You Are What You Buy

It can be fascinating how when you look at someone's receipts, you can what kind of person they are. My own receipts over the past few months, for example, can show a lot about who I am and what I like to do. Listed with different titles of many movies and how much I paid for them, once can clearly realize through these paper strips that I have been a very serious movie watcher of action movies, movies in which the good guy is the hero.

When I was in Saudi Arabia, during my teen years, I use to own a huge collection of video tapes of movies, especially American movies, of many genres. I enjoyed getting the latest movies too, whether I watched in the movie theatre or not. When it came to watching movies about good guys versus bad guys, I always prefer the good. That definitely says something about who I am and what kind of person I want to be. Few movie watchers might find themselves in situations comparable to my own, but each person would gain from looking at the choices they make in movies and which side they want to take, good or bad. It might sound very silly to some, but movies can really teach us something about our own personalities and image.

I personally want to be the hero who beat the bad guy and saved the day, and often the guy who would do everything he can to help others and/or myself. In historical action movies such as Brave Heart, I had a great desire to end the sufferings of the Scottish against the cruel English ruler. And even though the English had the most power, weapons, and control over the situation and were in the end able to capture the good hero Wallace, I remained on Wallace's side and felt mixed emotions of sadness and anger in the end. That reveals my own general bias and my own belief that good will always prevail over evil in the end. Wallace the Scottish warrior remained faithful to his fellow Scottish people to the end, and he never surrounded to the English ruler to the end, and won his freedom in spite of all evil means.

Buying movies has developed since though, with the creation of the DVDS, and now Blu-Ray movies, but my love to action genre is still the same. And I am considering the idea of replacing all of my good-guy action video tape movies, like Die Hard and The Gladiator, to Blue-ray discs as soon as they are released and I can afford it. There is something in these "good guy wins" action movies that makes me feel satisfied in the end. And when I look at my collection of DVDs in the movie library I own, I feel like the safety of the world is in this movies. One hears sometimes about crimes committed where victims had to fall, but there are heroes and good guys, like cops, who either did or are working so hard to save them, and one can rest assured that as long as there are good guys in this world who are willing to help others, the world can always be a safe place; this is exactly the same feeling I get after watching a movie in which the good guy wins.

It's not that I won't buy the movies with the bad side that wins or in which the bad guy gets the sympathy of the watchers at all, it's just that given the option, I gravitate to the good side. I won't buy movies where the bad side wins because I really don't enjoy movies where you have no option but to be the bad; that means movies like Hills Have Eyes are so off my "want to buy" movie list. I never want to eject the movie CD from the DVD player and at the same time thinking,