Cinema With Realistic Texture

The everyday texture of reality includes only-partial-sense-made, both joy and disgust, mixed motivations, ambiguity.

Recently, after watching a movie I’ve commented on how realistic the movie was. Inevitably, this comment is in response to movies that are extremely unrealistic on the surface level. For example, I had that response to Crimes of the Future, a film about a future in which most humans feel no pain and suffer no infection, leading, among other things, to transformational surgery as popular performance art.

My sense of “realism” in cinema is more related the texture of experience resonating with my everyday life. The below considerations may not generalize to others….

For me, the key elements of realistic cinema are:

Not everything makes sense, some things make perfect sense, and some things just sort-of make sense.

Two extremes of sense are Dadaism and absurdity (nonsense) versus a tightly plotted thriller (a paranoic world where everything has meaning). Everyday life makes sense more than half the time, but certainly not all the time. A filmic world with a realistic texture is partially, but not fully, comprehensible to me. In my everyday life, this texture could be found in a moment such as why is there water on the floor by the dishwasher between the sink and the fridge? Is it a sign of a leak in the dishwasher? Of water dripping off of plates being put in the dishwasher? Of an ice cube from the freezer being dropped unnoticed on the floor and melting? Of spray bouncing off of something being rinsed in the sink? I may never know.

Motivations are mixed and sometimes incomprehensible.

Real people rarely have singular, clear motivations. Instead, they often have many overlapping mixed motivations, which are partially in conflict with their other motivations. For example, I want to spend time with my family, and I would love some solitude, and making money seems like a useful activity, and boy, video games would be fun right now, and… Why am I doing what I do? In the end, it is inexplicable to myself. Many factors are reasonable explanations, but none of them are linear, causal reasons.

There is joy, sorrow, surprise, boredom, disgust, delight.

In particular, a little bit of “nothing’s happening” and a little bit of disgust in a film can create a palette that can reflect everyday experience. Yesterday, I had 20 minutes between scheduled events for which I had no clear aim, and during that time, I lived aimlessly. I also got some chicken poop on a sock — my daughter pulled her favorite chicken from the coop, and it had been sitting between us, resisting having its head inspected for quite a long time. Then it took the large poop that hens sitting on eggs store up.

There is no clear conclusion. The film ends on an ambiguous note.

In everyday life, things so often go sidewise, not along any foreseen (much less planned) path. For example, I might prepare for a phone call, and consider how it might go. But, instead of going well, or going poorly, the person had to go to the doctor and someone else takes the call, someone who has different understandings and decision powers. Perhaps the call transforms into a discussion of the role of various people in their organization…valuable, but completely unexpected.

So, when I say a film feel feels realistic, I am noting it has this everyday texture of only-partial-sense-made, of both joy and disgust, of mixed motivations, of ambiguity. A documentary film may fail to be realistic on all these accounts, telling a sense-making narrative of unmitigated praise or condemnation of a person, portraying them as having clear motivations, and ending on a conclusive note.

To pair two aphorisms:

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus
“The facts are true, the news is fake” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

These are not universal truths, but possibilities. I enjoy very much when films are true to the texture of reality as I experience it.