Sometimes, I’m surprised by how many people really like certain crappy thesis movies. I’m here to complain about this.

1. Good Thesis Movies

By a “thesis movie”, I mean a movie that is centrally intended to convey a certain (usually philosophical) thesis. Examples below. (Of course, you can also have thesis novels and other thesis art. But the main things I want to complain about today are movies.)

A good thesis movie is one that does well at conveying its thesis (and is reasonably good in other movie-related respects). Ideally, when you watch it, you learn something interesting and important.

Q: How can you learn something interesting and important from a fiction movie? You know that none of the events depicted happened, so how could they be evidence for anything?

A: The main way is that it activates your pre-existing knowledge about human nature, or other general aspects of the world, in a way that induces you to draw connections or inferences that you had not previously drawn. When you contemplate the fictional events, you have intuitive reactions to them based on your pre-existing general experience and understanding of the world. You sense that the sequence of events is plausible, and you draw from that certain conclusions intended by the author.

The best illustration I can think of for what I mean here (though this isn’t a movie) is from the novel Atlas Shrugged, which contains a self-contained story about a car company that tried to implement Marx’s dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” (https://theexplanationproject.fandom.com/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Twentieth_Century_Motor_Company_(told_by_Jeff_Allen,_the_tramp_on_Dagny%27s_train.) Very briefly, what happens is that people first realize that you can’t trust individuals to specify what their own abilities and needs are. So you have to have some people to evaluate other people’s needs & abilities. First it’s democratic, but that takes too long, so they move to appointing people to make the assessments. The decision-makers then of course have power over the rest of the workers. Also, everyone starts trying to prove to everyone else that they have very great needs and very low abilities. Some deliberately increase their own needs. You can imagine how things are going to go downhill from there.

When I first read the story, I learned something about socialism. Given that it was pure fiction, how could I learn anything from it? Because I already had some understanding of human beings, just from my experience with them up to that point, and the story activated that background understanding to make me draw inferences about what would happen with the Marxian dictum. As each development in the story was related, I saw, intuitively, that it made sense that that would happen. And once you notice that, you can see the kind of problem that’s going to afflict any serious attempt to realize Marx’s dictum.

(Of course, if the events in the story don’t strike you as realistic, then the story won’t work for you. If you think people in that situation would instead selflessly dedicate themselves to producing as much as possible for the collective, then you wouldn’t have any reason to draw the negative lesson about socialism. But in my case, even though Marx's principle initially sounded good to me, I could still see the plausibility of the events in the story.)

2. Crappy Thesis Movies

A crappy thesis movie is one that relies in a crucial way on unrealism.

Of course, good fiction can have all sorts of unrealistic, even impossible events. E.g., you can have a perfectly good story that features faster-than-light travel. (See most science fiction.) I’m not sure it’s even a problem per se if a story contains unrealistic characters. There could be a story about a type of person who doesn’t exist or is extremely improbable in reality, and it could still be a good story. This happens especially with villains. E.g., Hannibal Lecter or Darth Vader; real life killers are not like them.

My problem is when a movie tries to convey a philosophical thesis, and the implicit reasoning for the thesis crucially rests on the precise aspects in which the story is unrealistic. I.e., the thesis is only justified if those events are true to how the world works, and they obviously aren’t.

That’s my complaint about the following three movies (the last two are pretty famous and popular).

Monster

This was a movie about the serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Briefly, it portrays her as starting out decent, then being oppressed by society and becoming increasingly dangerous as a result. Her first killing is portrayed as a self-defense killing in response to a violent john who brutally raped her while she was working as a prostitute. She is also portrayed showing mercy on one potential victim after he reveals that he has never had sex with a prostitute.

The point of the movie, I take it, is the left-wing view of crime: people become criminals because society failed them. There but for the grace of God go we, etc. This is as opposed to the right-wing view that criminals are typically just bad people.

When I first saw the movie, I thought it was good. But when I read more, I realized that the movie was BS. Wuornos’ first killing was not self-defense. She initially claimed self-defense, then later admitted that she lied, that she killed because she simply hates people, and she would murder more people if given the chance. The incident with showing mercy for the one john was also invented. The producer explained, “It’s not a documentary. I mean in no way is it. It is a dramatic portrayal searching for kind of a greater truth rather than a … a factual truth.” (https://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=124320&page=1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/02/08/more-of-a-monster-than-hollywood-could-picture/179c7282-5e25-4eb5-8980-c72aa90efdb0/)

After I learned that, I thought it was a crappy movie. It’s not like they just simplified the story for brevity, or modified a few things for dramatic effect. They altered the fundamental facts that are relevant to the movie’s core message. If you have to completely alter what actually happened in all the crucial respects in order to portray your “greater truth”, then maybe you should consider that it’s not a greater truth at all, but a greater falsehood.

