One story-telling aspect I’ve always struggled with is the demand for delineating between good and evil, which is what makes blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Project Hail Mary or anything in the Marvel Universe unpalatable for me.
“You and me are good people,” Rocky says.
“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”
The technocrats would have us believe that we cannot come to terms with our highly problematic selves nor accept that we will always have needs and desires that will damage us throughout our lives. Another way to picture this is thinking of a tsunami, Hollywood offering a magnificent wave cresting in slow motion over a city instead of the insidiousness of the thing, relentlessly rising, permeating everything, and then staying.
I recently went to see John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway, which also tends toward sorting people as good or evil, although it does allow for a gray area in the end, those who doubt, those we really don’t know, who we tend to judge but now might resist that temptation and think a fraction more.
Ari Aster’s black comedy Eddington digs deeper. Set in the good old Covid days, the film attacks both polarities – a sheriff refusing to wear a mask, a mysteriously glamorous Antifa plane, along with a barrage of other triggering images and dialogue – encouraging the audience to engage while offering little to no satisfaction in the end.
I suppose that is what I appreciate most about an effective narrative. It isn’t the dream of being carried off into a magical world but rather the demanding process of being made to think and realize something other than what I thought I already knew.
