“Teachers teach to the dumbest kids in class,” a former student said to try to explain why we all found school so boring. It felt like truth when I read that, unvarnished, “the stuff they don’t want you to know” truth, because it explained so much. Some of my teachers were so slow and boring. I used to be a quick thinker, which shouldn’t be confused with a quality thinker. My brain operated in hyper-drive, both literally and figuratively, and I often had trouble slowing it down long enough to soak in details. Details drove me nuts, they still do, and when you ask me to slow it down to make sure I get all the details, I shut down. When storytellers focus too much of their presentation on detail, I want to yell, “Just go to it! Get to the point!” When I read what this former student wrote, I wanted to believe it because I thought it explained why my teachers talked so slow, repeated themselves so often, and why they focused so much on inane and insipid details. That truth, it turns out, has no basis in fact. It’s much closer to a myth that we all want to believe.

When I read that truth, I should’ve reminded myself of the line I gave my conspiracy theory friend, “Just because it’s the most negative and cynical idea you can find, and it sounds like something the status quo doesn’t want you to know, doesn’t mean it’s true.”

My guess is that if we polled 1,000 teachers, 950 of them would say that that snarky assessment is false at best or an excuse poor students develop to explain why they did so poorly. They would probably add that while a quality teacher would never abandon a struggling student, it doesn’t mean they would slow the lesson plan down so much that they fail to cover the material they are required to cover in a semester. Schools provide teachers so many different avenues to explore with struggling students that there would be no need to slow the lesson plan down. That makes sense and all that, but the idea that the teachers I had were so boring, because they were trying to slow it down for Wally just explains so much to me. After sorting through various teachers I’ve had, I dismissed this idea as not only unprovable but inconsequential.

The more I tossed the idea of this assessment around, the more I thought every subject, every lesson plan, and every presentation is one quality teacher away from being interesting. I experienced that when a teacher made Economics so interesting to me that I entered college an Economics major, until I took some classes with poor teachers, and I realized how boring the subject was. I even had a teacher who could make Shakespeare fascinating, another who made World History exciting, and I have to imagine there’s an individual out there who could make Anthropology interesting, hard to believe, but I have to imagine that it’s possible. 

Most of my teachers weren’t the type of people we would follow into a fire to save people. They slogged through the material as much as we did. We shared the idea that they probably chose the wrong profession with them. We knew this because we had those charismatic types who could make a lecture about the Sumerians interesting.

For most of the teachers I had there was obviously no prerequisite placed on the ability to craft a quality presentation to attract an audience. There is, however, for  politicians, podcasters, and other entertainers. They have to craft a presentation that appeals to a wide-ranging audience. The same holds true for an advertising agency that hope to sell their presentation to a corporation.

“If you want to know anything about a culture,” someone once said. “Watch its commercials.” There might not be an institution that pays more attention to the cultural mores of society than the average advertising agency. They spend millions studying the culture through sociological and psychological research, and they market test all of their commercials before airing them to understand us better. They pay for this, because they know if they’re going to be able to convince a corporation to give them money, they need to prove that they know us better than we know ourselves. The one obvious fact they know is funny sells, but funny has all sorts of constraints around it, so they pack their commercials with the most common, least offensive jokes they can find to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I appreciate all the time and money they devote to crafting the perfect pitch for a product, but when one of these insults to my intelligence runs through my home I realize there is hatred in my heart, and if the Catholic Church is right about the progressions involved in Judgment Day, I could face obstacles. 

“It says here that you do had hatred in your heart,” St. Peter might say with the pearly gates in his backdrop.

“That is absolutely not true,” I would protest.

“It says you hate beets, the Dallas Cowboys, and commercials.”

“Commercials?” I would say. “How can a hatred of commercials affect my standing in the afterlife?”

“Hatred in the heart is hatred in the heart,” he might say while thumbing through my life.

“I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t seem fair,” I would protest. “Commercials are a non-entity. I didn’t hate the players involved in making commercials. I know they have a job to do and all that, but I just found them such an insult to my intelligence and my sense of creativity, and the repetitive nature of them drove me mad, but you’re telling me that I face eternal damnation because I hated commercials?”

“What? No, you’re probably looking at three-to-five in purgatory for the general sense of hatred in your heart, but you’ll probably get out in eighteen months with good behavior.”

MacPhail’s MacGuffin

If entertainers and statesmen fashion their presentation to try to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and commercials employ dumb guy jokes, how do movie makers and TV show producers craft their projects for greater appeal? 

