See?
In the movie “Young Frankenstein” Dr. Frankenstein, at one point, says to Igor, “Damn your eyes!”
Marty Feldman, in the role of Igor, points to his bulging eyeballs and responds, “Too late.”
God pointed out to me this week that this exchange can be seen as an analogy for the film industry as a whole. It represents a problem they have been struggling with for decades, all without realizing that it can never be solved. To understand this we have to bring in the famous aphorism, “Seeing is believing.” In the imagined exchange between the film industry and us, it’s customers and audience, the film industry is the one damning our eyes. If only we didn’t have such keen vision they say, if only we couldn’t so easily see the falseness of their visual effects, then they could immerse us in their perfect visions. We would accept their art because seeing is believing.
And our answer to them is simply, “too late.” It is too late because we know that the visions they sell us are false, and no level of perfection will take us the final mile to believing that the vision is truth. They have managed to teach us that “seeing” is not “believing.” In fact, the ever increasing perfection of the artificial images they bring to us is largely helping us to recognize that even in our daily lives, we cannot just accept what we think we see as being the truth of the situation. So in their quest to bring us illusions as good as reality, they have ironically only succeeded in bringing us to believe that even reality is sometimes no better than illusion.
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