Not so Fast
Hello! My name is Isaac Castleberry, and I am admittedly skeptical of depictions of wonder in media, especially saccharine ones like nostalgia, kitsch, and sentimentalism. I’m not skeptical for the sake of being a contrarian, a curmudgeon, or trying to seem smarter than I am; there’s no point in any of that. It has instead been the result of a slow, subconscious shift in perception over the past few years. I wouldn’t have even believed it a year ago, but I do now. You might too.
I have been a lifelong lover and consumer of media, but I was a passive observer until recently. Even as recent as high school, I remember being in honors sophomore English class learning about symbolism, and it felt like a sick joke that everyone in my school was in on apart from myself. The idea that an idea, a character, a place, or even a color could have a meaning beyond the explicit text evaded me. I mean, their sweater is blue, sure, but everything else in the story must have a color too, right? Besides, I also have a blue sweater, but I don’t choose to wear it based on my inner emotional state at any given time, so why would they? It made no sense to me. So, to keep up with the class, I would just accept other people’s explanations as “probably correct,” and I moved on with my life.
It wasn’t until I watched Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that I saw beyond the surface level of a text. For whatever reason, I noticed a pattern: the mise-en-scène had recurring motifs of eating meat, butchers, and steps in preparing meat as predictions of violence. Characters ate meat, and they died. They got stuck with meat hooks and shoved into meat freezers. In the final act when Sally stopped by the gas station that the main cast had purchased meat earlier in the film, I made my first ever movie prediction: she is in danger because this is where they purchased meat earlier in the film. To my astonishment, I had correctly guessed that she was in danger, and I had successfully understood a text on a deeper plane than one of simply mindless entertainment.
From there, I began to occasionally notice symbolism, themes, and metaphors, but I could never pick up on them until I started studying film propaganda a year later, which is an interest that I am still passionate about to this day. In propaganda, I knew—no longer supposed—that every choice was intentional. Every framing was a calculated move by the filmmakers to subconsciously associate said group with evil, and so on and so forth. But as I started writing my own stories, I noticed that this was not exclusive to propaganda; artistic choices are intentionally made. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have made it through the edit. If they wore a blue sweater in this story, it is because the author wanted me to know that they wore a blue sweater.
In watching a movie, you must engage with its text to better understand it. You must ask yourself why everyone working on the project made the artistic choices that they made in crafting the film. This goes for the director, producers, screenwriter, and cast all the way down to the gaffers, foley artists, and graphic designers. Everyone in the production process has a hand in crafting the director’s vision. Each decision matters because it is the text itself, even if the decisions were haphazardly chosen.
What does a film implicitly assume about the world? Why does a single, brief act of self-inflicted violence in Michael Haneke’s 2005 thriller Caché feel more gruesome than a few blocks of New York City being leveled in a battle in Joss Whedon’s 2012 blockbuster The Avengers? Why is one given more moral weight than the other? Or, perhaps a film about perseverance through the guilt of war sensationalizes its depictions of wartime violence, undercutting its message and glamorizing the same violence it claims to condemn in the process.
When media evokes wonder, it must be treated with an equal amount of caution. What is the work trying to tell us? Why is it trying to make me wonder? Is this a distraction from its otherwise unsavory politics and ethical framework? Wonder exists beyond what is known—be it hope, confusion, or curiosity. Since an aspect necessarily remains unknown, it is possible for us to mistake wonder for naïve ignorance and to subliminally accept false and dangerous premises.
But not so fast—this is not to throw out wonder in media. Wonder, when properly handled, confronts the unknown; it does not accept it. Even in the worst of times, cynicism and defeatism are inactionable frameworks. If there is no wonder, then there must also be no hope, no curiosity, no new ideas, and ultimately no action, and action is necessary for a better world. Actionable frameworks must be a synthesis between wonder and skepticism—hope for a better future must exist, but hope filled with naivety and ignorance will fail to question the material conditions that require a better world in the first place.