Why We Like Movies

This will be stating the obvious, but what the heck.  

Ever since we were children, we loved stories.  We grew up on stories of one kind or another — starting with fairy tales and other nursery stories, proceeding to romantic stories, stories of chivalry and derring-do, love stories, war stories, the whole shebang.

As we became adults we would seek escape from the travails of the workaday world through stories. With maturity came greater sophistication in our choice of stories and story-tellers.  Novels about crime, revenge, the battle between good and evil, the foibles of the human condition, and above all, love, in all its variations. Plot, characterization, setting, all these elements became important to our enjoyment of a good story, as did of course the skill and the reputation of the storyteller.

We got our stories from books and from the movies, and later from television.  But I think it was the movies that really revolutionized storytelling.  Nowadays it's pretty common to hear someone say, when asked if they read such-and-such a best-selling novel, "No, I'm waiting for the movie."

Sound is a very important element in movies, and nowadays we could not imagine a movie without it, whether it be a simple ingredient such as voice-over narration, or a more elaborate musical background to accompany the images.  Moviemakers nowadays use sound as part of the storytelling process, not just to embellish the story line as they used to do in the early days of cinema.  Sound, and especially musical sound, adds dramatic effect to a movie in a way that images alone seldom can.

So the silent 'movies' became the 'talkies', and their wide-screen multi-channel surround-sound descendents continue to attract us in our theaters and in our homes, with stories that never seem to get old, no matter how many times they have been retold.