How 3-D Is Ruining Movies For Me

First, let's get one thing straight: there is no such thing as a 3-D movie.

3-D movies are two dimensional like all movies.  In the case of traditional movies, the flat screen uses certain context cues (scale, overlap, etc.) to trick our brains into perceiving apparent depth.  In the case of 3-D movies, an additional trick is used: two slightly off-kilter images, which our brains, assisted by special lenses, combine to perceive apparent depth.

I was perfectly happy to imagine movies as having depth.  I didn't need to wear funky glasses to aid the deception.  In fact, to me, that additional illusion destroys the illusion: the few elements that jump out of the screen only emphasize how flat everything else truly is.

To me, the 3-D movie craze is absolutely ruining my ability to watch the kind of movies I want to watch.

Case in point: Jurassic Park.  I saw it twenty years ago, and I was excited to see it again on the big screen.

But I can't.  Why?  Because it's in 3-D, and the very few 2-D screenings are in the middle of the day.  When I'm, you know, at work.

Most of the movies I enjoy watching--that is, fantasy and science fiction--are now being presented in 3-D.  Soon, they might only be released in that format.  At which point, I'll probably stop watching movies altogether.

And maybe that won't be such a bad thing.  Because the other, deeper way in which 3-D is ruining movies is by dictating their content.  With our fancy new 3-D technology, we take a perfectly nice story like The Hobbit and add endless chase scenes, dropping-off-cliff sequences, and other completely needless nonsense merely because it looks really cool in 3-D.

The technology, rather than the story or the theme or the character relationships, drives the film.

Now, to a certain extent, technology has always played a determining role in fantasy and sci-fi film.  A main goal of such films is to produce the illusion of the impossible, and technology has kept pace in striving to make that illusion convincing.  By introducing another illusory reality to fantasy and science fiction film, one could argue that 3-D is only extending that tradition.

But 3-D, I believe, is different.  To a far greater extent than any of the technologies that have preceded it--stop-motion animation, blue and green screens, CGI--3-D takes on a life of its own: it becomes the film's reason for existence, over and above its function of enhancing the realism of the film's patently unreal effects. If you want proof of that, the mere fact that these movies are advertised as 3-D should supply it: no one ever said, "I'm going to a CGI movie today," even if (as in the case of the original Jurassic Park) revolutionary advances in CGI modeling greatly added to the film's appeal.  3-D, in other words, is a kind of uber-technology, a technology that calls attention only to itself.

And ultimately, that's why it's ruining movies for me (and seems likely to ruin them for everyone in the long run).

We don't watch movies anymore.  We watch the technology.

Like so much in today's digital age, we've added a (virtual) dimension, while losing the thing itself.

3-D Versus Reali-D

I saw my first 3-D movie a few days ago: Toy Story 3. I'd missed the brief, late-70s 3-D craze; it didn't last long, it wasn't supposed to be very good, I wasn't very interested. But these days, it seems as if every kids' movie, action movie, or fantasy/sci-fi movie is coming out in 3-D as well as 2-D options, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I didn't like it that much. It wasn't that it made me queasy or headachey (my main fears beforehand); it was that for me, it detracted from certain important elements of the viewing experience without adding enough compensatory benefits. First, the glasses darken the screen slightly, which I found bothersome. More important, the 3-D elements tend to deflect attention from the total composition of the shot; as a film guy, I like to see the whole screen, not just the single element that pops off the screen. And finally, to my thinking, those "eye-popping" elements (as they're always billed) didn't provide enough pop to justify their existence; they appeared moderately three-dimensional, but nowhere near as much as I'd been led to believe. And since only individual elements of any given shot possessed even that modest degree of three-dimensionality, the effect was ultimately counter-productive, emphasizing the flatness of everything else and in so doing destroying the illusion that was supposedly being achieved.

But even if they do figure out ways to improve or perfect the illusion, I wonder at a deeper level why we're so gung-ho about 3-D movies to begin with. Is this really something the culture needs, or even desires? Has there been a stampede or a crusade for movies that mimic reality? On the whole, I'm concerned that the lines we conventionally drew between the actual and the virtual, the real and the fantastic, the worthwhile and the frivolous or merely entertaining, are being assaulted: when people spend more time talking or texting on mobile devices than interacting with the people in front of them, when email supplants face-to-face communication and kids can name infinitely more brand logos than indigenous plants in their neighborhood, when our very bodies and the ground they inhabit take a back seat to immersive, but unreal, experiences, I worry about the profound consequences for our ability to live as a society, to engage in meaningful and intimate relationships, to care for the earth, to be truly creative, reflective, and wise. I addressed these worries a while ago in a short story, "Your Name Here," which concerns a society that has fashioned a virtual heaven, and in a creative nonfiction essay, "Positioning," which explores the implications of virtual technologies for our experience of space and place. I raise these worries again in light of the BP oil spill, the ongoing collapse of world markets and local neighborhoods, and the effects I've perceived in my own life of over-reliance on mediated reality.

Life has always been 3-D. Maybe movies shouldn't be. Maybe we need to keep stable and intact the lines between what is and what merely seems to be.