Danielle Mitalipov (MBA ’25) analyzes post-pandemic films and what they ask of audiences.
During the pandemic, the nostalgic stories of years past kept me sane as the months of the pandemic crawled by. Lest that sound too poetic, I was just looking for quick comfort from the greatest hits of Tumblr 2013: my well-worn copy of The Secret History, Arctic Monkeys’ entire discography on shuffle, and reruns of Doctor Who, to name a few. I don’t think I was alone – social media was flooded with comments, both tongue-in-cheek and melancholy, that everyone was reverting to their teenage selves.
In between all this, I was mostly on my phone. As I scrolled Twitter one day, I came across a New York Times article that was puzzled as to why Gen Z was suddenly streaming The Sopranos during lockdown. Having just started the show myself, I was intrigued. According to the article, our sudden interest in Tony Soprano’s trials and tribulations was no coincidence. Critics argued that the show was about the banality of an empire in decline–the host of the popular socialist podcast “Chapo Trap House” was cited by as saying “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”
Interesting, I thought, but perhaps a bit dramatic – couldn’t it just be that young people were trapped at home, and new art wasn’t being released anymore? If anything, it seemed the entire country was trying to avoid politics given that daily life was suddenly flooded with it. Personally, the only fan analysis of The Sopranos I had been interested in was watching “sopranos but just gabagool (extended cold cut edition)” on YouTube. I wasn’t getting much of my information from cultural critics on what I was watching, and I certainly wasn’t getting any from some snotty leftist podcast that was deemed the godfather of the “dirtbag leftism” subgenre. I didn’t even want to learn what dirtbag leftism was.
Gradually, though, the world came back to a sort of uneasy normal. And suddenly the movies were back! The excitement on social media was palpable, and after thinking some more about that Sopranos article, I decided to do my own analysis of the new releases.
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Having not watched the 1986 movie, I hesitated to buy a ticket for 251 minutes of planes doing cool stuff and missing references to characters from the original. Then again, that wasn’t too different from watching the latest Marvel movie, so I went for it and, to my surprise, I loved it.
What made Top Gun: Maverick an excellent post-pandemic flick was that it didn’t try to subvert expectations. It was a simple crowd pleaser, which was comforting in the same way those reruns were during lockdown: we knew what to expect. On the other hand, the years prior to 2020 felt dominated by more ambiguous and confusing media. In retrospect, all those A24 horror movies felt like a sick experiment to see how unsettled audiences would be by a story that was all climax with zero resolution. Nobody wanted more movies where the real terror was some abstract concept like grief or trauma. Top Gun got it right: they didn’t bring the troubles of the outside world into the theater. It would have been a mistake to grapple with some social ill, like having Pete Mitchell suffer combat-related PTSD or have some contrived revelation about the military-industrial complex. Instead, Top Gun mostly was just Tom Cruise doing cool stuff in airplanes–and audiences loved it, including me. Even though I knew the contours of the plot that would unfold, the movie’s climax was delightful, even if anticipated. I barely contained a whoop when Rooster, who hadn’t been the fondest of his Top Gun peers, saved the day. They were a real team now–not just that, but a family (I’d expected this too, thanks to The Fast and the Furious)
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022)
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is a stylish teen slasher movie starring Gen Z victims. Since the trailer is littered with the language of social activism that had been everywhere at school, I expected more political content than Top Gun. There was plenty of course, but to my surprise, the movie seemed to be making fun of the lingo that had been adopted by the new generation. In one scene, our remaining characters started to quibble in the bloody aftermath of their harrowing night. I braced myself for the daggers to come out, both verbally and literally, since the killer still had yet to be revealed. As the argument reaches a fervor pitch, Alice (Rachel Sennott) claims that Jordan (Myha'la Herrold) character is merely cosplaying as poor to maintain moral superiority over her wealthy friend group. “You parents are upper middle class,” she sneers while somehow perfectly maintaining her vocal fry. Jordan, who has spent the entire movie mercilessly mocking the class privilege of her friends, suddenly shrinks. “That’s not true,” she protests weakly, her voice shaking. When Alice drops the mic that Jordan’s parents, in fact, “teach at a university,” all Jordan can do is whimper “It’s public.” Riotous laughter ensued, half due to the hilarity and half from shock. Like the aforementioned A24 horror movies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies subverted our expectations, but this time the subversion was pleasant because the subversion helped ease our dread, not grow it. The twist of the movie is that the social tension of the glamorous friend group isn’t as disturbing as we feared. In the end, it amounted to little more than a petty power struggle among some vapid teens, who try to win arguments by lobbing therapy-speak at one another. Phew–more comedy than horror!
