Brain-Candy: Better Read than Seen

I’d rather read a brain-candy book than watch a brain-candy movie any nanosecond. Last night reconfirmed this belief.
A brief backstory. After a five-year hiatus wiping runny noses and sometimes runny butts, I’ve returned to the leave-the-house career world. My sons can now wipe their own noses and thankfully, seriously thankfully, their own butts.  I happily traded in my failed domestic goddess apron for a pencil skirt and a chance to market an incredible child-safety device. 

The change in apparel was the easy part. Waking up my brain, to concentrate on something more complex than first grade math, has been a difficult, though enjoyable, labor. I like to think, but my thinking muscle is a bit out of shape. So by last night, my brain was done supping on the abstruse.  It craved the processed sweetness of brain-candy for mindless relaxation. 

I grabbed my scepter (the Wii remote) and selected a movie my friend had mentioned, Friends withKids. My husband refused to watch it on the grounds that he knows about my brain-candy fetish. He caved when I showed him that it was listed as an Indy film. He would rather eat unwashed turnip greens for a week instead of watch a mainstream Hollywood film.

I hit play and hoped he hadn’t notice what I had.

The first scene bared all. Not nudity – that might have helped– but all as in all that the film would be, the entire plot, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

(Spoiler alert) The first frames show two twenty-somethings on the phone talking in the middle of the night from their separate abodes. It’s apparent that they’re man-woman best friends. Even a road-side psychic could predict that the man-woman best friends would be a couple by no later than the 107^th minute. The film proceeded to  the suspected misalignment of when he likes her and when she likes him. The misalignments are the up-down conflict of the plot, but it’s never strong enough for the viewer to believe that the characters had even the slightest chance of not ending up together. No Mr. Darcy-Mrs. Bennett suspense, no worry, and no frustration.  1,065 inhales and 1,065 exhales wasted.

I could breathe in and out a million times reading  brain-candy and never close the book disappointed. Brain-candy books offer something that brain-candy movies with their eye-catching casts can’t – words. Typed, beautiful words. The beginning, middle, and end may be obvious from the first page, but the language is always a mystery. There’s always the treasure of a novel metaphor or an adjective that is the perfect inventive sauce to pour over a noun.  Even if the conflicts are predictable, the dialogue often contains a surprise or a connection with something I may have said or heard or thought. And then there’s the freedom found in pages that isn't permitted on the screen, namely, the characters. Major and minor characters in brain-candy books have a license to be avant-garde, odd, and strange, adding piquancy to archetypes, whereas brain-candy films tend to be restrained to store-bought stereotypes from strip malls.

At the 6,420^th second, the glad-that’s-over end, my husband breathed an eye-rolling “I told you it would suck” sigh. I answered his sigh by relinquishing my scepter, but not before, I mentally uttered my last command that my brain rev up, get in shape, and be ready for the intricacies of art-house films.