Category: psychology

KISS: Keep it Simple, and Silly!

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“If you listen to KISS, you’re stupid!” said an anonymous poster on a message board.

I’ve been through my Michael Jackson phases, KISS phases, Radiohead phases, King Crimson, Frank Zappa, Beatles, and too many others to list here. “Did you say you went through a KISS phase? You like KISS?” Sure, back when I was young, and all I wanted to hear were fun, silly, and artists who kept it simple. I grew out of them, to some degree, but I still listen to them every once in a while. And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with keeping it simple and silly, anyway? It’s fun.  

There are no reported connections between the band members choosing the name, KISS, and the acronym, the latter of which many state stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid, but has any rock band ever embodied that acronym better than KISS? 

The brief history of the acronym KISS is that it was developed by a lead naval engineer who instructed his team of engineers to design aircraft to keep the designs so simple that they could be repaired quickly on the battlefield. 

A Brief History of KISS 

Wicked Lester was the band Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley belonged in shortly before they decided to form their own band. Wicked Lester, according to Stanley and Simmons, was all over the map. I’ve never heard the music on Wicked Lester’s lone album, but those songs apparently involved keyboards and a flute. The two of them confessed that they didn’t know who they were back then, and they didn’t know what they wanted to do. They didn’t say that the music of Wicked Lester was too complicated and complex, but that was my takeaway. My takeaway is that they wanted to create a masterpiece in the manner all young artists want to create the next Dark Side of the Moon, Zoso, Sgt. Peppers, Exile on Main Street, or Aqualung. Whatever they were trying to do, they realized that it wasn’t them. They decided to tear it all down and create KISS (the acronym) tunes that young kids could enjoy and their grandparents wouldn’t find too offensive. They decided to play big songs that could be played in arenas.  

KISS ended up being the perfect band for “stupid” young, pre-teen boys who didn’t care about sophisticated complications of deep, moving music that could be defined and redefined with repeated listens. The KISS demographic, for most of my youth, was almost exclusively young and male. Some girls liked the song Beth, but they couldn’t believe the song came from KISS. (When I was young, I considered Beth a betrayal, as I considered KISS the only band that I could trust to avoid going soft. I never heard of AC/DC at that point.) KISS was fun, theatrical, arena rock that lifted you up on your feet, with a fist held high while you sang the lyrics with them. 

My neighborhood friends and I used to pretend that we were KISS-in-concert. I was The Spaceman, my best friend was The Demon, and his little brother was Catman. (Nobody wanted to be Starchild.) We would play air guitar and air drums in an area they called the basement. I would arch back like Ace did when he played his solos, because I thought that was one of the coolest things ever, and my friend waggled his tongue, spat blood, and pretended to blow fire with Gene. So, while the rest of you were listening to the important and vital music, we were having fun. 

KISS didn’t invent the terms arena rock, pomp rock, corporate rock, or anthemic songs, and the terms weren’t invented to describe them, but KISS is now one of the first bands that come to mind when we hear such terms. 

Who you Is?

KISS albums were chock full of silly, simple songs that won’t move you spiritually or cause anyone to think of the philosophy of Epicurus, but as the aphorism that some attribute to Leonardo da Vinci says, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If you consider it a stretch to attach anything KISS did to the term sophistication, I feel you, but how much effort goes into achieving complex sophistication, and how much restraint does it require to keep it as simple as possible?

Who is the better writer William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway? Those who love Faulkner often talk about the beautiful language he used to paint an images in the mind. “It was powerful and provocative,” they say. Few would argue that Faulkner doesn’t deserve to be considered one of our greatest writers, but there was a feeling of “could we get to the point here” when reading him. Hemingway sought to paint with an economy of words, seeking picture perfect sentences to describe and characterize in the most succinct manner possible. One, it could be said, could not wait to show us what a great writer he was, and the other restrained such impulses to make his stories more readable to a wider audience. Both might suggest the other insults his audience in relative ways, and both might say theirs is the finer artform. Both audiences would claim sophistication in their own right and the sophistry of the other.  

The point is we all know who KISS were. All we have to do is look at them to know that subtlety and sophistication were not their driving force. The point is not to denigrate KISS, but to say they put together a package far different from the one employed by a Bob Dylan or a Radiohead. The point is we know who KISS are, yet message board contributors continue to take time out of their day to remind us how awful they were. “…But I like them.” “That’s because you have such poor taste in music.”   

