Three Political Hang-Ups to Avoid When Watching Movies
How hyper-partisanship can act as an interpretive straightjacket
There are a myriad of potential distractions when watching a movie—like the loudly intoxicated man who attended my screening of Saving Private Ryan when it first released. Until the drunk was forcibly removed from the theater, his blabbering caused most of us in the audience to miss some of the proceedings.
Similarly, politics can sometimes get in the way of a good movie watching experience. In a highly politicized landscape, it’s possible to be hamstrung by partisan assumptions without realizing it. Like an inconsiderate inebriate, these assumptions can cause us to miss, and possibly even misinterpret, different aspects of a visual story.
One recent case in point is when film critic Jeffrey Overstreet bemoaned the “objectification of women as trophies” in Top Gun: Maverick—a posture that struck me as odd, considering that he extolled the virtues of The Wolf of Wall Street, even with its numerous instances of female objectification.
I have already explored what I think is the primary reason for the incongruence, but a secondary catalyst is the topic at hand: politics. With his decidedly left-leaning politics,1 Overstreet finds several offensive elements in Maverick, not just objectification:
[T]his movie is also an altar to America’s obsession with youthfulness, its exaltation of white super-men (showing people of color as inferior), its worship of heavy artillery, its insistence that we not think much about the consequences of violence, its permissiveness toward what we now wisely call “toxic masculinity,” its adoration for recklessness rather than integrity, and (sigh) its objectification of women as trophies.
On the other hand, the ubiquitously-exploitative Wolf of Wall Street received unvarnished praise from Overstreet (with not even a mention of objectification). Overstreet found it “rewarding [for the film] to attend to such depictions of evil” because it was designed to expose and condemn that evil.
This incongruence represents one of the hindrances I evaluate in my first article for Christ and Pop Culture. Entitled How Partisan Politics Interferes with Our Moviegoing Discernment, my piece explores three particular pitfalls, and how recognizing and rejecting them can unclutter and enrich our movie watching experiences.
You can read the entire article here.
I don’t want to give the appearance of throwing labels at people willy-nilly. Overstreet has demonstrated his left-leaning political positions numerous times over the years. One example includes his public response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade: “The wave of destruction this has unleashed will wreak havoc on the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable for generations to come. . . . Antichrist is on the move.” (He followed up his comments by sharing a screenshot of another social media comment that says, in part, “This is a setback for human rights of shocking proportions that is moving our country further in the direction of the terrifying totalitarian theocratic republic depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale that we all thought was just a cautionary tale just a few years ago.”)
(Incidentally, while I vehemently disagree with the main thrust of Overstreet’s post, I do agree that “It matters how a ‘battle is won,’” and that much of the road leading to Dobb v. Jackson—a court decision worth celebrating, for sure—was paved with cheating and bullying. Furthermore, as Steve D. Greydanus, a mutual friend of mine and Overstreet’s, has stated, “[T]he blocking of Merrick Garland in President Obama’s last year in office, the rushing in of Amy Coney Barrett in President Trump’s last year in office, and, finally, the evident determination of Republican leaders to block *any* nominee of President Biden if they have the power to do so regardless of circumstances, constitutes such a profound challenge to the legitimacy of the process that it would be hard to critique any Democratic response, including packing the Court if they have the power to do so, as excessive or unwarranted.”)