The Average American Day

"There are really two kinds of flicks--what we now call generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call Independent films. Hollywood films--and this is crucial to screenwriters--all have in common this: they want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in.

"Hollywood films reinforce, reassure.

"Independent films, which used to be called 'art' films, have a different agenda. They want to tell us things we don't want to know.

"Independent films unsettle.

"Famous cartoon from fifty years back. A couple are at the original run of Death of a Salesman. The man turns to the woman, here's what he says: 'I'll get you for this!' The point is that most of us work all day, often at something we don't love much anymore but we do it till we drop. At the end of our average days, we want peace, we want relaxation, maybe a bite of food, a few kind words. We do not want to watch Willy Loman's suicide...Most people want to be told nice things. That we really are decent human beings, that God will smile on us, that there is true love and it is waiting for you, just around the corner. That the meek really will inherit the earth."

William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell?, Pantheon, 2000, pp. 274-5