Why does anyone feel the need to go to a message board to inform the world how awful YOU thought KISS were? “I can’t help it, I’m just so durn sophisticated.” That’s fantastic Papa Smurf 124, but you do realize that your precious anonymity means that no one really cares what you think?  

I used to denigrate people who listened to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, in the manner people now denigrate the average KISS fan, but I realized the market is wide enough and divergent enough to welcome all. You can be a KISS fan, a Radiohead fan, or a Mariah Carey fan and know that no one is superior or inferior. They just enjoy listening to different types of music, and why do you care so much that they do? I choose Radiohead as an example of the complete opposite of KISS, on the musical spectrum, among mainstream acts. Radiohead writes complicated structures, with deep, provocative lyrics, and I am a huge fan. The question is do they write sophisticated material for the purpose of being sophisticated, so all their fans can prove their sophistication by saying that they enjoy listening to more sophisticated music? They get it, you don’t, because you’re a KISS fan, and they’ll spit the latter in the most condescending tone possible. KISS wrote simple, party music. Everyone knows who they are. Everyone knows they were a toe-tapping, foot stomping band who rarely tried to be something they weren’t (The Elder and Carnival of Souls excepted). 

Music is the tie that binds. It can be the only thing that you and your brothers share, the reason you fall in love, and the thing that helps you make friends from such divergent backgrounds. It, more than any other artistic medium, brings us all together. There’s a little something out there for everyone. For others, and they are in the minority, it can be the great divide. 

How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

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“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.” 

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?” 

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.” 

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter. 

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.” 

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”   

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.” 

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves. 

At the Movies

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No matter how hard they try to wreck movies, I still love them. I love a great book, a fantastic album, and even a mind-blowing painting, but nothing beats spending ninety minutes in the hands of a master movie maker. Thanks to the VHS, and every medium before and since, I’ve watched more movies than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I write “just about”, because I had a “Who’s watched more movies” showdown with a fellow movie freak who cut the debate short by asking, “Do you watch porn?” I said I didn’t. He said, “I win!” 

Nobody ever died wishing they watched more movies, and it’s not something we normally lord over someone to a point of superiority. When comedians start dropping references from movies, however, movie freaks enjoy getting those jokes that the others –who didn’t waste so much of their life watching movies–don’t.  

“Before we go to a movie, we have to get to the movie theater, and is there a better way of getting there, or anywhere, than in a Jeep Wrangler? (Cue the video backdrop of a Wrangler managing various rough roads, icy snow, and large rock terrains.) “Hi! I’m somebody famous, but I have a moderately-dressed family (cue the entrance of the wife and kids and remind the paid spokesman to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder), who need a reliable automobile to get them places. We put some serious consideration into purchasing a sensible family sedan, and then the snowstorm hit.   

“When hazardous conditions hit, the 4-wheel drive (4WD) drivetrain of the Jeep Wrangler will go from a luxury to a necessity. We don’t always need it, of course, but hazardous conditions strike, we can push, pull, or otherwise engage the 4WD to the supermarket, the drugstore, or the movie theater with comfort. The comfort 4WD owners know can be so great we might consider it a little weird. Most of us don’t care if others have a faster car than we do, and we don’t care if they think have a better car, and we never have. We’re not car guys. When that snowstorm hits, however, and it brings ice and everything else that defines hazardous conditions, there is something embarrassingly unusual that happens to us when we’re not only able to manage hazardous conditions but dominate them. 

“We all learned how to drive in the snow and ice in other cars, and those cars taught us to be cautious and never over-confident in hazardous conditions, no matter what we drive, but how often have you felt so intimidated by the “here/there be dragons” roads that you decided not to leave home. If this was you, the makers of Jeep have the antidote. The 4WD Jeep Wrangler not only provides the piece of mind that comes from making a decision that protects your family, but it can lead to some feelings of masculine machismo as you conquer nature. (Cue the son’s growl.) And now back to the show.”  

