When A Film Seems To “Hate” You: Reflecting On The Prism of Confrontational Art (Patreon)

Stories are both trivial and powerful.

They are trivial in the sense that they are, first and foremost, entertainment. I don’t say that disparagingly. It’s a vital, necessary mode of escapism for people to fall into after long, hard days in a pretty terrible world. Because of that, I think there’s honor in entertainment. No, it doesn’t even need the grand power of making people smile and emote, there is honor in merely giving people a break. Still, it’s easy to worry that people’s appetite for “comfort” entertainment dominates all consideration. Like, it’s easy to look at the success of TikTok (a platform I like a lot) and fret about many things, including the way it treats creators. But there’s such a genuine power in getting a steady stream of bite-sized entertainments that fill the cracks of a day. But if there’s anything I’ve tried to hammer again and again and again over the last decade is that there’s a reason that our most beloved media resonates with us,

Whether its films, TV shows, books, or even a popular creator you like, there’s a reason that some moment of a story can echo in your mind, even years and years later. There’s a reason these moments stick with you, as if they are some part of a deeper understanding of yourself. These moments are craft, too, often erupting out of the intersection of shared emotional spaces, character-based drama, and a deeper thematic understanding of the world around us. In short, they are the best at what art can achieve… But sometimes, those moments are completely incongruent with you. Meaning they do not jibe with who you are, what you want, and what you believe.

And that’s where things get tricky.

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I’ve come, perhaps unexpectedly, to love The Matrix Resurrections.

I say this because the fourth entry was a bit of a curio for me. I really liked the first film. I thought the second one was interesting. And I thought the third one kinda whiffed. But my general fandom for the series never really went super beyond that. Instead, I came to love the open-hearted, goofy mania of the Wachowskis work that came after, whether it was Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, or even Jupiter Ascending. So after all this time, I don’t know what I was expecting in a return to the world of The Matrix, but duh, of course it ended up falling in line with this later period work. Meaning it was a strange, candid, and meta film that wrestled so openly with its legacy. It wasn’t just unapologetic in this approach, it seemed dead set on defying all expectations of it in order to craft something that did not look, feel, or even fight like the original trilogy. And so, I can imagine that anyone looking for a little nostalgia bump was bumped in another direction entirely.

To wit, they were discussing the film recently on Blank Check (in a remarkable episode that I highly recommend) and they characterized the push-pull between the various things the audiences wanted from this film. It was Producer Ben who engaged the difficult feeling that the film was kind of “hating” where he was coming from, or at least, what he wanted out of the movie. To be clear, he ultimately kind of liked the film in discussing it, but it was a process. And at the onset, he was mostly struck oddly by it. But in the process, he said the following which captures it perfectly, to paraphrase: “I can’t help it, I wanted the steak.” Which is a really really good way of putting that instinct, particular when it comes to the steak metaphor of that particular series. Because of course people wanted the “steak” of the original’s hyper-controlled action with broad meaningful storytelling that allowed us to project ourselves into it readily. Instead, they got an uneven meta therapy session that was not only specific to Lana’s journey, but also unafraid to be “corny.” I mean, Keanu barely fights and instead uses these pacifist pushes to get his way through obstacles. Which all had a beautiful point of reclaiming the narrative and making something so loving and pure. Given my lack of expectation, I absolutely love what we got, which is one of the most emotional and personal pieces of blockbuster filmmaking in a long time. But of course I understand why people wanted the steak.

But this unlocks a whole series of questions. Not just about The Matrix Resurrections, but all kinds of films: Is it okay to want the proverbial steak? Or are we inherently obligated to go along with an artist’s druthers? What part of it, if any, belongs to us, the audience? What is the duty to honor a film’s intention versus our own hopes? And lastly, what should we do when it feels like a film hates you and what you want? To get right to the point of answers, we’re not obligated to go along with anything in art, But I think there’s always merit to trying to meet a film halfway in terms of what it wants. Because I think there’s ugly things that can happen when we don’t even try. Especially when it fails to meet the “demands” of entitled fans.

