Young Adult
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of zeitgeist is “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”
I watched two movies in the theater recently that I loved: “Materialists” and “The Life of Chuck.” (Both of them are rated R, so please proceed with caution if you plan to see them). They are two very different stories, but both center on the reality that every human life is of inestimable value.
Noticing the similarity between them reminded me of two other pairs of movies — externally different with similar themes. Last summer my two favorite movies were “If” and “Twisters,” both of which present post-traumatic fear as the antagonist in the story and express the beauty of bravely stepping into your identity and your call. The summer before that saw the release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” which were about as externally different as two movies could be. But they both wrestled with the destruction that comes from a broken relationship between men and women, and both pointed, however distantly, toward the hope of restoration. The coinciding of these themes in multiple movies around the same time makes me suspect that they are reflecting specific movements in the zeitgeist. But whatever the cause of this phenomenon, it deserves attention for several reasons.
One, in a world where public discourse so often devolves into fruitless shouting matches, even the most important questions can become live-wire stalemates. Social media so often corrupts debate into verbal violence where people become only more entrenched in their ideas than they were before. The world of fiction is a place where questions and ideas can be approached in a way that is thoughtful, nuanced and even beautiful without triggering any defense mechanisms. A story is not an intellectual proposition, it’s not supposed to be. The power of storytelling starts with its unique genetic makeup and the way it reflects our lived experience more than our abstract thought. Stories are made up of the recounting of specific events, unified by a plot, and it is only from the truthful telling of specific facets of what it is like to be a human being that deeper themes and ideas emerge. This similarity to lived experience gives stories an unusual capacity for moving and even changing our hearts. It also means they can sidestep some of the vitriol that has become standard fare in a world that spends so much time on social media.
Two, because of this, stories are also able to manifest things to us about our culture that would be easy to miss otherwise. If you pulled up any political debate comments section on any online platform, you would likely be hard pressed to see much evidence that treating other human beings with respect and reverence is something that our culture wants. If you watch “Materialists” or “The Life of Chuck”, however, you will see a portrayal of modern life that points to the idea that the value of any given human being is such that no calculation or rational explanation will do justice to their worth. These themes don’t come from thin air. They are an expression of the experiences and thoughts of the storytellers and of the broader cultural narratives.
And three, while stories reflect the culture from which they come, they can also change that culture. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the importance of what he calls the “overstories” of a culture in his book “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” He says, “An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behavior and development of every species far below on the forest floor … it’s not something explicit that’s drilled into every inhabitant. The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we are so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful.” He goes on to talk about examples of overstories — the impact they can have on the lives of people who believe them as well as how they can get rewritten. We have records of how dramatically cultural understanding in America of things like slavery or the Holocaust shifted toward the truth as a result of one story. That’s why Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish writer and politician said, “If I can write the songs of a nation, I care not who writes its laws.” Not every movie that hits the theater changes the overstory of a culture. But good art always has the potential to make a real impact on the culture in which it lives.
So, what do we, as ordinary people, do with these good movies? How do we embrace art in a way that will allow it to shift the overstories of our culture toward goodness and virtue and truth? I don’t know, but I have some guesses. I think the first thing we do is simply enjoy them: Allow these stories to live in the realm of experience where they belong and where they have the most power. Any analysis or discussion should always be secondary to the lived experience of the story. Second, within that experiential realm, allow them to give you hope: Allow the story to do its natural work of resetting your perspective, but also allow yourself to be hopeful about the reality that our culture, with all its brokenness, still asks questions like these. And after you’ve done those things, I suppose you could write a column about them, like I just did. But I suspect the better thing is to talk about them in real life, in person with real people. That may not feel like the scale that shifting the zeitgeist would require. But it is the scale at which all the most important things happen.
