Films Are Negative for a Reason, and It Is Not the Reason I Am

People who know my views sometimes tell me I am a pessimist, and then, in the same breath, complain that films have become too dark. I want to separate the two, because they are opposite phenomena wearing the same expression.

Why Films Are Negative

Start with the films, because the explanation is mechanical.

A film needs something to happen, and the only thing a camera can make happen is conflict. Two people who agree are not a scene. A city that works is a background. A marriage that is fine is the first ninety seconds before something goes wrong. Conflict is not one option available to the form; it is the form. Take it out and you have a documentary about weather.

So films select for negativity the way a fishing net selects for size. Betrayal, loss, violence, injustice, the world ending, the family collapsing. Not because film-makers are gloomy, but because those are the events that generate the next scene, and a film is a machine for generating the next scene.

This is why it is a mistake to read the darkness of cinema as a report on the world or on the people who make it. It is a report on the constraints of the medium. Painting had the same bias toward the dramatic for the same reason, and the novel before it. The camera merely made the selection more efficient.

The Consolation Underneath

There is a second thing to notice about film negativity, and it is that it is almost never negative about us.

The bad things in films happen for reasons. The villain has a motive, the disaster has a cause, the betrayal has a backstory. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, the darkness is there so that it can be overcome: the hero prevails, the relationship survives, the world is saved with two minutes to spare. Even the tragedies flatter their audience by insisting that the suffering meant something.

I have argued elsewhere that fiction consoles while science indicts. Screen negativity is a special case. It is darkness deployed as a setup for reassurance. The audience leaves having felt something terrible and then something better, and the net effect is not pessimism at all. It is the opposite: a renewed sense that things work out, that people are basically decent, that the arc bends toward justice.

Film negativity is manufactured, and it is manufactured in the service of comfort.

What My Pessimism Is About

Now the other thing.

The pessimism I actually hold is not about people. I think most people are roughly as decent as circumstance allows, which is the only thing you can reasonably think after watching how behaviour tracks incentives. It is not a mood, either. I am not gloomy about the weather or my dinner.

It is a conclusion about systems. About what happens when you put ordinary people inside a hierarchy that rewards loyalty over honesty. About what a market does when the product is one you cannot decline to buy. About what a government does with an emergency. About the fact that an institution almost never dies, however clearly it has stopped serving its purpose. Those are not stories about villains. There is no villain. That is the whole problem, and it is exactly the problem a film cannot show, because a film needs a face.

Evidence-based pessimism is about structures that produce bad outcomes from good people. Cinematic negativity is about bad people who are eventually defeated by good ones. They point in opposite directions. One says the individuals are the problem and can be fixed; the other says the individuals are fine and the arrangement is the problem.

Why the Confusion Matters

The confusion is not harmless, and here is why.

A culture raised on the cinematic version learns to look for the villain. When something goes wrong, it asks who did it, and the answer, once found, feels like an explanation. Replace the villain and the story is over. This is the reflex that produces the endless replacement of politicians, executives, and officials while nothing about the position they occupied changes.

A culture that had absorbed the structural version would ask a different question: not who, but what arrangement made this the likely outcome, and who would do the same in that seat. That question has no scene in it. Nobody will film it. But it is the one that would actually help.

So when I am told I am a pessimist like the movies, I decline the comparison. The movies are optimists who enjoy a scare. I am something less entertaining: someone who thinks the scare is mostly misdirected, and that the real trouble is in the part of the picture that never gets a close-up.