Why do people say movies only raise questions? Or rather, only create desire?
Movies as a medium have a fundamental structure of displaying rather than giving. Everything presented on the screen—beautiful romances, heart-pounding adventures, profound human struggles—is something audiences can only observe from the sidelines, never touch. As one theorist points out, adult films "are not just about the body; they are more about 'absence.' They reflect the passion missing from our lives, that sense of connection, and that desire to explore the unknown." This principle applies to all movies.zsapam.com
Movies let you see certain possibilities, but at the same time make you realize you don't have them. This is the basic mechanism of "creating desire".
From a narrative perspective, good movies typically do not provide closed answers but instead create tension and suspense:
Critic Robert Hughes said: "People engrave their history, beliefs, attitudes, desires, and dreams into the images they create."m.douban.com Images engrave desires but do not satisfy them—they etch the questions into the audience's consciousness while leaving the answers forever suspended.
Communications scholar Paul Levinson proposes three stages of media evolution: toy → mirror → art. The function of movies in the "art" stage is no longer simply "reflecting reality" (mirror), but creating new realities and illusions.m.thepaper.cn
Creating illusions is essentially creating an imagination of "the world can be like this"—and once imagination is awakened, it becomes an unrealized desire, an unanswered question.
Li Houchen, in discussing genre films, points out that entertainment movies are "a kind of fake food that never fills you up, a placebo".m.thepaper.cn Genre films try to "provide answers" (good triumphs, justice prevails, love consummated), but these answers are false satisfactions that leave one even more empty afterward.
Truly good movies—non-genre films—instead honestly admit that they can only raise questions:
| Genre Films | Non-Genre Films |
|---|---|
| Provide false answers | Honestly raise questions |
| Create brief satisfaction followed by emptiness | Create lasting reflection and unease |
| Close off curiosity | Open up curiosity |
Movies "only raise questions/only create desire" has three layers of meaning:
As Li Houchen said, the core value of movies is to make us "change," and the premise of change is always a question raised but not yet answered.
Movies are not a cure, but a diagnostic report. Their most profound power lies precisely in their refusal to pretend to have answers.
Is this determined by the characteristics of one-way limited display? Why is this evaluation less common for other art forms?
Your question is very precise. Painting, sculpture, literature, music are also "one-way displays"—audiences can't enter the painting, can't touch inside the sculpture, can't change the novel's ending. But this kind of statement is indeed most concentrated in movie theory. This is no accident.
Here's a comparison table:
| Feature | Painting | Literature | Music | Theater | Movies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-way display | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Viewer controls pace | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Extremely realistic | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | ✓ |
| Time flows irreversibly | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Occupies visual and auditory senses simultaneously | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | ✓ |
| Passive reception in darkness | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
One-way limited display is common to all arts; what truly makes movies a special "desire machine" is the overlay of the latter features.
Paintings are color blocks and lines, literature is textual symbols, music is abstract sound waves—they have an obvious symbolic distance from reality, and viewers always know "this isn't real".
Movies are different. The images captured by the camera look exactly like reality itself. You see a person laughing, crying, running—it’s almost identical to real people in your daily experience. But when you reach out to touch, there's only the screen.
This "looks real but isn't real" creates the strongest sense of lack among all arts.
As Jin Yingcun points out in discussing time in contemporary art, Impressionist painters try to "suggest" time on a two-dimensional plane but remain at the level of "expressing time" rather than "concretizing time"—movies precisely "concretize time," so the experiences they evoke are closer to reality, and the gap is sharper.zgwypl.com
Reading a novel, you can pause to think, go back and reread, digest at your own pace. Viewing a painting, you decide where and how long to look.
Movies strip all that away. It dictates the time allocation for you. Images flow at 24 frames per second; before you can think deeply, the next shot arrives.
This passivity resembles the structure of dreams. Movie theorist Jean-Louis Baudry's "apparatus theory" points out: the dark theater, immobile body, glowing screen ahead—this setup regresses the audience to a psychological state akin to dreaming or infancy. In this state, defenses weaken, and desires are aroused more directly.
Paintings occupy only vision, literature only inner language, music only hearing. Viewers always have spare senses to "step out" and examine.
Movies lock eyes and ears simultaneously; you have almost no leeway to "observe yourself being influenced." This makes the questions movies raise arrive not as concepts but bypassing reason, straight to emotions and body.
You say "this evaluation is less common for other art forms"—not necessarily less common, just expressed differently:
In painting, critic Mao Shian says: "Thematic fine arts creation should be a sensual history, a intimate emotional summons." He criticizes many current large-scale paintings for not having "heart-stirring power enhanced by scale"—this is also saying excellent painting should open questions and evoke emotions rather than directly provide fulfillment.reader.gmw.cn
In contemporary art, Niu Xiaolong's paper points out that the core ethic of Renaissance artists' creation is "gaze—understand—create," while the biggest crisis of contemporary art is "theory construction covering gaze"—i.e., theoretical discourse answers the questions for you, eliminating the openness art should have.m-news.artron.net
In immersive exhibitions, Zhao Xu observes that many so-called "immersive" exhibitions fail to truly immerse—devolving into photo-op "internet-famous exhibits." True immersion requires the exhibits themselves to "continuously guide viewers to seek answers, to verify their guesses"—this is precisely the logic of raising questions.zgwypl.com
So, "only raise questions/only create desire" is not exclusive to movies. All good art does this.
