coolbeans, 2/22

In class on Thursday there was a slide that showed a picture of the bombing of the twin towers. I think that images like those are what make people think of something as real because they depict the actual state of something during what is happening. For a viewer, the action shot is much more visually “exciting” than seeing a before and after shot. When people watch explosions or people getting killed in a movie it is another part of the excitement of the movie. People tend to make comments such as, “Wow, that was so bad***!” when they watch action movies. The reactions change however, when it is something that actually happens in real life. What was once seen as awesome becomes something tragic. This is because we realize that it is real. In movies, we root for the good guys and when they kill or bomb the bad guys we feel that it is justified. In real life, when innocent people die or are affected by the death of their loved ones we feel angry or sad. We recognize the difference between film and reality because the fact that the actions seem unjust makes it real to us. When people who did nothing wrong are killed it is in our nature to become upset. The power that an action shot holds is in the attraction that it has. It is the same as a shot in a movie except that we recognize that it is real and see exactly the destructive quality of the explosion. Visually it is an amazing picture, captured in time, amazing not in a good way but in a way that makes us realize. It wakes us up from thinking “Wow that’s really cool!” to thinking “Wait, hold on, this really did happen. People were killed from this.”