“Barbenheimer” (July 2023)
Riding the wave of great movies, I knew what I needed to see next. Twitter had already settled on its next great event: Greta Gerwig (!) was making a Barbie movie with Ryan Gosling (!!!), which would come out on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s (!) big comeback starring Cillian Murphy (!!!) Oppenheimer. The anticipation made sense given not just the comical juxtaposition but also that, yet again, we knew what was coming: Barbie would be a fun movie following the well worn sequence of the hero’s journey, and Oppenheimer was a Nolan movie, which meant it would be something convoluted for us to argue about on Reddit.
But something was different this time. I’d had fun coming out of Barbenheimer weekend, but there was also a vague sense of unease. Was there a coherent feminist message in Barbie? Did Oppenheimer grapple with the morality of his role in the Manhattan Project, or was it meant to be up to the audience. Alas, that terrible beast with many names was back–grappling with our violent past, accepting ambiguity, coming to wildly different conclusions about the movie’s message that were (gasp) political!
And then they tried to cancel Oppenheimer.
Or maybe it was just that I started seeing lots of opinions about the movie on what was now annoyingly known as X.com. Some criticized Nolan’s focus on Oppenheimer’s guilt while seemingly ignoring Japanese citizens, who were the true victims. Others shot back that gratuitously showing the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki burn alive would be nothing more than trauma porn and, additionally, that focusing exclusively on Oppenheimer’s perspective made sense because it was a biopic, not a history textbook. Some agreed but argued that this meant biopics were a failed artform that should be abandoned, except perhaps in the cases of downtrodden and unsung heroes. And, to my surprise, I not only had my own opinions, but wanted to shout them into the digital world. I had that most base of human desires, one I last felt before March of 2020: the desire for heated discourse.
Many on social media tried to brush this as manufactured debate. Faux activists and film connoisseurs were being obnoxious on social media–what else was new? They could have their silly quibbles, but it wouldn’t change a thing. Most theatergoers wouldn’t let that detract from their desire to have fun–in fact, they could have even more fun at the expense of the self-serious Twitter accounts. Besides, they couldn’t take Barbie from us!
And then they tried to cancel Barbie. After ignoring it initially so as to avoid irritation, I eventually attempted to synthesize the arguments on social media as follows:
“Was America Ferreira’s monologue really revolutionary feminism, or just pandering to audiences with a palatable version of feminism? Even if it was the latter, couldn’t it serve the purpose of educating younger audiences on the topic? Maybe–but was the basic core message of Barbie actually feminist? For example, why does Ken have so much screen time and his own musical dance number? Ryan Gosling is a brilliant comedic actor, but so is Margot Robbie–do we just not find women funny? Ok fine, we can have a fun dance sequence, but why does Barbie deliver a heartfelt apology to Ken? He literally brought patriarchy to Barbie Land, not to mention evicted her from her home! Sure, we should be cognizant of the ways men suffer under patriarchy too. But does that detract from the movie? Can I do both at once? Can the rest of the audience? Why are we arguing about this anyways? Everyone will find something wrong with everything. I guess art can’t be fun. I guess the movies aren’t back. Fine, screw it, let’s just GIVE UP while America BURNS DOWN AROUND US!”
I sighed–clearly at some point the exercise had stopped being a dispassionate retelling and gave way to my own confusing swirl of opinions. I closed the laptop and promised to be more objective about the next movie.
Bottoms (2023)
Bottoms, another seemingly nihilist Gen Z comedy in the vein of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, promised to be more lighthearted. It subverted my expectations in a way reminiscent of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. This time, however, the movie pulls a sleight of hand by assuring us that although bullies still beat up nerds in the world of the movie, that domination arises not because the characters are gay, or women, or people of color, but just because they’re “untalented losers” (which our lovable main characters are frequently referred to as). So although the girls will get themselves in some trouble, it won’t be the sinister kind we face just because we are girls–it will be the kind that really can be solved with a fight club. As the audience relaxed, the laughter flowed more easily, my own included.
And then the unease crept back in. At some point, the absurdity of the situations the girls find themselves in escalates such that, between laughs, I imagined the kinds of conflicting interpretations that would soon dominate my feed: Should this be funny? Can we really just have a gay, female version of Wet Hot American Summer while ignoring the obvious, i.e., the dreaded -isms?
