Thank you! Just streamed it last light and kept thinking about It's a Wonderful Life as well as The Matrix. But poster below hits another note I agree with. A Christmas Story.
May 23, 2022·edited May 23, 2022Liked by coldhealing
Just watched this movie and had very similar thoughts, except I haven't seen It's a Wonderful Life so the comparison I was thinking about was "A Christmas Story." Apart from the unexceptional comedy/action/aesthetics of the movie (I was almost getting bored by the action scenes, which is obviously not a good sign), the thing that bothered me about it was the language it ultimately used to communicate its message.
The basic idea of the movie, like you said, was of a love-based morality (really a Christian morality, but ofc this movie would never admit that) overcoming pessimistic nihilism. The daughter has lost all sense of meaning and says so many times. Her plan is to find a version of her mother capable of withstanding the "everything, everywhere, all at once" so that she can share her pain with someone else before essentially committing suicide. Her mother, with the help of everyone else in her life(s), doesn't arrive at the same pessimistic conclusion. Instead, she adopts her husband's attitude of fighting through love (literally such a Christian concept it could hardly be more clear).
What I don't like about how this message is communicated is summed up in a line the mother delivers to her daughter in the parking lot. She says "nothing matters" (in a positive way) before giving her daughter a hug at what is basically the apex of the movie. But that isn't the lesson she learned. The lesson she learned was that "it's a wonderful live," that you should appreciate the people you have, the beauty of the world, and act with kindness and love. She learned that the actions she took that were not made out of love, back when she still regretted her life-choices, were hurting other people, people who cared about her, and that that was wrong.
Some things clearly matter, like your actions and the people you love, etc. Expressing it in the whole "nothing matters," "we're all just little shits in the huge universe" way just seems immature and cringey. It makes sense for the daughter to be experiencing that type of nihilism turning her into the villain because she is young and confronted with an overwhelming and confusing world. But the lesson they learned was not that life is pointless, that was literally the opposite of what they learned. They aren't small pieces of shit, they are literally like the most important things in each others lives. The things that don't matter are the material things, like the fact that you're broke in this life when you could have been rich. But life does matter and other people matter a lot and that's precisely the point the movie was making so it annoyed me that it used language that contradicted that. They had basically discovered a universal truth and then said the opposite or something.
Like you said, if this way of communicating the message of love is what gets it across to more people, I suppose that's a good thing. But it bothered me and seemed childish. I understand it comes from this liberal, scientific/atheistic place where they have to say "the universe" when they mean "God" or something, but I don't even care about the religiosity of the movie. It could have been completely atheistic and still used the right (not cringey) language about meaning.
Thank you! Just streamed it last light and kept thinking about It's a Wonderful Life as well as The Matrix. But poster below hits another note I agree with. A Christmas Story.
Just watched this movie and had very similar thoughts, except I haven't seen It's a Wonderful Life so the comparison I was thinking about was "A Christmas Story." Apart from the unexceptional comedy/action/aesthetics of the movie (I was almost getting bored by the action scenes, which is obviously not a good sign), the thing that bothered me about it was the language it ultimately used to communicate its message.
The basic idea of the movie, like you said, was of a love-based morality (really a Christian morality, but ofc this movie would never admit that) overcoming pessimistic nihilism. The daughter has lost all sense of meaning and says so many times. Her plan is to find a version of her mother capable of withstanding the "everything, everywhere, all at once" so that she can share her pain with someone else before essentially committing suicide. Her mother, with the help of everyone else in her life(s), doesn't arrive at the same pessimistic conclusion. Instead, she adopts her husband's attitude of fighting through love (literally such a Christian concept it could hardly be more clear).
What I don't like about how this message is communicated is summed up in a line the mother delivers to her daughter in the parking lot. She says "nothing matters" (in a positive way) before giving her daughter a hug at what is basically the apex of the movie. But that isn't the lesson she learned. The lesson she learned was that "it's a wonderful live," that you should appreciate the people you have, the beauty of the world, and act with kindness and love. She learned that the actions she took that were not made out of love, back when she still regretted her life-choices, were hurting other people, people who cared about her, and that that was wrong.
Some things clearly matter, like your actions and the people you love, etc. Expressing it in the whole "nothing matters," "we're all just little shits in the huge universe" way just seems immature and cringey. It makes sense for the daughter to be experiencing that type of nihilism turning her into the villain because she is young and confronted with an overwhelming and confusing world. But the lesson they learned was not that life is pointless, that was literally the opposite of what they learned. They aren't small pieces of shit, they are literally like the most important things in each others lives. The things that don't matter are the material things, like the fact that you're broke in this life when you could have been rich. But life does matter and other people matter a lot and that's precisely the point the movie was making so it annoyed me that it used language that contradicted that. They had basically discovered a universal truth and then said the opposite or something.
Like you said, if this way of communicating the message of love is what gets it across to more people, I suppose that's a good thing. But it bothered me and seemed childish. I understand it comes from this liberal, scientific/atheistic place where they have to say "the universe" when they mean "God" or something, but I don't even care about the religiosity of the movie. It could have been completely atheistic and still used the right (not cringey) language about meaning.