Freedom and Creativity
In Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the idealistic young senator says to Miss Saunders:
Men should hold (liberty) up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: "I'm free... to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't - I can... and my children will."
Liberty has taken on an expanded meaning these days as we have access to virtually any piece of knowledge ever conceived of by the human race – good, bad or otherwise. And it begs the question: can you have too much freedom? Can having the freedom to do everything keep you from doing anything?
I thought of this while listening a while back to the podcast Unspooled, a fine series in which actor Paul Scheer and film critic Amy Nicholson spend an hour discussing each film of the AFI’s top 100 movies compiled in 2007. It isn’t a perfect podcast, but I like that the two hosts lack pretension and are often watching movies for the first time, enabling them to see through some of the hype.
Scheer and Nicholson also make astute observations about society from time to time, and no more so than during their podcast for the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. Near the end of the episode, Nicholson reveals her concerns about human creativity, and whether its been stunted since this movie’s release, when VHS tapes allowed for cheap home viewing. She says: “What changed in our generation when we were able to make Raiders the number one VHS tape and watch Raiders non-stop…are we stunting our imagination? It worries me not because I don’t like this movie, it just worries me on my larger scale of somebody who wants more random creativity in the world.” She goes on to share a story about Quentin Tarantino coming of age just before the VCR became ubiquitous, when after seeing a movie he’d buy the film score on LP and imagine the scenes while the music played, eventually coming up with his own scenes, reimagining the movie over and over again. Similarly, Scheer said that after watching Return of the Jedi, he’d go back home and write down everything he could remember in chronological order so he could read it back and get to experience the movie again. Viewing it at home wasn’t an option. Had Tarantino and Scheer grown up in the home movie era, perhaps they wouldn’t have become filmmakers or actors.
Does having immediate access to so much information at our fingertips hamper creativity? Do we – in effect – have too much freedom? Freedom to see almost any movie at any time at any place. Freedom to look up almost any fact about science or human history with a few keystrokes. To read any piece of junk written by morons. To watch gangs of people fornicating. In the Age of the Internet and constant connectivity, do we have the ability to say no to what’s available to us and proactively pursue an original thought?
In the aforementioned Unspooled episode, Scheer concludes, rightly so, that “we’re always living in a culture that adapts to what we have.” After all, were it not for recorded music, we’d have to rely on performances or hearing music in our own mental jukeboxes. Were it not for the written word, we’d have to remember stories our grandparents told us so that we could then tell them to our children and grandchildren. The written word has given us much, but it would be foolish to say that it hasn’t hampered some of our capacity to tell stories verbally. Likewise, being able to look up facts on Google at any time has probably hampered some of our ability to remember, and studies have shown that the Internet has most assuredly shortened our attention span.
Nicholson concludes, “I feel like something in us is just stuck because we’re not using our imagination anymore, we’re just hitting rewind.”
Next week I’d like to look at films in particular and how it’s not all doom and gloom. Creativity survives.
Stay tuned…