We’ve seen the ugly side of this approach crop up more than enough times now. It’s the Ghostbusters thing. It’s a lot of DCEU debates. And of course it’s the lens of the new Star Wars’s trilogy, which is everyone’s favorite topic that no one is sick of talking about at all! Sorry, it’s just such a good prism through which to look at how people process changes in art. Sure, there were the racist jerks that immediately lashed out at the basic representation of the casting announcements of The Force Awakens, but that film ultimately was about upholding the status quo of Star Wars through and through. Which is part of the reason the fandom brouhaha more centered around The Last Jedi. Now, to some of us, it was one of the best things that’s ever come out of the series. A film that rejected some of the thematically gross conventions of Star Wars to embrace a bigger, more inclusive idea of what the force can be (and should be). But to others the film felt like a radical affront for those exact same reasons. It rejected notions of “destined” parentage and ultimately, things like Holdo bait and switch felt like some cruel, withholding gesture by a mom who wouldn’t give them their cookies or something. It’s a gesture that made them feel like the film “hated” them, even though it’s a simple point about a hot head learning that he doesn’t know everything. But in an indulgence-laden fandom world, this is the same thing. And for defensive duds, it’s tantamount to treason. Thus, the “hardcore” fans rebelled.

Look, it’s been years now and honestly I’m tired of beating around the bush. The whole “controversy” was about how for decades now, a lot of populist art has created indulgence stories for white males and, when new pieces of art don’t, when they try to make something more thoughtful or challenging to those assumptions, then it cracks right around the same political and emotional fault lines that make up the country. There’s a reason so many of the loudest voices in fandom criticism are basically alt-right adjacent channels. And if you or any of these people swear you are just talking about your feelings about the given movie, then please, you HAVE to look at the adjacency of all this crap. You have to look at the C*mpeas of the world and how they preach a philosophy that is apparently “fan first” (read: white male indulgence first) and openly teach resentment of any drop of “auteurism” that seeks to change the property in ways that make it more expansive. Unfortunately, corporations are buying in and we are seeing what that level of naked indulgence looks like with The Book of Boba Fett. It’s the steak metaphor on overdrive. It’s the all meat diet. And god help you if there’s even ONE VEGETABLE in that mix. I’m exaggerating, but you get my point. And the truth is this is all pretty easy to talk about when it comes to popcorn fare with clear cultural-splits.

The lens gets more interesting with “artistic fare.”

I recently wrote about Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up and why even though it’s a film where we ostensibly “want the same thing” out of it (which is a funny, biting satire about climate change), it can still hit some of us so wrong. Because in this case, it’s not what it’s after. It’s the approach. To be clear, it’s a justifiably angry film. After all, we should be pissed as hell about the complete failure of our world to meaningfully respond to climate change. But as all modern therapy teaches us, anger is a valuable emotion that is fuel for productive behavior, it can just get used errantly. Which the film feels like it does. So often its just yelling and screaming in a way that feels so simple, so reductive, and most problematic of all, side-swipes so many random targets that have jack shit to do the real problem (i.e. the world blew up cause you cared about weight loss!). By turning everything into this simple reduction, it ends up feeling like Twitter: The Movie. Which is a shame because McKay’s politics and policy stances are actually pretty progressive, but the rage of the satire just gets flattened into the “blue check” middle of the road-ism that dooms us.

But this is the interesting thing to ponder about the film’s “confrontational” nature. Specifically when I think about a tweet from Clint Worthington about how Adam McKay is “the kind of social satirist who's mad *at*, rather than *for*, his audience.” So is it just that I am feeling targeted here? Am I being defensive? Or do I feel like it’s just picking bad targets along the way, even though I agree with it’s ultimate big target? This is the space where you have to really pick it all apart. The article I wrote about Don’t Look Up is about really digging into the minutiae of the various ways the film's confrontations don’t feel productive, but instead feel smug, petty, and misguided in comparison to something that actually has a meaningful drive. That’s the real argument. And in the end, all we have is an argument. But my reaction *still* gets at an interesting dynamic that tends to happen with confrontational art in general.

We often want stories that confront other people, but not us.

Because nope, we’re perfect!

