As I finish up all my screenings and get ready for the televised award mess, I am trying to reflect on the unifying theme of all the movies that make up the Academy Awards of 2024. This year is about identity and the distance between our self perceived identity and the actual impact we have on the measurable world. Whether we are looking at very personal stories, like Past Lives and Maestro or globally significant narratives like Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest, everyone is weighing and measuring how we square up our perception of who we are.
I want to say that this is a good thing. In our era, we are struggling with how we feel about democracy (in America, truly, but in many places around the globe) struggling to understand the impact that AI will have on our future, trying to heal from a global pandemic where people either felt like their personal health was sacrificed to business as usual or the freedoms of the many were sacrificed to the needs of a few. I'm glad that cinema is having a moment of "who are we?" and "what does it mean to be who we are?" If we take the time to ask the questions, to ruminate on it maybe we can be more mindful about who we want to be and adjust accordingly.
Let's look to Barbie, Past Lives and The Holdovers as examples of being able to adjust. Barbie thinks she's the hero of her story and world with no concept of the troubling expectations she has imposed on the real world. Her journey is to bring these two different perceptions into alignment and find a new path forward. Ken, too, dabbles in two worlds, one of a supporting role only and one of immense privilege and must heal those two extremes within himself.
In Past Lives, we see Na Young struggling to reconcile the wish she always had for a relationship with her childhood best friend, Hae Sung, with the actual life that she has built for herself in the interim. She has the ability to adjust, without demonizing her husband, bemoaning her choices or blaming anyone, including herself. She can reconcile these disparate versions of herself even though it is heartbreaking to do so.
In The Holdovers, we have two characters who have relegated themselves to outcast status, preferring not to be liked or at least preferring not to try to be liked and feel the sting of failure. Angus is ready to give up on himself based on his perceived fate of insanity and the lack of support from his mother. Professor Hunham has given up on his own life feeling he only deserves this tiny little corner of world, the one place where someone once believed in him. By the end, they both are able to step outside of their perceived smallness and give themselves a chance to be something more. These three movies give us hope that we can stand up to the task of reconciling who we think we are with who we want to be.
American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall and Maestro highlight the personal perils of not reconciling one's own identity fully. Maestro is the most difficult movie to fit into this thematic framework, but if we look at Bernstein's self perception as a passionate, free wheeling and joyful creator while also seeing the pain and loneliness his behavior inflicts on the person he loves the most, we can see a potential downfall. He has cast himself as such a main character in his own life that he fails to see the damage he is capable of inflicting.
In Anatomy of a Fall, the challenge is different. If your identity is strong and fully realised but can then be picked apart and questioned in the name of justice, where does that leave you? Are any of us prepared to stand up in court and defend our pettiest moments, our most non-traditional behaviors, our lowest points in order to be seen as a whole human being? And what if our life and family are on the line the whole time? If a jury cannot embrace your self perception and instead imposes another identity on to you, how can you defend your life?
American Fiction is such a pure demonstration of perceived identity, as a whole industry chooses to see an entire group of people through only one lens. Monk, a black author must tell "real" stories of drugs and illegitimate children and inner city struggles or risk being seen as inauthentic. Knowing his own self perception and identity don't measure up becomes a real bar to his financial advancement when his family needs him the most. So his question becomes one of what it means to sell out, to indulge an outsider's version of identity in order to pay the bills.
The big warnings come form Killers of the Flower Moon, Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer. Oppie views himself as a scientist, free from political machinations. His job is to discover the means to a weapon first because, without question, we don't want the Nazis to have the power. His short-sightedness comes from believing that he knows how the weapons will be used moving forward and not considering what it means to unleash this power on humanity for all of its harrowing future. By the time he reconciles his perception and the reality of what he has wrought, it's too late.
Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest both deal with delusional self perception; the conviction that, due to a perceived inherent superiority, these main characters are the actual good guys. Rudolph Hoss in The Zone of Interest is simply doing a job that needs to be done for the betterment of society, never pausing to consider his own monstrosity. He is utterly and terrifyingly convinced that he is a good person. Likewise in Killers of the Flower Moon, Hale and Burkhart believe themselves to be good people with justifiable self interests. They are capable of loving, caring for and helping members of the Osage nation to a point but their perception as members of a more important segment of society allows them to also murder the same people whenever it benefits their own futures.
These three movies serve to warn us. You can think you are on the right side of things and be irreversibly, disastrously wrong.
Lastly, let's look at Poor Things which is set apart from the others by virtue of it being about the acquisition of self perception as a sort of science experiment. Bella Baxter is an adult blank slate, with no parents, no history, no context for anything other than a father figure (God) who is a scientist. She learns about the world through experience and experimentation and we get to watch her slowly create an identity as she moves through the world. Bella doesn't have to reconcile her perceived identity vs. her real identity as those two are already completely aligned. Instead, the rest of the word has to reconcile what to do with Bella, a human being incapable of shame or manipulation. The audience finds joy in the purity of this process. Bella is something we would all like to be, a human without the shackles of convention or expectation, a true individual and free spirit.
I'm inspired by these narratives to ask harder questions about where my own motives come from, to adjust my own self perceptions and maybe set my goals for myself a little more audaciously. And to do all that while trying to perceive others with kindness, empathy and grace, understanding that they too are trying to reconcile who they thought they would be with who they are.
