Has A Movie Changed Your Mind?

Oops, more art for the end of the world!

girl, same

Every so often, the internet goes abuzz with an Art that might change the world due to What It Has To Say. Due to it being Important or perhaps Speaking Truth To Power.

A few weeks ago, it was Kendrick Lamar’s super bowl performance. A few weeks before that, it almost might have been Emilia Perez and its thirteen Oscar nominations, but alas.¹ For about one minute last year, I think Justin Baldoni truly thought it would be It Ends With Us.²

In 2023 it was the Barbie movie, which was going to make people realize that being a woman is hard, actually, because America Ferrara said so in her little speech.³ If I had a dollar for every person who told me how a hypothetical misogynist would be able to take his daughter to this movie and be enlightened, I would have several dollars — not a lot, but a weird amount nonetheless since nobody can tell me of a real person this has happened to.

I wanted to like the Barbie movie. I really loved Lady Bird. Little Women is a pillar of my childhood as both a novel and a Winona Ryder vehicle, and I thought the Gerwig adaptation was competent and beautiful.⁴ I did not like Frances Ha, but I think I might have if I’d seen it at the right age. And obviously I grew up steeped in the Chronicles of Narnia and am cautiously curious about what she’ll do with that.⁵

The Barbie movie made me sad.

This is not even to do with the capitalism-monster of it all. If that’s your bag, I see you, I respect you. It is also not to do with the production design, the dance numbers, or the comedy, because I am only human. If the movie was content to only be silly and gorgeous, I would have been so pleased!

What made me nauseous was the mass delusion in summer 2023 that this movie had Something To Say. That to like it was our birthright. That to disdain it was unsympathetic to the trauma the patriarchy hath wrought. But I think we all know by now that Barbie had nothing to say.

The cultural praise and defense of Barbie was obsessed with this straw-misogynist who was going to see it and be changed. When I admitted feeling sad, disappointed, empty after seeing it, my relations and coworkers repeatedly and independently told me “well, okay, you didn’t need this movie to convince or inform you. But someone does. This is someone’s entry point to feminism.”

But . . . whose?

I’m not convinced anyone’s minds have ever been changed by art created with the ambition to change their minds, or which people on one side of a question celebrate for how it will hypothetically impact/change/inform strangers on the other side of the question. I did not like the Barbie movie, but the number of people who gushed to me about how it would open someone’s mind struck me as so fundamentally smug and out of touch. That is not how art works, and it’s not how people work.

We are rarely changed by art designed to chance our minds, and yet we have each, thank goodness, been changed by art. Not with a bludgeon but with a whisper, art sneaks into our open ears and eyes and hearts and instills in us language, feeling, imagination we did not previously know how to access.

My friend Elise reminded me of this the other day. I was on a variation on the above tirade, and she pointed out that we both can name art that has literally changed out minds — not in that we flipped from one side of an issue to a binary other, but in that our minds are different than they were before. The landscape of our imaginations has rumbled and resettled into new formations, and art has made it happen.

Elise cites the example of the 2022 novel The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton, which imagines a near future in which Florida becomes virtually uninhabitable due to climate disaster, and yet people keep inhabiting it. It’s sad and scary and magical and impossibly hopeful. In Elise’s words, it asks, what if the end of the world was not the end of the world?

My control group is predisposed to apocalyptic thinking, but I know what she means because I have had the same experience. I too have felt art cracking open a door to hope and possibility when my instinct is despair.

For me, this happened when I saw the 2016 adaptation of Arrival⁶. The film, it is true, does not completely hold up to the magic of the first viewing upon subsequent rewatches, though I will continue rewatching it. (There’s a twist that, if you don’t know it, dawns on you in a quiet way I really love). But the first viewing was enough to change me. It haunts me. It looms large in my imaginative worldview.⁷ It might be my favorite movie, which always feels like such a risky thing to admit — how dorky to love something!! How predictable to love this in particular! How deeply uncool!

Like Elise’s experience with The Light Pirate, here is a premise that could be summed up in a bone-chilling soundbite. (There is a climate disaster.) (There is an alien invasion.) In other words, it’s the end of the world.

And yet, Arrival asks of the viewer, what if the unfamiliar could also be benevolent? What if our tenderness is important? What if we can learn new things? What if we can be changed? What if we have choices? What if we do not need to be afraid?

The first time I saw Arrival, I felt transfixed. I felt invited into a new existence that I had not previously imagined. Yes, this is a story about language, about motherhood and the choice whether to have a child, about grief, about curiosity — truly Krystiana-core almost to excess.

But the door that it cracked open inside me was, specifically, what if the end of the world was not the end of the world. This happens in the story on at least two levels that flow in and out of each other.

Aliens have arrived on earth and we assume this to be a death sentence. You want to have a child and your child will die.

The way these vectors of fundamental terror⁸ strike a one-two punch to my gut makes me feel stripped open, revealed, seen to my core. And then, once I am all squishy and naked, the story invites me to loosen my grip, to imagine not the worst but the best outcome available.

It was as if it knew something about me.

If you do not live, as I do, with a sense of the world being on the brink of collapse at all times (and a bonus but not unrelated terror about childbearing, ha), I cannot explain to you how numinous the experience of this movie is to me.

I want everyone to have this experience with art. The capacity to be changed is one of my favorite things about human life, and the capacity to make art is another. God, we’re incredible.

So in short — stop telling me how particular art will change some external imaginary person, and tell me what has changed you.

What is your Light Pirate, what is your Arrival? What stripped you to your most afraid core and then invited you to hope? What rumbled through your landscape?

What has made you new?

1. THIRTEEN! A laughable quantity for a good movie, let alone for a trainwreck of cultural appropriation / casting of people who do not speak the language the movie is in / platforming of racists / bad songs. Mercifully, Emilia Perez should soon fade into embarrassed obscurity, letting Selena Gomez get back to her most important work: wearing kooky outfits on Only Murders in the Building.

2. The Who? Weekly podcast coverage of that whole kettle of fish is unparalleled, esp on their Patreon which is an absolute steal at three dollars a month.

3. This is not on America Ferrara, I hope America Ferrara got a jillion dollars and can send her children to college and buy a boat. Namaste.

4. Even if Emma Watson’s accent work is, strictly speaking, neither.

5. Yes, I know about the baffling “rock and roll” comment from Amy Pascal, I’ve chosen to interpret that as a joke until further notice, k thanks bye!

6. Having not yet read Ted Chiang’s story (titled Story of Your Life) which I subsequently did and recommend along with his writing in general

7. In a manner incredible for a movie that posits that Jeremy Renner could be both a) a scientist, and b) a loving partner and father. (ba-dam chhh)

8. A thinking woman’s two greatest fears, aliens and motherhood.