But before I could spiral as I had about Barbie and Oppenheimer, the rug was pulled out under me. PJ (also played by Rachel Sennott), desperate for the attention of an attractive cheerleader named Brittany, sits the girls down after practice and encourages them to share moments of abuse. “Grey area stuff counts,” she quips. This time, the audience is less sure how to react–the laughs are more nervous, with some gasps mixed in. And the girls answer her, providing brief glimpses into the pain, big and small, that they suffer because of who they are. Brittany heartbreakingly admits that she has been sexually assaulted countless times. But worst of all, she argues, nobody takes her seriously because they don’t think she can fight. It’s then that the movie is flipped upside down. The bizarre parallel world the characters live in was not just a cheat code to make the comedy apolitical, but rather a tactical choice to make us laugh and to convey some insight about the real world. Both happen at the same time– PJ’s dark question to the group is funny in that it’s unexpected, and it’s a suckerpunch in that the joke is on us too, leaving us with a sinking feeling.
But from there, Bottoms somehow gets funnier. From then on, I wasn’t simply amused by these scrawny girls literally eviscerating a team full of football players. I felt joy–not because the jocks were mowed down (although that was fun), but because I felt vicariously through the girls that resistance could be joyful. It was the strange and wild joy I last experienced sometime in elementary school, when some obnoxious boy cut me in line and I challenged him to fight, fully believing my moral outrage would lead the playground fight gods to bestow victory upon me. When he backed down, I felt confidence that I could always stand up for myself, as long as I knew what I deserved and wasn’t afraid of a scuffle. At worst, I might lose a fight and suffer a few bruises.
Of course, as you get older this thought becomes painfully naive. Standing up for yourself by saying no outright when the guy who won’t leave you alone asks you out a third time has real consequences to consider–the obvious fact that you were harassed won’t matter if things come to blows. So we swallow our anger–but the dorks in Bottoms don’t have to because the stakes of losing aren’t so sinister and they’re pretty likely to come out on top, so long as they practice their uppercuts.
Seligman didn’t pull any punches about sexism, but she didn’t need to subject the women and gay people in the audience to its gory details. Instead, Bottoms invites us to imagine a different world, where the only violence they suffer is the cartoonish beatings that jocks deliver to nerds in movies, and where the only thing stopping us from fighting back is our determination to get really good at fighting. Great movies can have profound meaning and insight while also making our ribs ache.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Of course, great movies can also make us ache in different ways. Martin Scorsese’s latest release Killers of the Flower Moon has a similar yet different narrative twist as that of Bottoms. Going into the film, I was aware it focused on both the Osage people, a Native American tribe that had become wealthy after discovering oil on their land, and the white laborers and financiers who flocked to Osage land to earn money. Knowing some of the historical context, I braced myself for things to go poorly for the Osage, but Scorsese’s signature “whodunnit” style promised a fascinating and complex explanation of why they would go poorly.
Things unfolded as expected in the first portion of the movie–there are mysterious deaths among the Osage, seemingly tied to the plots of sinister banker William Hale (Robert DeNiro). When Hale’s nephew, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) marries wealthy Osage woman Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), her family members suddenly begin to die–at first, the deaths are suspicious but potentially natural. Questions immediately arise: how is Hale executing these murders, and why? What do he and Ernest stand to gain, aside from the obvious (the valuable land the Browns own)? What role will he get Ernest, who is easily manipulated but seems sincerely in love with Mollie, to play in the horrible affair?
The reveal of the film is not a twist, but rather the shock that things are actually exactly as they initially seem (spoilers to follow): Hale is of course behind the murders, and Ernest has been involved, but the “why” is far less convoluted than we might anticipate: they were doing it for the money, and all Hale has to do is outright ask Ernest to kill Mollie’s family members, and then Mollie herself, in order to inherit their wealth. A bit anticlimactic, I thought, but perhaps there would be an ingenious cover up of some sort.
There is not. When an FBI investigation begins in the last third of the movie, the case is almost immediately cracked, not just because the initial suspects were obvious (the white men married to the Brown women), but because they didn’t even bother trying to cover it up. Finally it dawned on me that there was never any reason for Hale and Ernest to bother with a more complicated and untraceable plot–nobody cared and, for years until the FBI investigation, nobody bothered to look into the deaths. The killers weren’t political masterminds playing 4D chess to outsmart the helpless Osage. They are just greedy and violent men who live in a world that rewards them for their greed and violence.
The injustice and tragedy of the situation, having been stripped by any stylized plot, made my eyes prickle and my hands shake. Then, I started to get indignant–what the hell kind of mystery could have been solved in the first fifteen minutes of the movie–the last scene began, diverging sharply from the story of Ernest and Mollie. Suddenly, we are witnessing a dispassionate “true crime” retelling of what happened to our characters–that Ernest and Hale were convicted, and that Mollie passed away alone, having lost her entire family. Scorsese himself delivers the final lines, explaining that little has changed today–Native American women are disproportionately victims of homicide and assault, which continue to go uninvestigated. Suddenly, the point becomes clear–we, the audience, are guilty ourselves by demanding to be titillated by stories like Mollie’s while pretending they take place in a world that has nothing to do with ours. Like Bottoms, Killers of the Flower Moon flips this on its head by forcing us to reckon with the fact that the two worlds aren't so different after all. Our society is implicated and therefore needs to confront this history and its modern day incarnation. Scorsese has taken it upon himself to speed along this confrontation, stating in recent interviews his regret that he has only just realized his obligation to tell stories with greater empathy. And until we are able to reckon with these stories, the moral stain of what happened to Mollie’s family, and countless other families, is one that we all share.
