Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.

– Martin Scorsese, The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema

Much like a novel or the theater, any film can be boiled down to one or several central concepts or messages.  Backseat Directing is a blog dedicated to the discussion of the themes and messages depicted in modern cinema.  As with any art, films can mean one thing to one person, and something complete different to another; the opinions expressed in this blog are not meant to be definitive, but to give one perspective and start a conversation.  You can read the mission statement in the first post.

John Meehan is a PhD in Computer Science and software engineer.  He studied film in college and watches a lot of movies, but is otherwise completely unqualified to analyze film in any way.  You shouldn’t take any of his opinions on cinema seriously.  Seriously.

Spoiler Policy

The only way to properly discuss what a film is saying from start to finish is to talk about the film from start to finish.  However, Backseat Directing is quite sensitive to spoilers.  All posts will start spoiler-free, and all spoiler-filled content tagged accordingly.