What is real?

When I moved to Drain, Oregon (no shit!Drain!) in 1969, it was an isolated backwater logging town in the middle of nowhere. Then logging died. Simple math, really. You cut down all the trees, pollute the river with the run off and then the mill shuts. Now, it looks like there is a minor epidemic of grape growing for wine on the naked hills. it does look a lot better than the crop of stumps that was covering the hills when we lived there. So, when we moved to Drain, there were very few people who had been "away". We had been living in New York and people in Drain did have TV. Most had seen New York on TV. But, talking to neighbors it soon became clear that to them, in spite of TV, New York was just a bigger version of Drain. They could not make the mental leap from the 19th century poverty and ignorance that they enjoyed to the size, prosperity, culture and so on of New York. They could not do it.

That is one side of the equation. Today, sitting by the Plaza in Ashland, Oregon, I listened to several conversations of other people watching the action with me. The action was Hollywood setting up a scene for the movie "Wild" which will be filmed here tomorrow starring Reese Witherspoon. I loved the autobiographical book and the scene being filmed actually took place about 13 years ago. But not quite at the same time of year. It is full-on Autumn now and some of the trees have lost their leaves and others have turned gorgeous fall colors. I am guessing that the scene they are filming took place in late August.

So what we were watching was a ton of people stripping the brown, tan, red leaves off the trees on the plaza. Then another crew was replacing them with green silk leaves, then the third crew was painting the bright green silk leaves with a wash of filmy brown. (I think the color of the silk ones was a little too 'spring green." I found this all very amusing. I sit in the Plaza for my late afternoon coffee almost every fall afternoon watching the pass and chatting with friends. This was fun.

The conversations I heard around me from random people centered mostly on exclamations about how surprised they were at the artifice involved in movie making. Remarks about how they would never believe a film again. The word 'fake' came up a lot. I felt a little lost.

The folks in Drain 44 years ago didn't comprehend what they saw. These people think that what they see in movies is real, were upset that illusion and even artifice was involved. So my question that I ask myself is what happens when either group sees a Godzilla or a Raiders of the Lost Arc or an good old after the Nuclear holocaust kind of flick?

I choose not to watch horror movies or slasher movies because I don't enjoy having certain images imprinted in my memory. But, I get a kick from the art of cinema when it does its magic and transforms me to another place and another time. I feel kind of badly that illusions were being shattered today. It kind of reminded me of my feelings about the tawdry process of taking down the Christmas tree. I never wanted to do that in front of my kids. I wanted them to remember the magic and be shielded from the reality. Maybe Hollywood should keep making movies in big studio sets hidden from the public.

I will go to the Plaza a few times tomorrow and gawk. In two days everything will be returned to normal and it will appear that we had a midsummer night's dream. Do you think they will glue the brown leaves back on? I hope so.