Character, Meritocracy, and Technology in 2023 Movies
Reflecting on the movies released in 2023, The Holdovers was perhaps the best I saw. It comically explores the corrupting influence of money on traditional values, like integrity, sacrifice, and self-control through two characters: a grumpy but utterly committed history teachers at an expensive male boarding school, Barton, and an adolescent student at his school, who was abandoned by his mother and rich step-father, after the psychological collapse of his biological father. A subtle but prevailing theme is the way that wealth undermines meritocratic achievement and can derail otherwise promising lives into obscure and even tragic sidings, even as it props up and pushes forward those undeserving of their place atop the hierarchy. Many movies would push this theme through Marxist ideology, but there is not a shred of anti-capitalist sentiment in the movie, despite its setting in 1970. Instead, the film takes on a far more creative, if traditional framing, which feels fresh after decades of precious liberal arts pretention in cinema and writing. There are the unvirtuous who reject principles, and there are those who stick to them, even at great personal expense. Paul Giamatti is perfect as the disgruntled but honor-bound teacher, who aims to steer unruly and undisciplined Barton men toward virtue.
Superficially similar themes of class resentment are gratuitously displayed in the funny and stylish film Saltburn. Therein, the main character—a smart, upwardly mobile English kid just starting out at Oxford—immediately comes to appreciate the ways rich kids, especially those of noble birth, are lauded socially, and he desires nothing more than to become like them. What transpires is often entertaining: imagine Downton Abbey occupied by contemporary adolescents, and the film offers clever, somewhat sinister thrills, but it is ultimately as empty as an abandoned country estate.
Resentment directed at technology, America, and its creators characterizes the hyper-left-wing television series A Murder at the End of the World and the immensely disappointing movie Leave the World Behind. Both were intriguing, at least at first, stylish, and captivating, but both take anti-technology zealotry to the level of sincere religious conviction, with very little complexity or realism.
The heroes of A Murder at the End of the World are anti-technology artists and climatologists in a world where the mass extinction of humanity from global warming is taken for granted by informed scientists and tech-billionaires, and Chat GPT is regarded as a potential serial killer, at least if created by every left-wing writer’s favorite villain. The writers—Britt Marling and Zal Batmanglij—should read Bjorn Lomberg’s sensible distillation of climate research and robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks on the limits of artificial intelligence.
With that said, at least the characters in A Murder at the End of the World were complex, lifelike, and compelling to watch. The same cannot be said of those in Leave the World Behind, in which every character was an embarrassing stereotype, designed to assign blame toward White Americans for the ecological and political annihilation of the country gleefully imagined by the writer, Rumaan Alam, whose book was adapted. The scenes combine quotidian exchanges of fear and loathing with pure fantasy scenes involving nature and technology. A herd of deer stares down a young girl, for example, and cancer is transmitted electronically through the air, but only, apparently, harms adolescent White boys who are mean to their sister and fantasize about Black girls. The absurdity of the plot is in no way redeemed by any metaphorical accomplishments. The writer holds a low opinion of White Americans—and has Black characters saying as much—and evinces an extreme distrust and lack of understanding of technology. It’s that bad.
Avatar 2: Way of the Water is also a dystopian fantasy with strong views against both technology, corporations, and economic development, but I give it higher marks that the aforementioned productions because James Cameron has the wisdom to imagine and realize narratives in which characters are capable of learning and cooperating across species/race/class interests. This is largely born out in the characters by their realization of the inherent value outside their species, a valuation of nature that Cameron obviously champions outside of his films. This awe-struck love of the natural world has not stopped Cameron from pushing technological boundaries in his film-production, and his ultimately optimistic take on the potential for reconciliation between nature and humanity is what makes his movies so powerful, inspiring, and gripping, despite their wooden dialogue and simplistic villains.
The 2023 film The Creator took what might be thought of as the extreme other side of the technology debate. Robots are beautiful, soulful, practitioners of Buddhism in this strangely boring and dreadfully violent action thriller. That theme is never developed beyond superficial dialogue and set pieces. Any humane or spiritual insight also gets blurred and then buried as the audience is forced to watch the brutal killing of many humanoid robots by one-dimensional human villains and their robotic-henchmen.
A movie with much greater thematic and moral ambiguity than those above, Oppenheimer did not disappoint. It was a thrilling, intelligent, and extremely detailed portrayal of the key events in the life of Oppenheimer as he led the U.S. effort to develop the atomic bomb before Germany but came to regret key aspects of the work and its implications. In the end, I felt Oppenheimer was a good man who did good work for his country but was treated rather poorly toward the end of his career for petty political reasons. Outside of the rich historic insight, it’s harder to see what the movie contributes, which is why I don’t rate it as the best of the year, despite flawless execution from Christopher Nolan and his cast.
Napoleon proved to be as wasteful and ill-conceived as the titular character’s march to Moscow. I had hoped that Andrew Robert’s excellent book on the man would inform the writing, but instead, the film focuses on made-up domestic scenes and embarrassing blunders. Napoleon’s coruscating intelligence, immense work ethic, and incredible achievements in battle, in politics, in management, and institutional creation are mostly or entirely ignored.
While not necessarily the best, Barbie was perhaps the most enjoyable to watch. It’s humor and images were delightful, and it, thankfully, avoided taking itself and its very loose take on feminism, too seriously—at least for most of the movie. The funniest scenes involved Ken enthusiastically discovering that men held power in the real world outside Barbie land. Perhaps, it was needed for humor, but the movie conveyed considerable disinformation in suggesting that women were still held back by discrimination in the workplace. As Claudia Goldin’s work has shown, women are close to men in terms of pay parity in many fields and don’t face any real issues in entering occupations. The remaining pay gaps between men and women are driven by the fact that women are more likely than men to prefer spending time with their children than be constantly on-call for an employer. Barbie is best thought of as a creative, witty, homage to a beloved toy, akin to the great Lego Movies.