Holy Motors Response - CS

Holy Motors is an extreme take on how media is produced and consumed. The movie begins with an unconscious, unmoving audience sitting in a theater. They are unphased by anything on the screen or around them. A large guard dog lumbers down the aisle, keeping watch (not that any try to escape). This scenario reminds me of Plato's Cave. The people seem trapped trapped in their seats, unable to move, and only concerned with the shadows on the screen. The images they see are the only reality they know, a manufactured reality. Therefore, all the scenes that follow, all the various rolls that Mr. Oscar plays, are being created for the audience trapped in the “cave.” The world in the film seems to establish two different groups of people: the content creators and the audience. It could be assumed that everyone who is outside the theater is part of the cast or crew of some production. Oscar mentions that he is nostalgic for the old cameras that were as big as his head. Now they are so small that they cannot even be seen, (a commentary on modern surveillance perhaps?) This is likely the film's explanation of why we never see a production crew while he is acting out his scenes. He just seems to flow into each new scene once he leaves his limo. When the film began it appeared that he was just an eccentric rich man who enjoyed putting on makeup and acting as various persona, but later it becomes clear that he is at the mercy of his appointments. After he is stabbed in the neck but later he is fine in the limo, the film reveals that it is not just him acting, it is everybody.

The people in the theater can be viewed as the blind consumers who will buy into any media. Real movie and TV studios use focus groups to test market their content. Great amounts of research is put into find out what people like so they can produce films that will sell. But after studios do this for a while, people catch on and claim new films have gotten “formulaic.” The studios attempt to change up their formulas just enough to keep their audiences hooked. The Holy Motors production company has their audiences hooked in another way: trapped in the theater, unable to look away. Still they attempt to create watchable content that will keep them staring at the screen, because, like in Plato, what if one person became aware of their own existence and broke free to the outside world. Outside the theater they would learn that the reality they knew was only fiction. Their entire concept of reality would come crashing down to reveal the falseness of it all.

Holy Motors causes us to question the kinds of movies and television that are created for the mass market and through what processes it came to be. It pens large production studios as an entity which controls the general population with their films and raises concern about the media we choose to view.