Have you ever watched a movie with an excessively complex plot? We’re not dumb, and we’ve probably watched a million movies, but some screenwriters and directors fall in love with complexities that involve weaving tangled webs of intricacies with various twists and turns. I might be a lot dumber than I think, but I prefer to think that I never cared about a character, or a plot, so much that I’m going to follow them through the laborious labyrinths that “brilliant” screenwriter create.

A screenwriter named Angus MacPhail (apparently a real person and not a pseudonym) developed a device for dumb people like me who don’t care as much about complex plots as much as “brilliant” writers think. He called it: The MacGuffin. MacPhail and Alfred Hitchcock teamed up on several MacGuffin projects. The very basic definition of the MacGuffin concept is that it doesn’t really matter to an audience what the characters of a story are after as long as the chase is compelling.

The most interesting element of this MacGuffin concept is how true it is, even to a movie buff like me. After watching several MacGuffin movies, I realized that I could watch such a movie, thoroughly enjoy that movie, and love it so much that I memorize certain chunks of dialog from that movie without ever thinking about what the movie was really all about. I’ve read some Reddit discussions about what the characters in the movie Pulp Fiction were after. I loved that movie, and I consider it one of the most memorable movies ever made, but when they broke the movie down, I realized that I didn’t devote a thought to what the characters were actually after in that movie. Pulp Fiction is a movie that many movie freaks consider one of the best examples of a MacGuffin, because it never explains what the characters are actually after. When the Redditors explained their theories, I found them fascinating, and I realized that not only were their theories better than mine, I never even developed a theory, and I LOVED that movie so much that I saw it numerous times, something I rarely do.

The next question I ask those who employ the MacGuffin device is, is it an attempt to dumb the movie down for the dumbest kids in the class? The answer to that question might involve the overly complex and condescending, “Yes and no.” Yes, in the sense that we dumb guys can’t or won’t follow all of the complexities, and no, in the sense that the MacGuffin device helped moviemakers in their negotiations with producers. 

The primary reason moviemakers “dumb-down” their beloved productions is to appease investors. The primary investors are called executive producers, because they often either fund the movie themselves, or they play a major role in securing funds for that movie. Some producers are so involved in the process of making movies that they offer notes: “This particular concept requires too much explanation, and that other idea needs more explanation.” Moviemakers mostly hate these notes, but they know that if they are going to make a multimillion-dollar production, they need to follow their producers’ notes. Hitchcock and MacPhail believed that using the MacGuffin device satisfied both parties by offering no explanations at all. They believed that if the chase was good enough, the audience wouldn’t care what the characters were actually chasing. We have to imagine that they experienced pushback, as the producers surely dropped a note that read, “We need some explanation, or the audience will feel lost.” Hitchcock and MacPhail were right.

“I’m From the Future. How is ya’?”

One note producers drop probably drop on moviemakers during productions that involve speculative themes is how to introduce foreign concepts in a more seamless fashion that appeals to all moviegoers without confusing them or belaboring the point with too much exposition. “How do I follow your notes without ruining my production?” is probably the reply most moviemakers send back.

The 1927, German film called Metropolis provided an example that movie makers now use to resolve the tricky dilemma of introducing characters from the future. The moviemakers could’ve simply had one of the actors say, “Maria is a robot from the future.” They could’ve also had the year of Maria’s introduction on screen, or on set somewhere (and they may have at some point.) The producers and moviemakers ended up creating a figurative scheme of thought by suggesting that everything in the future will be silver-metallic. Robots, like Maria, will be silver-metallic in the future, and the rest of us will follow suit by wearing silver-metallic clothing. Metropolis was so influential, in this regard, that for the next fifty-some odd years, movie makers forced actors, playing characters from the future, to wear silver-metallic costumes to symbolically represent their tense. Did any of them think we’d all be wearing silver-metallic clothing in the future, no, but they did this to conform to the figurative scheme of thought Metropolis developed. 

Why did they choose silver-metallic? I think we can all agree that silver-metallic just looks futuristic. Either that, or this image might be so ingrained that that’s just the way we see it now, but my guess even if Metropolis was never made, some futuristic, speculative movie would’ve come up with the idea. The colors silver-metallic and the color white, are those we most closely associate with space and time travel, and most people in the present and past rarely wear/wore silver-metallic clothing. 

