The Death of Imagination

By Shlomo Maital

   Tuesday’s New York Times has an article, “How to make a movie out of anything”, by Alex French. In it he describes how Hollywood producers are desperately searching for IP, slang for intellectual property, as the basis for movie scripts. Translation: Find something people recognize easily, and build a plot around it.

   Examples: the Lego movie; the recent Emoji movie; the Angry Birds movie; and soon, yes, the Fruit Ninja movie.

     So what’s wrong with that?

     I grew up in the 40s and 50s, in the era of radio. I listened to Boston Blackie and the Cisco Kid. I heard horses hooves, a pistol firing…and I had to imagine the horse, the revolver… everything.

       Today? In the era of TV, MTV and virtual reality and smartphones – all the images are there, given to us…no need to imagine. A Lego movie? Lego is building blocks. How can you make a blockbuster Lego movie? Turns out that you can – if you start with something people are familiar with, they do not need to use their imaginations.   But if you start with a conventional movie plot, a story, however strong, people need to imagine – and it looks like our young people no longer can. We need to have the images stored in our brains already, because…we’ve lost the ability to create them ourselves.  

   This sounds like a cranky old curmudgeon yearning for the good old days. Perhaps.   But if this new Hollywood trend portends the death of imagination – then we’re in real trouble. Worse yet, nobody seems to care much.