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Ben Shapiro has it wrong. You should watch woke movies.
Over Christmas break, one of my best friends showed me the flashy mish-mash of absurdism that is the 2022 movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
For two hours and 19 minutes, I was subjected to hot dog fingers and googly eyes galore, an on-screen manifestation of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. But the most striking part of the movie wasn’t its ridiculous imagery, it was its message.
“Nothing matters,” the characters conclude. Yes, you read that right. The message of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is sheer nihilism.
It is a message I could not disagree with more strongly. Despite this, I loved the movie and believe it absolutely deserved its 2023 Best Picture win at the Oscars. This is because it forced me to wrestle with an objectionable message.
The film promotes a liberal worldview on a thought-provoking level without vomiting up buzz-phrases like “diversity is our strength” or “love is love.” It forces viewers — especially Christian ones — to wrestle with ideas they might instinctively dismiss, such as atheism. That is one of the fundamental purposes of art; not to spoon-feed audiences what they already believe, but to challenge them.
You will never understand opposing worldviews if you focus only on strawmen without entertaining the source itself.
Now, this does not mean you should engage with — how shall I say this? — slop. Poorly written stories that focus on activism rather than art, even crossing into objectionable content, exist everywhere. These less-than-stellar films, TV shows, and books are not worth your time. James Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise comes to mind.
Instead of exploring themes of colonialism by depicting imperfection in both the human invaders and the native Na’vi, Cameron portrays the former as totally evil and the latter as totally good, at least in the first two movies. He leaves no room for nuance or interpretation, nearing a propagandistic political message. People hate “Avatar” because the films tell audiences what to think instead of allowing them to interpret the message for themselves.
Many neo-conservative works of art have this problem as well. Their creators, such as Ben Shapiro, claim to be “agenda-free,” but this is self-contradictory — the supposed agenda-freeness is the agenda.
Films like “Lady Ballers” and “Reagan” fail to garner good reviews (especially among the youth) not wholly because liberal audiences hate conservative ideas but because their sole purpose for existing is that they’re not the supposedly worse alternative. These films are created as responses to culture rather than as cultural building blocks, and this only furthers cultural division.
Just recently, we had two separate Super Bowl halftime shows, one by Bad Bunny and the other by Turning Point USA, designed to cater to America’s two dominant political parties. Nothing screams “we’re doing fine” quite like that.
Still, there are plenty of quality films that shine despite their dodgy messages.
Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” in my not-so-humble and stereotypically male opinion, is one of the greatest movies ever made. The film asks us to ponder what a millennium of human development might look like. Though I disagree with Nolan’s conclusion — that human evolution will save mankind, implying that we don’t need God — he presents thought-provoking questions.
At Hillsdale, we read literature and philosophy with which many of us have staunch disagreements. For me, that’s Oscar Wilde’s preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto.” Classical education should challenge worldviews and presuppositions, thereby strengthening the mind of the individual. If we consume classic literature and philosophy that is contrary to our beliefs, it should not be different for quality modern entertainment.
The way we heal the cultural divide is not by blasting a canyon between opposing worldviews or hibernating in ideological cliques. It is by wrestling with ideas we disagree with and arguing for something substantive instead of against everything else.
So, watch that nihilistic movie. Read that communist novel. Binge that woke TV show.
Find out, on an intellectual level, why you disagree with it.
Jayden Jelso is a junior studying English.