My guess is, more than anything else, the silver metallic clothing solved the movie maker’s tricky dilemma of how to introduce a man from the future? Again, they could’ve simply had the character say, “Hi, I’m Arnie, and I’m from the future. How is ya’?” And that line might work in a quirky Wes Anderson movie, but it would prove awkward and stilted in others. How many of us introduce ourselves by saying, “I’m Arnie, and I’m from the present.” Even if we traveled back to the past, we would still regard our tense as the present tense, as in we’re presently in the past. Thus, the movie making world decided the best way to inform the audience that their character was a man from the future was to present him in an outfit no one from the present would wear. Once this symbolic representation was established by Maria, we either began thinking everyone in the future will wear silver metallic clothing, or the movie makers engrained the image in our head through repetition. 

This symbolic image is so ingrained now that if we went into a supermarket with a silver-metallic outfit on, people might begin hounding us for Lotto numbers, sports predictions, prognostications on world affairs, or stock tips. If silver-metallic suits are becoming more common, we probably wouldn’t immediately assume that their silver-metallic clothing means they’re from the future, but what if they spoke in an emotionless monotone? 

Speculative movies have long speculated that human emotions will no longer drive us in the future, on our next evolutionary plane, a concept most notably explored by Star Trek. They imply that we will no longer be as sad, angry, or happy in the future, and their implicit suggestion is that that will be a result of taking us all off the money standard. 

Taking humans off the money standard is, at the very least, an interesting thought experiment. Some suggest that if we did away with the cultural, social, and worldwide reliance on money, it could diminish sadness, feelings of hopelessness, anger, jealousy, and it could eliminate most of the crimes those emotions inspire. That’s possible, but it’s also possible that we might not aspire to be better today than we were yesterday without some kind of reward. The pursuit of money is widely regarded as a soul-less venture, and we’ve all heard the line money is the root of all evil. Yet, depending on how we earn it, money is also the best reward we’ve developed for hard work. If money is the root of all evil, it’s also at the root of some feelings of purpose, a sense of fulfillment, and it can promote feelings of definition and identity. Money has tangible qualities, of course, but so many of its complex intangibles make us who we are today, and the unforeseen consequences of doing away with money could be an article unto its own.

The Aliens are Turning

Movie characters from the future no longer wear silver, metallic outfits, as we’re all past that silliness now, but we still have numerous figurative schemes of thought in our movies that we fail to see them, because they’re so ingrained.  

‘Who is the alien?’ we ask while in the audience of one of those aliens from another planet movies. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait until one of them turns their head,” they say. ‘What?’ “Just watch.” Most movie aliens either have a different musculature structure, or they haven’t learned the mechanics behind a full shoulder/torso turn well enough to mimic a full human turn properly. In the 1978 version of The Body Snatchers, a movie I believe set the symbolic representation, the aliens only turn their head, and they fail to incorporate the shoulders and torso in that turn. The turn is also so slow that it appears eerily mechanical and menacing. Their stiff, unnatural motions, dictate their inhuman nature to us. “He’s the alien!” we all scream. The sudden switch in music helps, but only to accompany the visual. 

If we’re trying to locate movie aliens in other social situation, we should note that if these movies are correct, the evolution of most aliens from another planet also failed to provide them casual conversation sounds, as they tend to communicate in a lexicon of roars, high-pitched squeals, or creepy, slither sounds that humans find unnerving. If movies are correct, aliens from another planet do not have mundane interactions. If we were to witness one of them in a transaction at a Walmart franchise, from their home planet, it would probably involve a series of various roars and slithering sounds that we would find so unpleasant we wouldn’t shop at that location. 

Monsters Only Eat Non-Believers

If we find ourselves a character in a monster movie, we should also know that believing the raving lunatic in our production could save our lives, as movie monsters, humanoid and otherwise, have a particular, dietary preference for non-believers. If we survive that first round, we should then avoid thinking that they’re mindless, bloodthirsty beasts, yet we cannot doubt their ferocity either. Failure to do any of the above will lead the monster to zero in on us to prove us wrong. “Why does a monster of blind bloodlust care if we doubt its existence?” we might ask. ‘They just do,’ the raving lunatic will inform us with dramatic repetition. ‘They do just do.’

When we first witness the monster, we see it in its more natural setting. In the second scene, we hear the roar, and just about every roar suspiciously mimics the ferocious roar of the lion. They roar in a projectile manner with their spines bent in an S-shape formation, and they do it in a manner that shows us nearly all of their teeth. We might even notice that their saliva is thick and gelatinous. Even some individual species of sharks have evolved a lion’s roar, and we don’t question that, because we know that that means they’re just that ferocious. 