(For footage of the real Wuornos, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6a5gmbPV98.)

It’s a Wonderful Life

People have been watching this movie every Christmas since I was a child. I take the core message to be something like this: You should live your life for the sake of others, to satisfy their expectations and desires rather than your own ambitions.

The part of the movie that’s realistic supports the opposite message. That’s the part where George, after consistently sacrificing his own ambitions for other people, is miserable and on the verge of suicide. That’s all realistic. The realistic continuation from that point is that he jumps into the river and (a) dies, or (b) survives but with brain damage.

Instead, the movie has George being saved by an angel, who shows George how implausibly beneficial George’s life has been. Then in an iconic scene, the town rallies together to provide the missing money to save the Building and Loan. Oh, also, of course, the rich guy (Potter) is a mustache-twirling villain who stole from the Building and Loan.

That’s all completely unrealistic. If you wind up miserable because you’ve consistently sacrificed your own happiness throughout your life, no angel will come to save you. You also won’t turn out to have indirectly saved many people’s lives and drastically improved your entire town. And if your company is failing, the townspeople will not donate their personal money to save it. None of that stuff happens in the real world.

And all of that is crucial to the movie’s central message. Those things would have to be realistic, in order for the movie to legitimately support its thesis. So this is a crappy thesis movie.

Note: I’m not saying this shows that altruistic morality is false. But the argument that altruistic morality is correct because it will really benefit you is false. If an altruistic morality is correct, it has to be that it’s correct even though you wind up worse off if you follow it.

Gattaca

This is a popular science fiction movie about a “dystopian” future society in which almost everyone is genetically engineered. The protagonist, Vincent, is a non-engineered person who is trying to become an astronaut, despite his genetic infirmity. He deceives everyone around him in order to get selected, and he passes all the tests through sheer determination and hard work.

I take the message of the movie to be that genetic potential is not as important as personal determination (which presumably is non-genetic). With enough determination, you can overcome nature. Also, genetic engineering is bad.

Some more details: In the movie, Vincent is said to have some extremely high chance of having a heart attack early in life, due to his bad genes. His brother is genetically enhanced, yet Vincent manages to hold his own in physical contests with his brother. As children, the two have swimming contests in which they swim far out in the ocean and then back. One time, the two swim too far out, the brother starts to drown, and Vincent winds up having to save his brother. Late in the movie, they do a repeat in which Vincent saves his brother again. Vincent explains that the reason he is able to do stuff like this is that he “never saved anything for the swim back.”

The problem: That’s all obviously unrealistic, in precisely the respects that are crucial to the movie’s message. In reality, if you’re genetically predisposed to heart disease, sheer determination is not going to make you a prime candidate for a space mission. Sure, you can do some things to reduce your risk, like regular exercise, a heart-healthy diet, and appropriate drugs. But even with all this, Vincent would have a high probability of having a heart attack during the space mission, thereby placing the entire mission and the rest of the crew in danger. Though he’s the hero of the movie, Vincent is highly irresponsible and immoral.

In reality, if Vincent never saved anything for the swim back, then he would have drowned. People who disregard their personal safety and fail to plan ahead like that do not wind up miraculously succeeding. Force of will of course makes some difference to one’s performance, but it does not completely, radically alter your physical abilities. I can’t become faster than Usain Bolt if I just try really hard. And by the way, all the people competing to join a space mission would be extremely determined, so being very determined while also having far worse genes would not get someone selected.

This is a crappy thesis movie. It’s trying to convince you that genes aren’t that important by just stipulating, falsely, that that’s the case. It’s like if I try to convince you that God exists by saying, “Suppose God exists.”

Conclusion

The authors of crappy thesis movies fundamentally misunderstand what happens when someone learns from fiction. You don’t show that P is true merely by imagining a possible world in which P. To show that P, you have to invoke the audience’s pre-existing, actual-world knowledge that they haven’t yet noticed supports P.

Fake Noûs

Crappy Thesis Movies