I kid, but this is such a common dynamic. To wit, think about how often movies about racism are set in the past. This, by its very nature often, is designed to absolve the white audience of complicity. So often it frames these stories within the lens of the good white people who help and the super racist people that are the obvious bad guys. Thus, there’s nothing actually being confronted here. In the end, these works designed to uphold the status quo and make white audiences feel like racism was in the past and people learned their lessons, etc etc. Compare this to the incendiary movies that bring us into the moment at hand. Sure, white audiences line up to see Green Book and yet we’re left to wonder why they’ll steer clear of a film as directly confrontational in the title as Dear White People. The dynamics just push ever on. Even to this day, Spike Lee talks about how when it comes to Do The Right Thing, white people ask him “why” Mookie throws the trash can and his answer is always that no black person has ever asked him that same question. We refuse to engage the clear understanding of the confrontation in that moment. Which brings up a whole other consideration….

How much confrontation is going over our heads? How much is being directly avoided?

When I look back on my teenage years I realize how many of my favorite films weren’t films that confronted me, but were full of aspirational things I wanted to believe. I loved that a film like Magnolia gave some kind of instinctual order to the chaos of the universe in a non-religious way, but it’s a film I feel much differently about today. I also loved the way Malick’s films captured a poetic sense of the universe that I was looking to see the harshness of the world around me. Again, there’s an aspirational quality to these films that made the scary world seem like a less scary place. Meanwhile, I think about how many things I just absorbed without thinking. There was so much dysfunctional sexism in rom coms that you just take in. There was so much indulgent violence I just accepted blindly. There were so many films steeped in the patriotism of the American military that I just ate up. Because wrestling with these things is difficult, even now. Especially when you realize how much you have to suddenly think about the horrible things of the Marvel movies and how phrases “I just privatized world peace,” should genuinely terrify us, especially as a quip that never really gets unpacked in any meaningful way. Where are the things that are genuinely questioning the problems with these modern depictions? Where are the films actively questioning capitalism? Are they too dangerous? Are they a threat to the status quo?

Where’s the confrontational art?

Sadly, I feel like the most confrontational things in the modern landscape are either reactionary or erratic. I loathe to even reference it, but J*e R*gen’s podcast positions itself as this confrontational series that’s “just asking questions,” but all it does is either back up the same conservative bullshit from the past or pipe conspiracy laden nonsense. But such things are obvious and the only argument will be between the “haters” and the “defenders.” The conversation is much more interesting with a show like Euphoria, which I feel like is instinctively designed to go after the “moral panic” part of society, but it’s also much, much more complicated than that.

But to be clear, I don’t feel like I can write an in-depth analysis of the series yet because I’ve only caught the pilot and four random episodes throughout the run. But from what I’ve seen, the show seems positively unhinged. Even on an aesthetic level it feels like it’s so afraid that if it stops moving it will have to actually concentrate on something. But hey, maybe even that has a point. (I’m looking for a tweet, someone suggested the show’s style “simulated” ADHD and I can’t speak one way or another, so please feel free to speak to that sentiment below). The problem more seems to be what Levinson is interested in mining from this dark, unhinged portrait of teenage-dom. If you use the meltdown critic speech from Malcolm and Marie as a rubicon, best explained in this great piece from Robert Daniels on “how using a black actor to vent white frustration sinks…” then you see the weird tactic at the center of so much of the show, too. But in a way that’s more projecting into the characters instead of using them as a mouthpiece. It feels like it's playing naked barbies, constantly throwing characters into dangerous scenarios in this way that feels almost voyeuristic. Honestly, it seems to resent, be transfixed by, and ogle everyone in its cast (to whatever credit, it at least ogles the entire spectrum of that cast). But all of it is so messy that it's hard to pick apart with any real clarity, which might be part of the point of obfuscation. Even then, it gets some very real things right about addiction and buried resentment. Yet it’s hard to really drill down into ethos or pathos because everyone is cool and disaffected and thus not vulnerable, except when they’re full on melting down. It’s hard to get a lock on because the show *is* so many things.

