Judge, 1916-02-12 · page 11 of 28
Judge — February 12, 1916 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This satirical article mocks moviegoers' inflated sense of cleverness. The piece argues that silent films, unlike theater, make audiences feel intellectually superior because everything is visually spelled out—no subtlety to miss. The example centers on a "fat traveling salesman" who smugly congratulates himself for "discovering" obvious plot points: recognizing that a man is thinking of his sweetheart when her portrait appears on screen, predicting he'll telephone her. He scores "forty putouts" by evening's end, feeling brilliant. Chapman's satire targets the false confidence movies inspire in ordinary viewers. Unlike theater's spoken subtleties that require effort to parse, cinema's explicit visual storytelling allows anyone to follow along and mistake basic comprehension for genuine insight. The piece suggests movies flatter audiences by making them feel perceptive when they're simply following obvious narrative cues—a phenomenon Chapman finds both amusing and somewhat troubling about cinema's popularity.
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IN CALIFORNIA—GETTI THOS E FLAT T to an unretouched photograph, the moving picture screen is the greatest flatterer in the world. It doesn’t flatter those N who appear in the pictures so much as those who sit in front. Nobody can attend a moving picture show without being reason- ly confident that he has assimilated everything. It is not like the spoken drama, where one learns, on picking up the paper the next morning, that he missed just about half the subtleties in the per- formance and came near losing the big idea of the whole thing. abl Everything is right where all of us can get each detail without effort, and in grabbing those details we find great matters for self- congratulation. Just an instance, a picture of a young man i flashed upon a screen. He is sitting at a table, ina dreamy attitude. Finally there appears in the upper corner of the picture a portrait of a girl. The portrait appears slowly, as if through a mist. The young man’s features take ona rapt expression. Everyone in the audience knows he is thinking about his sweetheart, as visualized in the upper part of the screen. A fat traveling salesman who Emma-McChesneyizes in crockery whispers loudly to his wife, “He's thinkin’ about his girl,” and then shakes hands with himself because of his cleverness in discovering the point and his quickness in making it known. The fat man is confident that he was the first in all that large audience to discover what the young man on SSS se 2 NG ALONG SWIMMINGLY ERING MOVIES the screen was thinking about. Then the young man in the picture takes up a desk telephone—something which no interior scene is without nowaday Whereupon the fat man whispers, a trifle louder than before, “He's goin’ to telephone to her. Marvelous perspicacity of the fat man! The young man does telephone his sweetheart, who is seen answering, and who, of course, is none other than the young woman whose portrait appeared on the screen in the guise of a mental image. The fat man scores another putout for himself. Before the evening ends, he scores forty putouts without a bobble—a record which the star shortstop in cither big league could not equal. He goes home shaking hands with himself as a cleverguy. Quick think- ing, that, guessing those situations as fast as they came up. Not m: ‘ould do it. And several hundred in the theater are thinking in the same strain with the fat man. They have caught everything the playwright threw to them. He didn’t fool them fora quarter ofa second. They could even tell how the play was going to come out almost two deep breaths and a gasp before the hero grabbed the heroine for the final fadeaway clinch and kiss. Thus it is that the movies are getting in their evenings of insidious flattery and sending everybody home supremely satisfied.—Arthur Chapman. comicbooks.com