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The Cutting Room Floor Posting Date: Sep 24 2007 8:54AM Ever wonder why your life isn’t like a Hollywood movie? It’s the editing.
Think about the last major motion picture you watched. It certainly did not feature the activities that make up the bulk of your day. You didn’t have to sit through cinematic depictions of a lot of bathroom breaks, laundry folding, car washing and lawn mowing. You’ve never seen Butch Cassidy pick the kids up at school, Harry Potter rifle his pants pockets looking for car keys, or Darth Vader testing melons at the supermarket. It doesn’t happen. Not in the movies.
We can probably assume that Forrest Gump flosses his teeth, Jason Bourne needs to a few moments to shave and Sarah Connor has to butter some toast every now and then. But we don’t see it on film. That’s the magic of editing.
With one or two notable real-time exceptions, movies take the events of a larger period of time and condense them into three hours or less. That’s a lot of boring crap being scraped off into the garbage. Let’s say the average movie lasts two hours and covers a period of time of something like a month. That means we’re seeing less than 0.3% of the action. Imagine if you could select only the best 0.3% of your life and relive it over the next couple of hours. Wouldn’t that be damn exciting?
I’ll tell you right now … without knowing who you are or what you’ve done with your existence on this planet, I absolutely guarantee that the best 0.3% of your life is way, way more interesting than Spider-Man 3.
You may never participate in life-and-death, survival-of-the-universe events like those depicted in The Lord of the Rings or The Empire Strikes Back, but surely to God, you and I can cobble together enough interesting moments to keep up with When Harry Met Sally or Meet the Fockers. Heck, follow me around for two days and cut the footage down to the best ninety minutes and you’ve got something better than Ben Stiller’s next movie.
Of course, we don’t live our lives according to the Principle of the Best Three Thousandths. We live all one thousand thousandths. We struggle through every chore, endure every commute, and suffer through each and every line-up, elevator ride, busy signal and infomercial … unless you happen to be a male born after 1960.
Every North American male who grew up in the Television Era constantly runs his life through the big editing suite of his mind before releasing it to the world. We go to Home Depot with a soundtrack of sports announcers playing in our minds …
Oh, baby! Did you see the way Koblyk snagged that parking spot? No hesitation at all. He’s right beside the door. Absolutely magnificent. The great ones make it look so easy.
And that’s just for the mundane stuff. When something really interesting is going on, we live it in slow-motion, with a soundtrack by John Williams and a whole team of announcers.
He’s reaching … He’s reaching and … OH MY GOD! He has his hand under her shirt!
That’s right, Jim. His left hand is definitely under at least one layer of clothing. I don’t think he’s going to stop until he has touched his first breast. We could be watching history.
It’s close now, Buck. Closer. Closer. BAM! There it is!
Jim, you want to talk about dedication? You want to talk about hard work? This kid busted his ass all through training camp and it was to get to this moment, right here.
And then, when it’s over, just like any good sports fan, we guys want to relive the whole thing again, this time as a highlight package. So we take the best 0.3% of our lives and condense it into about seventeen minutes of stories, stories that we repeat time and time again, usually to the same audience, just like SportCentre.
It’s a process that defines and reflects the modern man. It’s a process designed to appeal to the short of attention, the deluded of grandeur and the hum-drum of existence. It’s a bit of editing magic that turns Joe Blow into Indiana Jones, and John Doe into Michael Jordan.
It’s the little piece of candy that gets us through the remaining 99.7% of our lives.
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