Throughout every year of English class since elementary school, we are assigned books; books to read, analyze, and chew through every last detail of. This is for obvious reasons: books are important for the stimulation of our minds, the preservation of our culture and its history, and for teaching us about how people can use language to tell stories. These are not all the reasons why books are a key part of English Education curriculum across the country, but it does beg the question: why aren’t movies? If you were to look up the definition of a movie right now, Google would tell you it is “a story or event recorded by a camera as a set of moving images and shown in a theater or on television; a motion picture.” This definition, however, does not even rise halfway to the esteem in which I hold the importance of film. I have seen incredible movies with such depth and thought put into them by the writers and directors, and then I go to school and what we’re doing in class refers to some of the same things that I had just seen done on screen, only they were done in a magical, innovative, way called film.

I say with full conviction and certainty that movies are literature, and I will stand by that for as long as projectors flicker in theaters across the world. No, they may not be in the same way that you would consider the works of George Orwell, Mark Twain, or William Shakespeare, but movies are, in fact, literature.  Movies are literature because somebody sat down and poured their heart and soul onto a page, like any author would, only they did it with the intention of bringing it to life visually, and with the help of producers, directors, a cast, and a crew, that author, or in this case screenwriter, turned those words on a page into an entire universe that you can see, and hear, and feel. Movies are literature because they can present an audience with an entire, completely developed and furnished, house, where books would have to spend pages on description to even approach what the film had done for a single room. Movies are literature because they make you think. They make you think about character motivations, plot twists, ambiguous endings, our past, our present, and our future, and they do this through symbolism, foreshadowing, character development, and so much more.

Does this sound familiar? It should because this is what we have studied in English class day in, and day out, for years, but when was the last time this kind of analysis was of a movie? When was the last time you had half a term to chew through and appreciate one of the many incredible works of cinematic genius that we have at our fingertips? When was the last time you were truly exposed to the depth and versatility of film as a story-telling medium? Movies have such a strong influence in our society today, and the entire industry is growing, but they are ignored in school at the expense of the students. As the lucrative business that it is, one would think that it would be important to share with the youth of America, but movies are bitterly ignored. According to Select USA, the American Media and Entertainment industry is the largest in the world, and it is expected to surpass $825 billion by 2023. As part of such a large industry, there really is no point in sheltering the young minds of America from the opportunity to fathom the worth of film. Movies are time machines. Movies are parallel universes. Movies are magic. Movies are literature.