"Look at the fireworks!": May Blog Revitalization Part 1

Hello Everybody!

I have had the craziest April! I feel like this is the first time I have sat down in about 3 weeks. So, I have learned an incredible amount this past month and I’m going to do my best to both revitalize this blog and document it over the coming days/weeks. The bigger picture includes 2 film festivals and a visit to my favorite paradise, Disney World. Now that later visit may seem out of place when studying film and TV from a more academic point of view, but I would argue that I have learned as much, if not more, about entertainment from learning the background machinations of Disney parks and observing the Disney cast members than many viewings of (some) classic films. It’s an obsession, but I promise it’s an interesting one.

On that note, I want to kick off this May blog rebirth with an allegory that starts with a simple fact: I really love fireworks. Specifically, I really love the nightly fireworks at Disney World because they include a Jiminy Cricket narration, but I really will take any fireworks. I jokingly like to claim the reason I love fireworks is that I was scared of loud noises as a kid, so they are still a novelty for me. Most of the time, that is reasonably accurate, but as I was watching them this year, I had a slightly deeper realization. If you take a minute and start comparing fireworks to the experience of watching film, you may realize that looked at in the right light (no pun intended), fireworks are a perfectly condensed version of the film watching experience.

Ok, I know you are all true friends and readers if you stuck with me after that last statement, but bear with me. Fireworks are visual spectacles designed with the aim to evoke an emotion in their viewers. In the case of the Disney fireworks, the spectacle is tied to music and preexisting stories and characters. When we strip the show down, we can see what is foundational to the experience and what is the cherry on top. By doing that, we can also do that with film and suddenly I think you can start to think very differently about film as a whole.

So, the foundation of the fireworks is that visual spectacle I mentioned. They are big; they are sparkly; they are pretty. At the very least, they will hopefully get an “awww” out of you. To Disney though, that’s 4th of July amateur hour. To take them to the next level, they add music so that the explosions are perfectly tied to emotional cues. We therefore start to associate the big, sparkly things with how we feel and can even start to assign personalities to them. In the Disney show, it is a small step to add the Disney canon’s characters and narrations on top of the music and the sights. The audience is already feeling the stronger base emotions based off of what we are watching and hearing. With that base in place, the familiar songs and messages about wishing on stars and believing are just a little bit easier to be on board with. It is easy because we are already feeling the way Disney wants us to feel. This overall is what makes them a satisfying entertainment experience. We go away feeling something different then we felt before and that is because of layers of careful planning by the architects behind the scenes.

While adding Disney to this experience makes it all feel a little perverse based off their current omnipresence, it really consists of the same fundamental principles behind good filmmaking. My favorite filmmakers work behind the scenes to make their stories land more convincingly. It’s why more conventional narratives can be told again and again and some movies can be The Philadelphia Story and some are The Room. The power does not lie exactly in the story being told, but in how it is told. There are layers to great film and the answers lie beyond the script in things like the acting, the production design, the score, exc. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has its iconic music. Bringing Up Baby has Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Up has the color magenta. These elements connect with you on a visceral level so that you can actually be invested in the story. Those more visceral elements make it almost impossible not to be invested in what you are watching. It’s why the best filmmakers feel more akin to puppet masters. To me, this the most wonderful and most mysterious element of film. It’s why Titanic leaves me flat, but Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life makes me sob. Disney taps into that better than most. Ultimately, it’s the fireworks and oh boy do I love watching them.