If you read film criticism (and you surely do if you’re bothering to read this), you’ve almost certainly seen this phrase describing a recent movie: “[BLANK] is the movie we need right now.” Teen Vogue and Collider said it was Hidden Figures. Yahoo News said it was Moana. A writer at the Hill, a paper for congressional staffers, wrote: “Loving is the movie we need now.” The Washington Post said it was Jackie.
Apparently, we all need a movie right now, which is understandable. As a group, film critics and their loyal readers are largely progressive and are in anguish over the election of Donald Trump. Many have described his election as a death or even compared it to 9/11, which could explain why movies about grief – such as Jackie, Arrival and Manchester by the Sea – are resonating so deeply right now with critics, fans and awards bodies. When stricken with a cataclysmic emotional event, cinephiles look to film – the prism through which they understand the world – for answers. These days, movies either feel like they are about Trump (The Founder, which one critic wrote “dares you not to filter it through the orange lens”) or an antidote to the misery he has already wrought (La La Land, which a prominent outlet promised would “transport you from Trump-world”).
There’s nothing wrong with seeing Donald Trump in every piece of art you come across (although it’s surely unpleasant), and I understand it may seem silly to suggest critics shouldn’t be telling people what movies to see. Isn’t that their job? But there’s a difference between recommending a film and prescribing it. When critics assume a movie can solve our problems by persuading some segment of the population with whom we disagree to change their minds, they are engaging in wishful thinking, not critical analysis. It’s also not borne out by the facts. For years, I believed that film could improve our society by addressing issues too difficult to grapple with overtly. Narrative could be a safe space, or a venue for progressive film-makers to introduce ideas to audiences that would otherwise reject them. That’s what I thought, anyway.
Now, I’m not so sure. When I first started writing film criticism in 2012, I remember being excited about The Hunger Games, whose story of economic inequality I took as a sign that Americans were finally ready to fight back against our oligarchic leaders and oppressive culture of wealth and celebrity. I felt as if a real political revolution was coming.
Four years later, we got our revolution, but it wasn’t the one we wanted. Looking at The Hunger Games now, it’s easy to see how its message probably resonated more with Trump voters than Hillary supporters. Surely those white working-class voters who supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 related to Katniss Everdeen, growing up poor in what looks like Appalachia, fighting against an elitist despot who had remained in power for many years. The film was vague enough in its politics so that anyone could see themselves in the struggle it depicted, but in hindsight, and with Trump’s white working class perhaps making the difference in this election, it’s clear that The Hunger Games was working in his favor.
Or maybe the profound and instant change we hope for can’t come from cinema at all. For years, we have operated under the assumption that politics is downstream of culture (a phrase coined by the late Andrew Breitbart, of all people), and that the more we encourage diversity (of race, gender, sexual identity, and thought) in our pop culture, the more real social gains will be realized offscreen. But if that’s happening, it’s happening very slowly. As we celebrated strong female protagonists in The Hunger Games, Frozen and Maleficent, we watched as a reported 53% of white women voted for a candidate who was caught on tape bragging about groping women. Sure, only 42% of all women voted for him, but that’s still an incredibly high number. We cheered “the year of racial cinema” in 2013 that produced such critical and commercial successes as 12 Years a Slave and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, and then watched as more unarmed black men got shot in the streets and racial tension in America grew to its highest pitch since the civil rights era. Film is clearly not a balm for society’s wounds.
Of course, movies can still be powerful, but mainly on an individual level. They still move us, but they can’t move masses, not any more. That’s the problem with the phrase “the movie we need”. There is no “we”. We are a profoundly divided nation, and any attempt to prescribe a solution, especially an artistic one, is a fool’s errand. It assumes a shared perspective between the critic and their reader, or, worse, it attempts to superimpose one. It’s kitsch, in the Kunderian sense. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera wrote: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” Like kitsch, any suggestion that a movie is the one “we need” prohibits the reader from experiencing the movie on his or her own terms and demands it be filtered through the critic’s values. It’s not the movie “we” need. It’s the one you need.
In reality, the movie we need right now is any movie that is unique and authentic while artistically expressing the film-maker’s point of view. We need to listen and learn from each other. We need to experience empathy, not install it in others. As someone who has struggled with finding importance in the trade of film criticism following the distressing election, I was enormously affected by Paterson. Its story of a pair of lovers who find meaning in the simple act of creating art – not defining it by how it is received by others – moved me. As did Arrival, which ultimately argued that life was worth embracing, even under profoundly painful circumstances. Those were the movies I needed, and I’m not sure what can be accomplished right now by saying more.
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