The Holt of Moving Pictures

The human obsession with assorted pixels across a screen is almost enchantingly beautiful. Each original arrangements of small squares collaborating into the silhouette of Gru from Despicable Me on your baby cousin’s greasy iPad to Wonder Woman’s silhouette on the big screens of Hollywood. So many things to watch on so many devices. What does one even start? That’s where I come in, I guess.

As I see it, movies to belong to a host of trees, branching off from a successful paradigm like budding roots in newly fertilised ground where there wasn’t the opportunity there before, sparking new ideas. All these trees belong to a vast forest where one can easily get lost if they can’t identify the different shapes of leaf that branch from the Romance Genre Tree as opposed to the Horror Genre Tree. Because no one wants to accidentally watch “Us” thinking it’s a beautiful (albeit bloody) representation of two soulmates conjoining to one unity out of love? Not many.

So, I guide them.

Being an excellent recommender of movies, I have become an almost anthropologist in my experience, leading each person down their own path to meet their own tree to climb, perhaps even attach a swing to a branch or two before letting another one like me lead them to another. Due to my anthropologist outlook, I have developed a formula, a mini Isaac Newton, if you will, however, instead of letting the tree hit me with its fruits, I explored the trunk, counted each ring in the logs and examine the paradigms of each movie genre and squirreled my way up to the tips of the leaves that stretch out in the spray of sun that casts over the holt.

Take the Romance Genre Tree for example. Closely entwined with the Tragedy Genre Tree. Almost as if they both grew from the same trunk and then repelled like opposing magnets, making their own paths in individual genre. I imagine them to be two trees, conjoined, one a cherry blossom with sweet smelling leaves, th’other one a purple beech tree with bark that is soft to the touch. The trunk is nearly always the same: the works of Shakespeare, with the most obvious: Romeo and Juliet or anything of his hand for that matter. The idea of forbidden love, a branch on the vast Romance Genre Tree, and when one shows a liking for this branch it’s easy to lead them down to the likes of The Great Gatsby or The Fault in Our Stars, all aligned in premise: love that could never be. So, in layman’s/ non metaphorical terms: if you like The Fault in Our Stars then maybe regress back down the tree into the classics, enrich yourself and indulge in them.

Although the Romance Genre Tree is the most diverse, my heart will forever belong to the acre of the Science Fiction/ Horror Genre orchards, presenting the fruits that I hold so dearly such as The Hunger Games or The Matrix that hold the most heart-breaking, potent, albeit sweet, long lasting poison. The kind of movies that change the way that you see anything and everything.

The branches are clear, categorised in my supple mind by the cruxes in each story, categories including human hamartia, the supernatural, aliens and apocalypse, each their own shade of irreverent moss green, chlorophyll bursting through the veins of each leaf. Say the wanderer wants the supernatural? I offer a knee for them to climb to the branches, to the crossroads of The Blaire Witch Project or even the mighty Annabelle franchise and pray they don’t jump from the branch running and screaming towards the Romance Genre Tree’s warm embrace and drown in the likes of Titanic forevermore. Don’t get me wrong, romance is alright, but watching the dramatis personae of Margo and Quentin from Paper Towns fall in love makes me remember how I myself fail to feel such burning passion, such unbreaking devotion to a person who, often by luck, feels the exact same way. But I can relate to the bubbling anger of Katniss Everdeen and the naivety of her sister Prim as they stumble through post-war America in hopes of liberating the oppressed. Because we all feel that anger. Not all of us feel that love, except for in the arms of moving pictures.

Moving slowly.

Frame. By. Frame.