The Action Movie

“Jason Statham is our new action hero!” they say with all sorts of exclamation points. I yawn. Action movies? Does anyone still lust after a great action flick? I have nothing but compliments for Jason Statham. He’s a quality actor who picks some quality movies to star in, the Crank movies stand out as his best so far, but action movies as a whole are just dead to me? We all loved what Stallone and Schwarzenegger did to and for the genre, in the 80’s and 90’s, but didn’t the whole action movie format kind of peak in that era? How many twists on the genre can we put on this otherwise tired genre? The John Wick movies supposedly proved I am wrong. People were a buzz about them. “You have to see this next one. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see it with me? If this one is anywhere close to the first one, it’s a must-see.” So, I saw it, and as action movies go, it was really good, but I couldn’t have been more bored. Maybe there was a time when I found choreographed fight scenes exciting, but I can’t remember it. All scenes in movies require some suspension of disbelief, but we all know they’re going to win the fight. They are all so formulaic. 

To introduce his guest action-hero Steven Seagal to his show, Arsenio Hall had a great line, “This man could probably whip your tail with a french fry.” I’m sure Steven Seagal could probably beat me up, and I kind of don’t care,, but we’re talking about a man who played a character in a movie, and most of his physical exploits were choreographed with players executing moves that allowed him to punch them or kick in pre-planned moves. Does that mean he could beat me up with a french fry in real life? We all know they’re not fighting for real, of course, but we suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the choreography involved. If it’s not real, and all the moves by the main character and his adversaries are choreographed, aren’t we basically watching a ballet with some punching, kicking, and bullets thrown in? “But you’re male, and every male has just been intoxicated with fight scenes since about Bruce Lee. Why, because we’re males. It’s as every bit apart of us as our ring-a-ding-ding.” Well, then, I’m obviously not as male as you, because I’d prefer the verbal, cerebral exchanges we can hear in even the most average Woody Allen film over the finest choreographed fight scenes of the best Van Damme flick. 

The Car Chase   

Some say that the greatest car chase scene that ever took place in the history of cinema occurred in 1971’s French Connection. People still talk about this scene as if it’s one of the greatest scenes in movie history. They talk about how dangerous it was, and Screenrant.com writes that director “William Friedkin had no permission to film the car chase the way it was done, which is why The French Connection could never be made today.” They also drop a note about how the car accident in the scene was real, and Friedkin kept it in the movie to add to the scene’s gritty realism. I drop a big “who give a crud” thud. When I saw that that scene for the first time, before I knew anything about the hoopla and the hollering, I thought the scene ran too long. After hearing people gush about the scene in the decades since, I watched it again with a renewed sense, and I thought it ran too long. That scene, one car chase scene, runs approximately six minutes. About five minutes too long. “But you have to understand how difficult the logistics of the scene were,” they say. “You have to sink yourself into the drama of the moment, and how well it was edited to a perfect pulse pounding pace.” No, I don’t. I don’t care about the particulars of the artistry of the film-making, I just want to sit down and enjoy watching a movie. I also don’t plan on ever shooting a car chase scene, so why would I be influenced by anything involved in the shooting of it? I watch a movie to be entertained, and when a chase scene, or a fight scene, interrupts the pace of that movie, “because that’s what we love”, I now have the luxury of fast forwarding through it to see what happened.

The Bad Guy

Our familiarity with portrayals of bad guys began in preschool when our teacher put on a puppet show and introduced the bad guy, “And here’s comes mean Mr. Johnson,” “BOO!” we all shouted in unison. “All I care about is money!” she has mean Mr. Johnson say in her mean guy voice, as our throng of boos strengthened. It was fun and funny back then, but we fully grown, mature and responsible adults are still doing that today. When the bad guy enters our adult productions today, the writers will introduce him by having him kick a cute, little puppy down a flight of stairs, light a physically-impaired individual’s house on fire, or do some other equally heinous act such as declaring there are some virtues to profit. At some point in the production, he will declare that a side character isn’t pulling their weight in the company, and he will do it in such an over the top, mean, bad and dastardly way that it’s almost embarrassingly cheesy to watch. Enter our good guy, “C’mon man, that’s no way to talk to a person.” We all but cheer our good guy for saying what needed to be said, but doesn’t anyone else see this as the movie’s obnoxiously obvious way of endearing the main character to the audience?

