C. O. Bonham

Montages are great they allow an epic task that would normally take forever to occur in 30 seconds or less. With some creative camera angles and an upbeat pop song anyone can go from science geek to superhero.

Want to lose weight? No problem. Just inter cut scenes of intense cardio workout with shots of the numbers on a bathroom scale steadily declining and finish with a shot of you modeling skinny jeans.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had montages in real life? Think about it.

If I decided to write a novel all I would need are a few really good shots of me typing followed by a shot of the printer emitting an endless stream of paper. Then a shot of red marked pages being crumpled and tossed into the waste paper bin. More typing. Insert the required shot of me sleeping on the key board while “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” flashes across the screen. More typing, hit the print key, shot of printer spitting out one last sheet of paper with “The End” on the bottom.

That was easy none of the wasted hours of staring at a blank word document or the annoyance of having to delete a days work because that scene I wrote was too clever by half. No getting distracted and organizing all of your writing utensils into separate pencil cups by color. Don’t ask.

Is it just that a montage gives a false sense of time passing? I don’t think so because it is understood that some of the montages take days weeks or even years out of the narrative time in the movie. What the montage does is give the viewer a false sense of focus. Making us think that we will really be able to stay in the game and devote the required amount of time to reaching our goals. It’s true that many people have stuck it out and written that great novel or lost the weight. But it doesn’t take  just one time of saying, “I am going to do this.” It takes constant re-motivation, patience and even knowing when to call it a day. Really, who wants to wake up to “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr?” That would really upset me having to delete all those Rs before I could do anything else. 

The montage might work for people living in TV land but in the real world we have to do it the hard way with all of that real-time in between shots in which to lose focus and get distracted.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have some writing to do. But we both know that I’ll just end up wall papering my room with post-it notes.

Cathrine