Movies and Messages
Movies and Messages
Why the lessons from stories should be carefully considered
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Dear Bolu,
Hundreds of contestants. One winner who lives and leaves with freedom. The rest perish.
If like me you're yet to see the series, Squid Game, what you've just read essentially summarizes it. Oh, doesn't that sound like a movie about Gladiators? Yes, it does and it is in many ways, similar to the Roman practice that went into extinction a long time ago. The prominent distinctions between the two are that the champion of the colosseum exchanged blows and engaged in sword fights with others. He also won freedom in the most literal sense—he ceased being a slave. In Squid Game, however, the champion was determined largely by playing games and the reward was financial freedom.
A while ago, I came across a post about one of the movie's characters, Ali. Ali is a nice guy by conventional definitions. He's a kind-hearted bloke with a loveable personality. Of course, such traits may not be very desirable in situations where one's survival is the priority. Ultimately, he met his end thanks to his willingness to trust another contestant when the stakes were high. Ali's demise was the subject of the post and it read along these lines: "This is why being a nice guy gets you nowhere". And that had me thinking.
What seemed like an innocuous message ended up as the catalyst for a series of realizations for me. Now, I had nothing against the content of the post. Rather, what sank me deep into a sea of thoughts was the observation that we tend to take lessons from movies. And it's not only movies, of course—I refer to stories in general. Movies are just stories with layers of good acting, great cameras, and tolerable music.
We derive lessons from movies and that's not, in itself, a good thing. Why? Well, movies are extensions of a writer's imagination. They could express the reality of society to astonishingly accurate degrees, and they could also be further from what's obtainable in real life than the Sun is from Pluto. "It's just fiction". Well, yes it is, but we still come in contact with the ideas expressed in the movie and each idea persuades us to think a certain way, albeit subtly.
That said, we often can't help but listen to the messages in the movies we watch. How we interpret and whether we acknowledge them or not is an entirely different matter, but we all see and hear them. To think that the movies you watch or the stories you hear don't influence you in some way is, I believe, an error. Whether it is the overarching conviction that good overcomes evil, the belief in the existence of a soulmate, the conception that someplace halfway across the world is defined by certain elements or the notion that nice guys always lose/win, there is some effect to be felt from our exposure to cinema.
Say in a movie the main characters are a toxic (“toxic” is a bit vague but take it to imply impossibly incompatible) couple who in true romantic fashion, end up getting married at the end. The closing scene is one where the couple is in a wonderful mood having just taken their vows and riding to infinity in the back of a limo. The conclusion we are implored to embrace is that their lives ended pleasantly and that two people who are extremely bad for each other can work it out. Well, while the latter is true, it is not always the case. The movie won't show you how difficult and damned the marriage may be due to the couple's extant toxicity. There is only so much the writer wants to say and a 2-hour movie can reveal after all.
Movies have taught us a lot—pick-up lines that tend not to work, for instance—and they continue to do so. But I don't think the single lessons they preach should bear heavily on our internal maps of meaning. I don't think we should point to a movie scene and say, “that's why you should never trust your friend”. I think that for movies and stories, generally, whatever lesson we derive needs to be properly and carefully evaluated. We are only being shown the mind of the storyteller, and we shouldn't be too quick to adopt the values portrayed in the story.
Hence there is a need to be careful of what we watch and the lessons we gain from Netflix-and-chill appointments, more so for kids and younger minds around us who are more easily impressionable. We shouldn't be too eager to absorb the messages in movies. They might be correct, but they might also be incomplete. This ties into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's lecture on the danger of a single story—why we need to seek and tell more stories. It's a talk I think you should listen to at least once a year because it is much too easy to forget the implications of the paradigm she beautifully describes.
No matter. We can't stop watching movies and listening to stories from our friends, family, and those outside our circles. They abound. But we shouldn't take the messages they preach as ultimate or accurate examples of what we should embrace or abhor. In another writer's story, Ali could have survived simply because of his lovely personality. A single story shouldn't be enough to make you form a conviction, dear friend. It could be false and inappropriate. It could be true and incomplete.
Fin.
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Write you soon, merci !
- Wolemercy