I would submit that the characterizations of bad guys haven’t progressed much beyond that preschool puppet show portrayal of the mean Mr. Johnson bad guys. “Hey, if you don’t think money is important, I’d like to see you get along without it!” mean Mr. Johnsons say in modern, adult movies. “Boo!” we shout in unison. Most adults don’t openly boo in theaters, but do we avoid openly booing because we’ve matured past that impulse, or does decades of movie going let us know that the writers and directors of our beloved productions are going to make something awful to him? That’s what separates us from preschoolers, we know the movie makers are going to expose him as the bad guy he is, and we know he’s going to get his comeuppance. We’re not talking about comedies either, where it’s more acceptable to have exaggerated characters for comedic purposes. We’re talking about otherwise complex dramas that basically write Scooby-Doo bad guys as actual characters. “He’s going to get his comeuppance,” someone in the audience says, as if they’re watching a sporting event. He’s one of those “I told you,” guys who love to say they knew what was coming, even though it is as obvious as it was in our preschool puppet plays. As I wrote I don’t need, or even want, a complex, deep narrative on par with a Dostoyevsky novel, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some writers shake up these tedious, bullet point tropes that adhere to the 80’s cookie cutter characters that Scooby Doo made famous.    

My favorite illustration of this point comes from Quentin Tarantino: 

“Critics always really preferred Bill Murray movies to Chevy Chase movies,” Tarantino said. “However, it does seem as if the point of all the Bill Murray movies is that he’s this kind of hip, cool, curmudgeon, smartass guy, who in the last 20 minutes gets a transformation and becomes this nice guy. And almost apologizes for who he was the entire movie before that happened.” 

Tarantino continued with examples: “Stripes, Groundhog Day, Scrooged. The whole thing. For instance, Stripes. How does he go from where Warren Oates kicks his ass, deservedly kicks his ass…to where now he’s rallying the troops? Now, he’s getting their army on during the parade and now he’s leading a secret mission. Same thing with Groundhog Day. I mean, does anybody really think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray? Maybe it’s better for Andie MacDowell, but not for us as the viewer.”

“Yet, Chevy Chase movies don’t play that s***,” Tarantino said. “Chevy Chase is the same supercilious a**hole at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He never changes in his stuff…I mean, unless they have him playing a dope like he is in the Vacation movies. But when he’s playing like a Chevy character, he never apologizes for who he is, stays the same way through the whole film, and even if there’s a slight change, that’s not the whole point of the movie, like changing him into a nice, cuddly guy.”

Information Age and Movies

Another huge component of watching modern movies is all of the insider information we have at our disposal. Thanks to news aggregators, the internet in general, and the other chairs on late-night talk shows, we now know so much about movies that we crossed a tipping point of too much information about the production of a simple 90-minute movie. I used to find the information actors, directors, and everyone else involved in the production provided in the other chairs on late-night talk shows somewhat fascinating, but somewhere along the line I realized it’s all just self-imposed deification, and their sign to them that they made it. For some reason, we all want to know everything we can find about our definition of our royalty, and the roles they play in movies, and we can never get enough. I did. When the actor told me that they put weight on to play the role, I didn’t really care, but I considered it a worthwhile dedication to the role. When the host began to ask questions about the diet they used to add weight, I turned the channel. When the person in the other chair informed us that she didn’t wear make-up for their role, I didn’t care. When the host said, “You are very brave,” and he appeared to mean it, I turned the channel. When it was revealed in an aggregator, that this actor didn’t get along with that actor, their onscreen lover, we all learned that many considered working with that actor difficult. When we learned that the actor became so immersed in his method acting that he demanded everyone on set call him Weasel, because he’s playing Weasel, I found that fascinating at first. Then, when everyone copied that immersion technique, I found it trite, redundant, and a little pathetic and dumb. We learn that some actors aren’t nice, but others are. “It’s true. I know he’s a good guy, because he asked me my name when giving me an autograph, and he called me Harley from then on, and he even winked at my kid.” That director used this technique, this setting, those cameras, that soundtrack, and the movie studio budgeted it at such and such an amount, but as usual the artistically demanding director burned through that the first week. We still care about the quality of a movie, of course, but all these other late-night talk show talking points enhance the movie experience for us. Why? I honestly don’t understand how any of this information enhances your cinematic experience. You like a movie better, because you found out she’s nice, and you won’t go to see another movie, because you heard a report about how one time that star didn’t hold an elevator for an old lady carrying groceries? You might be a victim of too much information. 

Even with all that, I still love movies. I find a trip to the theater, a night at home with Netflix, Prime, etc., and a quality movie, a great evening. No matter how hard they try, they can never take that away from me.