Another sync-up we have with modern moviemakers is our fascination with motive. Why does a killer kill? Why does a monster kill? Nonbelievers suggest that it/he just has a blind bloodlust. Believers know better. They know that it’s too simplistic to believe that anyone, or anything, has a primal lust for killing. They know it’s complicated, and figuring out its primary motive is the best method to finding a way to eventually pacify it. 

In early movies, monsters had no motive, they were built on blind, bloodlust and destruction, but modern moviemakers know that their monsters/aliens don’t necessarily need a motive, but we do, and it’s usually political. Modern audiences require complex motives that call for scientific research. It’s just too simplistic for us to believe that a beast would harm or kill another being, because the idea that any beast acting in an instinctive manner when encountering something foreign is reductive. It’s also reductive and simplistic to explore the idea that a foreign entity might act in a reflexively defensive manner, or that they might view humans as a source of food. These speculations suggest that foreign entities are relatively primal, and as we all know, suspect, or fear, foreign entities have an intelligence that we cannot comprehend.

Even some slasher flicks, with human monsters, now feed into our need to know what motivates someone, or something, to kill us. “If they were just nicer to it, perhaps it wouldn’t feel the need to kill them all,” we now whisper in theaters. “They just need to understand it better.” Thus, scientists and reporters are often the sole survivors of the monsters, because the monsters appreciate their desire to understand them better. 

Indicators of an Infernal Influence

Most of us don’t pay attention to these figurative indicators, but thanks to the image provided by The Exorcist, we now know that one of the ramifications of undergoing a possession is that it will damage our daughter’s complexion. In its place will be the ruddy complexion of the meth head, that is accompanied by a creepy green hue. It also won’t matter if we instructed her to use conditioner that day, because her hair will go instantly scraggly and oily when the demon infiltrates. Possession movies teach us that demons know how to manipulate our vocal cords in such a way that it doesn’t matter if we’re a young woman during a possession, all victims of a possession will assume a deep, rich demonic voice. What is a demonic voice, we don’t know, but if our child is possessed and her new, demonic voice reminds everyone of Bob, the electronics department employee at Best Buy, we’re probably going to have a tough time convincing anyone to help us exorcise that demon from her system. That’s because everyone knows that demons come out growling and speaking some antiquated language in a hissing whisper that is punctuated by a lion’s roar.

“I know she sounds like Bob from Best Buy, but I’m telling you that my daughter is possessed by a demon named Gerty, which I know makes no sense either, because Satan usually gives his minions more creative, multi-syllabic names, but this is an actual possession Larry. We either need to run or find a Bible written in a language other than English, like Latin or Aramaic.” 

There comes a point in everyone’s existence when they’ve read too many books, listened to too much music, and watched too many movies. When we reach that point, it becomes difficult to avoid spotting the indicators that moviemakers use to abide by our figurative schemes of thought. They can insert a wide variety of creative inserts to their production, but there are certain touchstones that the audience needs to follow along without confusion. When we witness the agreed upon touchstones, we know exactly what they mean, and we know that the producer forced the moviemakers to incorporate agreed upon symbolic representations to get the audience from point A to point D. 

Most of these touchstones are so ingrained and expected now that we don’t even see them for what they are. If you’ve ever watched a movie with a child who hasn’t watched the hundreds of thousands of movies you have, you’ve probably heard, “How did you know that guy was from the future?” If you recognized that it was all about the silver-metallic suit, you probably opened up a can of worms that you couldn’t answer until you began thinking about these figurative schemes of thought that you didn’t even know you absorbed until they asked you about them. Once these touchstones enter our mind’s eye, it’s difficult to separate them from the mostly fallacious theme that teachers teach to the dumbest kids in the class. 

“We need to rewrite this scene, so the dumbest kids in the class can get it,” the producer’s note says, and the creative types probably argue with their proposals, saying we want to introduce a new way to introduce a man from the future, an alien, a monster’s mindset, or a product of a demonic possession. “Too much exposition,” the producer might reply, or “the characterization is too complicated, just give them meth face, have them make a head-only turn, or put them in a silver-metallic suit. Even the dumbest kids in the class will get that.” The moviemaker might fight back with righteous indignation regarding their creative interpretation, but they know most ideas won’t get off the ground without the producer’s check.

“Fortune favors the brave and the bold,” is a phrase we’ve learned through the years, and we all want to be the renegade, the maverick who bucks the trends set by others. We don’t want to follow the rules, we want to be the exception to the rule, but if we’re going to attract a wide audience, we learn that no one appreciates the exception until they become successful. We also learn that the irreplaceable become the replaceable when they refuse to follow the rules.