Reflections on post-pandemic cinema
I, like many of us, wanted movies that were familiar and fun. The reality, of course, is that not every story can be the kind of fun treat that you finish chewing on before you’ve even left the parking lot. This seems somewhat obvious, but we’d seemed to have forgotten that movies can be easy fun or they can be powerful thematically, but almost never both.
These revelations are not new, but they seem to be forgotten as quickly as they’re learned. I had chuckled during the pandemic when Twitter comics derided the notion that Covid-19 would result in the next Shakespeare. Did we really need more Shakesepare? And at any rate, weren’t we just desperately latching onto a mythical silver lining to pandemic, trying to attribute meaning to senseless tragedy? But an unflinching look at suffering and the systems that undergird it has always been the actual inheritance of art after social unrest and plagues, regardless of what audiences want. Eyerolls aside, King Lear radically reflected the chaos, suffering, and death of the Black Plague. And in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, the play Angels in America held not only the Reagan administration to account, but also every American who contributed to the tidal force of homophobia, or else failed to speak up. It scandalized the country, angering some, ignored by others. This is what defines a great movie.
A great movie helps audiences reach these conclusions through tools like silliness and violence, which serve to highlight the absurdity of the situations in the movies. In Bottoms, we laughed at the absurdity of a high school that has bullies but no structural discrimination. In Killers of the Flower Moon, we winced at the absurdity of how brutal and swiftly the Osage were murdered, and then the further absurdity of the farce that passed for justice (the latter was literally represented by Brendan Fraser cartoonishly interrupting the legal proceedings that represented my last hope for the right outcome.)
But pointing out absurdity isn’t enough. In fact, merely pointing out absurdity, or using it to entertain, is among the biggest sins a film can make, because it lets the audience off the hook. The audience might agree that yes, the world of the movie is absurd, but it has nothing to do with our world – and so the absurdity leads to detachment and cynicism. Great movies like Bottoms and Killers of the Flower Moon use the scalpel of analysis to show that the rules of the fictional world aren’t actually so different from the rules governing our own lives. The absurdity we are laughing at is the absurdity of our own world, which means the resistance we find so delightful could also be our own.
Ultimately of course, it is up to us in the audience to choose to carry on in the task of reckoning that great movies propel us towards, rather than choosing cynicism. And not choosing cynicism is hard, not because we come into the world cynical but because we quickly learn that ignoring or pretending to be unmoved by suffering is the only way we can keep moving. The world helps teach us this lesson – our parents tell us that “life isn’t fair” when we come to the horrifying realization that we have to kill animals to eat meat, and teachers tell strange jokes about how life’s only guarantee is death and taxes. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve continued to strengthen these defenses. During the pandemic, that meant I had to avoid articles and social media posts about the Covid-19 death toll, the wildfires right outside my home in Oregon, the protests against police brutality, and the myriad of ways things were somehow even worse in other parts of the world. After being battered daily by the consequences of these issues, choosing to engage more of them seemed like masochism.
But some of the incredible cinema coming out of the pandemic has changed my mind and inspired me to choose to try to understand, if not solve, the world’s problems, and to do this even in the face of absurdity and pain. I can’t help but think of a short story I read in the last philosophy class of my undergraduate career–one of the last difficult texts I read before lockdown. In Good Old Neon, David Foster Wallace is both author and, it is eventually revealed, main character. He spends the majority of the story trying to construct a narrative that will help him understand why a former classmate committed suicide. In the last few lines Wallace falters, realizing the philosophical impossibility of empathizing with another person through this sort of exercise:
“David Wallace [is] also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere...the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of [Wallace] commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’”
Danielle Mitalipov (MBA ’25) is an RC interested in scaling climate technology and renewable energy generation. She is involved in organizing the Climate Symposium and a Student Sustainability Associate (SSA). Prior to HBS, she studied philosophy at Stanford University, and led merchandising for a global brand at adidas. Outside of school, she is usually watching the latest release at the Coolidge Corner Theater and, after getting inspired by Bottoms, has joined a fight club (jiu-jitsu).