My One Political Message: Watch More Movies
Investing time in shared fictions is essential to constructing a shared reality. We already have the best technology for this, and its name is "cinema."
I’ve been making a list for the past few years called “Movies for Americans.” I add to it whenever I see a film that I think contains a cultural message of particular relevance to USA. Our Library of Congress has its own version of this in the National Film Registry, which as of last year contains 875 films regarded as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” (This project is easily one of my favorite things the government spends money on.)
My list is much shorter and its criteria more discerning, if also imprecise: I choose movies that have moved me in a way that makes me feel hopeful and excited about what America can be, or distraught about what America is. Both of these emotions are often experienced as a result of the same film, which perhaps signifies it being an appropriate reflection of the America we actually have.
Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about the election lately. And since I’m never not thinking about movies, I had the idea of reconfiguring my list into a post called something like “8 Films to Watch Before You Vote” …But as with many ideas, the timing doesn’t quite work. I had the thought just yesterday, and here it is time to vote already! It takes at least a couple hours to watch a movie, a few hours more to write or converse with a friend in depth about it, and then sometimes several weeks, months or years for just one film to reveal itself to you.
“Reveal itself to you” is a mysterious phrase.
It has to do with movies becoming meaningful, both personally and to the broader culture. Before this, a movie is just a title, poster, or one of a million thumbnails on your screen; afterward, at their best, a movie can shape the world, or at least your perspective on it.
Arguably, movies are doing these things inevitably, especially if you were raised on them like I was. Movies, like music, painting, photography, etc., are operating on our individual and collective unconscious minds, forming who we are and what matters to us, what our culture is all about and what we want to do with our lives. I believe movies do this more powerfully than many other art forms in part because their illusory nature creates a virtual reality that feels so close to our actual experience — no matter how artificial it may be. Film’s collective nature (at least traditionally, seeing films in a theater) is an important aspect of this; even if you and I didn’t watch Casablanca or Jaws or Mary Poppins together, we can be reasonably certain we both watched the same movie. Our reflections, conversations or arguments about what we saw and what it means can then develop out of our diversity of perspectives, personality types, political or religious beliefs, life experiences, etc. that we as individuals bring to the table. This is different from the way our minds are operating in real life, always working to make sense of the world at the same time as the world we’re in is actively changing in real time before our eyes.
Alternatively, each movie we see gives us a partially-removed model of the real world and our experience of it. They come to us in a format that is cohesive and understandable to our senses and the efforts of our sense-making brains. Each one is a singular experience that can simultaneously be different each time we watch it because of the changes it creates in us, along with the changes we undergo on our own between viewings. We are not the same person at the end of the film that we were at the start; all the more different when we watch Bambi or Star Wars again some decades removed from first exposure in our childhood. This, again, applies individually, which then informs our immediate relationships, which then informs our extended sense of community and ultimately our society at large.
There is a lot to say about the dark contrast between this kind of engagement with art and media vs. that which has become far more common in the digital age. Social media, the news, podcasts, YouTube, memes, etc. all serve as the architects of our culture and basic sense of reality, but in a very different way than movies do. The fundamental difference is that a movie doesn’t change; it has a beginning, middle and end, and these will be the same each time I watch it. I will change, my friends will change, the world will change around us, but the movie stays the same. By this, it is our experience of it that changes, which then can become a great help to us, for within the process our personal and relational changes are mirrored back to us in a constructive way. It allows us to learn about ourselves and others in ways we would not have otherwise.
The internet, by contrast, does not ever stop changing. It is an infinite network of infinitely new information. Some of it may be helpful and informative and even revelatory; this is largely why this is a difficult problem. But without a time-based structural model such as that which a film or song or even just the story around the campfire can provide, it becomes all but impossible for us to comprehend the wild, amorphous mix of reality and fantasy, truth and falsity, authenticity and advertisement constantly shining through our phone screens and computers.