Chief among them is popular. Which I don’t really think is a problem. Viewers are smart. Most “moral panic” assumes they’re not. They get that it’s ridiculous. And there’s a reason so much social media makes fun of it like “me being a teen at Euphoria high!” and getting into all the dynamics I’ve outlined. There’s also something theatrical about it all. For all the vividness, most people get that it's a soap opera. And the unhinged qualities give it a weekly train wreck quality that makes it easy to watch, mouth agape. This week Molly Lambert had a great series of tweets about the finale and the creator using the play to meta-pat itself on the back for championing the idea “art should be dangerous" and "at least it's not boring" and then she hit the complicated nail on the head by saying: “Unfortunately, I completely agree with him.” In a world with so few weekly train wrecks, it feels weirdly refreshing in some way. And I think it’s part of the reason it’s the most hate / love show going on. There’s power and tension in getting to watch something unsafe. But even with that understanding up front, I’ll always still question to what end and purpose. Moreover, it makes me realize how much of the “confrontation” conversation isn’t really political or even really about values at all.

Real artistic confrontation is so much more personal.

There’s a movie I talk about a lot called Taxi Zum Klo and I do so because it was foundational to me. I saw it in college and it’s a film about a young teacher and his normal life as a gay man. It just so happens feature a lot of hardcore gay sex. When I saw it at the time, there was something that I didn’t realize was being unhooked inside me. Sure, on some level, I knew I was attracted to men at a very young age. But on another level, I was still trying to understand how to both wrestle with and engage that. And there was something about watching that film the shook me. In a way it felt scary. But it was also ransfixing. And yet in the end, it also felt somehow right. But I didn’t know how to talk about it at first. In the immediate aftermath I think I intellectualized my response and talked about the power of this scene or that. But years later, I see it as this thing that absolutely helped get me comfortable watching gay sex, which opened the path to much, much more.

But that’s the whole thing: It’s a process. Confrontation itself isn’t the be all and end all. It’s a step. And often a confusing one with various levels of denial and embrace. One where so much of its power has to do with the ins and outs of our lives’s journey. Kenneth Lonergan is probably my favorite writer on the planet these days, but what would I think of his work when I was teenager? I don’t know. Would Margaret have hit TOO damn close? Would Manchester by the Sea have seemed too sad and hopeless? All I know is that as an adult who has self-created so much loss in my life, that film confronts and rocked me to my core, just by telling this deeply personal story about life, depression, barriers and all the positive and negative things I really needed to accept. And of course they had to set it where my dad lived, the lousy jerks!

To use a word from Lonergan’s work, confrontation isn’t always strident. Sometimes a film changes people’s minds about racism / homophobia not by confrontation at all, but by showing full, rich, lived in characters that are the antithesis of whatever stereotype a viewer might expect. And sometimes a work like A Short Film About Killing literally helps gets the death penalty abolished in its country, not by showing some obvious case of an innocent being swept up in the system, but instead by ironman-ing the argument and showing how even in the case of a murderous young sociopath, there is still such ugly waste in propagating death upon death. There’s no one way to work any of this. Because “confrontational art” is an endlessly refracting prism that perhaps has more to do with us than the art itself.

And that’s okay. Because one of the things I get more comfortable with in writing as I get older is writing essays that don’t really have an answer or a cool theory, but more just just highlight a line of thinking. “Confrontational art” is just a parameter; a wedge to examine your own internal or external conversations about why a story might be hitting you a certain way. At the center, the same questions: what do you want? Why do you want that? And most of all, using those questions to take a deep look at the framework of inclusion. I often think about the reflexivity of being in a comedy room. One where you can have some jerk go up there and start making horrible jokes or something and, of course, the crowd laughs. In that setting, you feel alien. And you feel the pressure to “go along with the joke” or else you’re grinding the room to a halt. But what a lot of these same reactionary comedians fail to recognize is that if they were in some alt comedy room and some comic was making fun of the privilege of white guys, would they miss the reflexive nature of these two scenarios? Would they feel “hated?” Or would they likely ignore the confronting nature of this scenario and chock it up to, “well, they’re not funny,” which is just a failure to realize how relative funny is?

But it is here we recognize that “moving” moments are relative too. So is sadness and joy and love. There are so many things that get us to question and unlock whatever powerful feeling is resting inside, even when it seems like art at its most trivial. But above all else, when wrestling, we just have to take the extra moment and think. Because in the end, most confrontations are about something else…

And that’s the kind of person you want to be in response to it.

<3HULK