to be impacted by the tides. I mean, goes great with the 55-gallon drum of popcorn.
But I will say this, and I find it hard to believe I'm saying it: we as a nation, perhaps as a world, may watch too many movies.
Perhaps not "watch" so much as "believe." We think someone can do all that stuff in nine minutes. That heroes can shoot through crowds and only hit the bad guys. That there's always a security camera at a gas station across the street with a clear view of the license plate of the get-away car or someone walking a dog at 2 in the morning who can positively identify the person who committed a crime despite the fact that they only saw him in the dark running the other direction in the rain.
Or, we buy the idea that the government is populated by sinister villains hatching a fiendish plot to enslave us all or introduce a plague that will wipe us all out. Or at least a portion of us, because, hey, even sinister villains likely still want to get their decaf lattes first thing in the AM and they probably don't want to make them themselves. Besides, they're gold in the loyalty program, so every fifth one is free.
Recent events indicate that perhaps too many of us believe that the world is binary, made up of either heroes or villains, good guys or bad guys. That things are easy or plots abound. That a cure is either simple or actually will turn us into zombies. That we have all the time in the world...OK, perhaps I've given away too much with that...
Maybe we get that from the movies. Maybe, well, because it's easy and a little lazy but allows us to think about complex problems in simplistic ways that don't really allow us to solve them. There's no hero defeating the bad guys single-handed. But there are lots of heroes every day helping people, trying to find cures for diseases and coming up with the best solutions they can. And we should celebrate them.
And realize it takes a little longer than nine minutes to open doors. Any doors.