The Fall

Although I don't think The Fall was executed perfectly, I really liked the concept of having a magnificent adventure story paralleled to the not so grandiose emotional breakdown of the man who shared the story.

When Roy killed off every character in the end, it was a metaphorical representation of his utter emotional collapse. I feel like in our lives we make our emotions feel much grander than they actually are. For those recovering from depression, they always make it sound like they escaped a war. They talk about how they were "saved", how they're "a survivor", and they're "ok now." I'm not trying to insult those with serious depression in anyway. What I am saying is that we, as human being, always exaggerate what we feel. Why? Because we don't know of any other feelings but our own emotions. Everyone has an emotional scale, and when something painful reaches above the scale, we shatter. If we build ourselves back up, the scale extends. If not, we get stuck.

Also, when all the main characters were unfairly annihilated, to me it represented how you don't always win. In real life, the bad guys often get what they want, and efforts to be good and wholesome are ignored and unappreciated. In real life, you lose a lot more than you win, and you don't get something even if you deserve it. Even though the story ended with the mask man still alive and Odious finally dead, he never got the satisfaction of killing the enemy and he never got the girl, just like his real life. The world's never going to do your justice. You just have to accept your fate.

If I were to take these things into account on an artistic scale, the movie sends me one clear message. Art is the grandiose demonstration of ordinary life. In art we explore a world of fantasy that's so much more appealing than the world we currently live in, but everything in this fantasy world is based off of real life. Even though we can't take big adventures to kill our arch nemeses in real life, we can always imagine doing so through art. For the most part, we can't murder people, or run away from home, or force people to fall in love with us, or bring people back from the dead, but in art we sure can.

That is to a certain extent. Even in Roy's story, he didn't get everything he wanted. When we make art, we can only perceive a world based on our world of emotions. The action of creating art is honest. You can't lie about being happy when you're not. You can't pretend to be sad when you've never experienced sadness. If you're not being real with yourself making art, then you're not being yourself. Sure, you can make complex songs, pretty pictures, and visually stunning films. But it won't be long before you drive yourself crazy from all the lies you tell yourself. That is, unless you're not emotionally invested in your life. If that's the case, you probably wouldn't be much interested making art in the first place.

In a lot of ways, real life is boring, filled with a few good moments and a lot of garbage in between them. As an artist, you control your perception of the world, altering it into what ideal you want it to be. If you want to kill yourself, that's the world you make. That's what Roy chose, until Alexandria changed his mind.