The fundamental reason isn't that movies are "more advanced" than other arts, but:
Movies are the one among traditional arts closest to reality yet ultimately not reality.
Only movies—they show you a complete, flowing, realistic world, then tell you: none of this belongs to you.
This structural "show you but not give you" makes the proposition "movies only create desire" manifest in the purest, sharpest, most unavoidable way on this medium.
"One-way limited display" is common to all arts, but movies, due to the overlay of realism, passivity, uncontrollable time, and full sensory coverage, push this commonality to the extreme—it is the one among all arts that is most like life yet least like life, thus exposing the artistic essence of "raising questions without answering, creating desire without satisfying" in the most naked way.
Does the interactivity of games mean they possess the ability to provide answers beyond all other art forms? Or is whether they possess answers determined by their connection to reality, after all, only problems related to human life are hoped to have an answer
Your follow-up hits the nail on the head. Let me break this question into layers.
The interactivity of games grants a unique ability: letting people receive feedback through action.
Movies say "war is cruel"—you hear it. Novels describe hunger—you imagine it. But Papers, Please lets you personally let through someone you shouldn't under survival pressure, and personally refuse a couple who should reunite. As one analyst notes, such games "no longer need to directly instill emotional experiences into players; they just 'place' the entire humanistic mechanism causing those emotions in front of players, letting players reproduce the creator's intended emotional experience through interaction with that mechanism".gameres.com
In this sense, games have an answering ability:
| Traditional Art Expression | Game Expression |
|---|---|
| "Power corrupts" | After you wield power, you really start making corrupt choices |
| "Moral dilemmas are painful" | You truly feel the inner torment of struggling in a dilemma |
| "The price of freedom is responsibility" | After gaining freedom, you bear the consequences of your choices |
This isn't abstract propositions; it's firsthand experience. In this dimension, games do transcend "only raising questions".
Your second intuition is deeper: only problems related to human life truly need answers.
This precisely exposes the structural boundary of games' "answering ability".
No matter how complex, games are ultimately finite systems under preset rules by designers, while life's problems exist in an unknown rules, blurred boundaries open system.
| Games | Life | |
|---|---|---|
| Rules | Known, finite | Unknown, infinite |
| Consequences | Reversible (save/load) | Irreversible |
| Endings | Designer-preset finite kinds | Unknown to anyone |
| Costs | Virtual | Real |
| Time | Pausable, restartable | Gone forever |
When facing a moral choice in The Witcher 3, you can save, try, load, retry. You eventually find a "best solution" or "most satisfactory ending." But can this "answer" transfer to your real life?
Probably not. Because in real life:
The more games make problems "answerable" (clear mechanisms, explicit feedback, quantifiable consequences), the farther they are from real life.
Conversely:
The more games make problems "unanswerable" (ambiguous consequences, undecidable right/wrong, unsettling open endings), the closer they are to real life—and also closer to the state of movies and literature "only raising questions".
This means interactivity gives games a form of answering, but when problems touch life's core, this form self-dissolves. The best games—This War of Mine, Undertale, Papers, Please—move people not because they "give answers," but because they let players experience the impossibility of answers through action.
I think this judgment is correct, but needs further precision.
It doesn't mean an artwork must be realistic or depict daily life. Kafka's The Metamorphosis has a man turn into a beetle, no "reality" whatsoever, yet its connection to reality is profound—because it touches alienation, estrangement, functional identity in family relations, existential dilemmas everyone faces.
So "connection to reality" is more accurately: connection to human existential conditions.
And human existential conditions have a fundamental feature: they cannot be fully objectified.
You can model weather systems, economic systems, war systems—games excel at this. But you can't model "how should I live this life," because the questioner, answerer, and bearer are the same person, and that person is constantly changing.
These problems need answers, but only obtainable through irreversible actions in real life. Any art form—interactive or not—can only do two things:
But it can't live out the answer for you.
If we accept the above analysis, then the true unique value of game interactivity isn't "answering," but:
It lets people, in a safe environment, first-person experience the process itself of "seeking answers but not finding them".
Movies can't do this (you only observe others seeking), literature can't (you only imagine the seeking process); only games can—let you walk through it personally, then discover the end of the road isn't answers, but deeper confusion.
One theorist precisely summarizes this: game interactive narratives "from traversing the ordinary page-turning of literature, to choosing movie plot directions, to controlling characters to explore the game world," contain not "answering" logic, but "intentionality"—a narrative structure that drives you to act, explore, question.aj.xhu.edu.cn
In other words, where game interactivity surpasses other arts isn't in giving answers, but in making "raising questions" itself a firsthand experience.
Back to your question:
Does game interactivity endow it with "answering ability" beyond all other art forms?
On the technical level—yes, games can provide functional feedback in closed systems that other arts can't.
But on the existential level—no art form can truly answer life problems, because the answers to life problems aren't information, but action itself. Game interactivity brings you closer to action, but between "closer" and "being" lies an uncrossable chasm: real costs, real irreversibility, real stakes.
So, your second intuition is more fundamental: what determines if a problem is "answerable" isn't the medium's interactive form, but the existential connection between the questioner and the problem. Only when you face a problem with your real, non-restartable life does the answer possibly emerge—and that is no longer the domain of any art; that is life itself.