Why are jobs always cooler in the movies?
Name
IV Leader Staff, Mar 15, 2007
Movies serve as an inspiration for job choices. Yet if
there is anything to be said, it is the worst way to choose a job. Jobs are
never as cool in real life as they are in movies.
Screenwriters follow people around a job for three years and
pack only the most interesting moments into two hours of greatness.
Cop movies are most guilty of this offense. The Lethal Weapon
series had everybody convinced that a life pursuing justice is action-packed and
filled with comedic relief. More so is the case with Super Troopers. They chug
maple syrup and psychologically torment criminals. If such a unit of troopers
really exists, I do not know where to find it.
Careers in the social sciences are not always how they appear
onscreen. No modern paleontologist wakes up next to brachiosaurs like in
“Jurassic Park.” Anthropologists probably spend more time doing serious field
work than making up fictitious tribes, a la Krippendorf’s Tribe. And Archaeology
doesn’t involve all the glitz and glam of “Indiana Jones,” which is unfortunate.
My greatest ambition was crushed the day I found out that you can’t be a
professor and a whip-wielding buccaneer.
Movies that portray the lives of writers are especially
disheartening. “Almost Famous” made being a freelance Rolling Stone journalist
look like a rock ‘n’ roll-filled vacation. The movie forgets to portray that
getting such a job is not always so easy. “Moulin Rouge” has the same effect.
While it is already doubtful that one can survive as a penniless Bohemian
writer, it is even more so that one could also have such an epic romance.
Those kinds of lives are works of fiction, not producers of
it. There are countless other careers that are probably way cooler in movies
than real life. I blame this on the minds of creative screenwriters.
They muck up our illusions by making life seem extraordinary
all the time. Yet we viewers are to blame as well— we’re the one who are not
content to watch a cop filing paperwork.
So how do you know what career you really want to go into
when you don’t know what’s really in store? Make a really good guess and hope it
pans out? Maybe when it comes down to it, being a movie star is the best career
move anyone can make.
They’re the ones who get to have the really cool jobs — if
just for that two-hour run time.