Our hardware (our brains, our bodies, our mental/emotional infrastructures) are simply not capable of running this kind of software. We are wired for day and night, sun and moon, summer and winter, life and death. We must have stories, movies, things with beginnings and endings — reliable models of the universe and the human condition that we can understand. And if we are to continue in some collective effort to build a good society, it’s my view that it will only be accomplished upon the foundation of shared story. To do otherwise, as we seem to be trying to do every day online, is like trying to build a sandcastle with shovels made of play-dough, and all far too close to the ocean about to wreck us all.
So, what to do? How to begin, or to renew…
My conviction: If you care deeply about the salvation of our country, democracy, human life, progress, conservation, independence, the soul of America, the future of the world, then one of the very best things you can do is to just go to the movies.
Yes, today, please vote. Vote with your heart more than your brain and you’ll be fine.
But then let’s take a breather from the endless nightmare of shit which makes up at least 90% of our modern internet-media landscape and get back to what really matters: Tom Cruise hanging off of airplanes, Ripley throwing aliens out of airlocks, and Sam playing As Time Goes By again.
Go to any movie. Go to the theater and spend money to see it. Buy popcorn and soda and tip the kid working the counter.
You will need your phone long enough to tell ten friends what screening you’ll be at and where you’re getting drinks afterward to talk about it. Then leave the Light Rectangle Portal to Hell at home and go to sit before the Light Rectangle Portal to Heaven at the holy church of cinema. See something and let it take you somewhere. Stay and watch the credits after — the limbo space where you can begin to process what you’ve just seen, coming back to reality while quietly honoring those who gave you a short break from it.
Then maybe write a few words about it, just for yourself. Talk with your friends, be curious about their thoughts and feelings and why it made them think or feel them. Question, provoke and argue. Let it change you — but let it make you more aware of how you’ve changed, or perhaps even of who you were in the first place.
The point here is not that there is some secret treasure of deep golden value waiting to be found in every movie if you just look hard enough. It’s true that most movies are trash, or at least un-profound, as is true of most art generally speaking. This doesn’t make them necessarily less enjoyable (and sometimes more so), but this is also beside the point.
The point is to simply spend more time engaging with media that is constructive to our collective well-being and projects of greater social good than with that which is unhelpful at best and catastrophic at worst — firstly because of its form as much as the content within. The idea that “the medium is the message” is predictive of our present situation; if the medium is corrupt, or of a form we cannot comprehend as human participants, then the message becomes either useless or destructive, entirely regardless of its potential validity. We must therefore be as discerning about the structural form of the media we spend our time with as we are any of the actual content being consumed.
I believe film is better suited to this task of prioritizing socially constructive mediums than many or perhaps all other art forms in modern society. It follows directly from the virtuous and inherently human technologies of storytelling from the oral traditions on, but made scaleable — both in its ability to reach widely diverse audiences with singular experiences, as well as its incorporation of elements from every other medium into a singularly cohesive form.
So whatever your political leanings or the various reasons you may vote one way or another both today and in the future, my hope and proposition is that we try for one first task in our broader culture: Let’s aim to make sure we’re watching the same movie. Metaphorically, this ought to come first before arguments or worse are cast forth as internet noise and battle lines drawn in sand. But when we’re actually watching movies, our common humanity becomes easier to see, and our common goals becomes easier to accomplish. The quality of our politics, and health of our society at large, depends heavily on the stories we share and the mediums we choose to engage with each other with about them. Our shared fictions are essential to constructing a shared reality.
The first film on my Movies for Americans list is Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. At least as relevant in 1939 as today, it’s a movie about corruption within the US political system via the influence of money and power, and the role that media plays in obfuscating these things. It paints a contrasting picture — in equal measures dark and aspirational — of what America is and is supposed to be. Most essentially, it’s a film that shows us that the corruption or the goodness of America begins with that of the individual, with each one’s commitment to our essential human values, and with our willingness to speak.
If you have some downtime today, I hope you’ll watch it.
Or if you find yourself feeling down in the coming days, it’s one I recommend. It’s an escape from our reality as much as it is a reflection of it, and it’s one that I return to when I need a restoration of faith in our human-American project.
Be well, be safe, be kind.
No matter what happens tonight, and whatever your politics are now or yet become, I hope to see you at movies.