Top of the List
November 2, 2009
Stacey Mason
Stacey Mason
Every few years, in an attempt to make us all feel we haven’t seen enough old movies, the AFI announces a new list of the 100 best movies of all time. Time and The Modern Library have notorious 100 Best Novel Lists. IGN.com even offers the 100 best video games of all time.
But in a culture of ever-converging media, why has no one combined these lists and offered a 100 Best Narratives of All Time?
Of course, these lists are subjective anyway. Ebert argues that they’re arbitrary and misguided, serving only to start arguments. The Godfather is always in the top 3 of the AFI list, and I can’t get through it. But still, no informed scholar has tried this? No hack on the net? Not even cracked.com ? Why?
I have some theories:
- it scares people to think about books and movies as different means to the same end because they have always thought of one as the more challenging or as a high-brow version of the other.
- people don’t want to put the thought into it
- people really and truly believe that you can’t compare apples and oranges.
So I challenge someone out there to put this together–not just because I want to know who would win in a 4-way wrestling match between Francis Ford Coppola, James Joyce, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Frank Miller–but because I really believe it’s time we start really thinking about different forms of media as what they are: different ways to tell a story.
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