Projecting Profundity

I am known as a bit of a movie hater. This is ironic, since I love movies. But it’s true that almost all the buzzy new releases that have everyone else salivating into their popcorn tubs fall flat for me.

I watch them all anyway, of course–because what better hobby can there be in the 21st century but content consumption–and then must justify my dislike to others who have seen and enjoyed them.

When navigating such conversations, I try to abandon my deeply ingrained tendency toward antagonism and argumentativeness (thanks, high school debate), and understand why the other person liked what was an objectively bad film. About half the time, the answer is simply “Timothee Chalamet” and I can move on with my life. Sometimes, though, I end up having an interesting, complex, sophisticated conversation about themes and concepts that were not interesting, complex, sophisticated, or often even present in the film itself.

I first noticed this phenomenon during the months-long sociocultural fever dream that was Barbie. I have never attended a rave with a crowd of former white collar convicts, but I did work at a movie theater during Barbenheimer and I suspect the two situations share more similarities than differences.

The movie came out when the COVID pandemic was still a fresh memory. We had been cooped up–physically and intellectually–for so long that we were jumping on cultural bandwagons and using them as life rafts. We were transforming molehills into our personal Everests. We were ready to go out and have an amazing time and shout it from the rooftops until everyone else joined in.

The only problem is that Barbie is a bad movie. And hey, that’s okay! Plenty of people like bad movies, and plenty of people with bad senses of humor liked Barbie. I have no beef with people having bad opinions.

But I watched Barbie, and cannot imagine a movie with less interesting things to say about modern feminism. The movie is a collection of scenes and shots intended to go viral on social media, with the loosest of connecting threads between them. The movie’s “thesis,” such as it is, is literally stated verbatim by America Ferrera’s character and has all the nuance and three-dimensionality of the stick figure “Men” and “Women” signs outside gendered restrooms. Even Greta Gerwig, who directed the movie, seemed to acknowledge this. When asked in interviews about why she made any particular choice, the answer is almost always “we just did it in the moment because we thought it was funny.”

And once again, for the people in the back, I actually have no issue with that type of movie. I don’t think all films necessarily need to have complex or interesting messages, and although Barbie isn’t my style of humor, there are plenty of dumb comedies I enjoy. But what confused me about Barbie was the number of people who genuinely believed it to be insightful or profound. I had countless conversations about the meaning someone derived from the movie, or the things it made them think about in their own life or in the world as they saw it. I greatly enjoyed these conversations, and most of the time, I resonated with the meaning the person was explicating. I even rewatched Barbie to see if I had missed something the first time around.

But the conclusion I came to is that the meaning and the insight and the profundity that many viewers were contemplating after watching the movie, didn’t actually appear in the movie at all. The movie is about feminism, in an unsubtle hammer-meet-nail kind of way. Interested viewers, who were actively looking for things to think deeply about and immerse their intellect in, were independently pondering interesting concepts related to feminism, and because they were doing that during and after watching Barbie, they imagined that the movie itself was elucidating those concepts. When I asked them to identify specific lines or elements of the movie that were nuanced or complex, they rarely had an answer. Instead, they would pick a very simple aspect of the film and relate it to their lives in an interesting way. From that connection–from their lived experience and own thought processes–something profound was forged.

Since Barbie, I have noticed this happening with countless other critically and commercially-acclaimed movies. And there is nothing per se wrong with this (if I keep saying that enough it must be true!). Thinking complex thoughts is good and valuable, whether those complex thoughts derive purely from your own consciousness, or whether they are embedded in something you read or watch. But I am still a little sick of the movies and creators themselves getting the credit for complexity that they actually had little hand in.

If all art is a conversation between the creator and the viewer, these dialogues are extremely one-sided. They are like the conversations I had with my mom after school when I was a bratty teen–she would ask interesting questions about my day, and I would respond with either one-word answers or not at all. If I had answered “fine” about how my science test went, and then my mom immediately afterwards thought up a cure for cancer, that would be cool–but I certainly would deserve no credit for the discovery.

And of course, nothing matters before I coin a term for it, so I’ve been calling this phenomenon “projected profundity.” There is something interesting to me about the pervasiveness of projected profundity in the modern discourse.

I think most modern content and entertainment is not stimulating enough for the average human intellect. One has to look no further than the Skibidi Toilet trend on TikTok to find evidence supporting this assertion. There is an endless vat of shallow content to consume, and most people consume it in large quantities–but that doesn’t actually satisfy our natural human instinct to think critically and have interesting interior lives. When we project profundity, we are filling that gap by grasping at the spindly cultural straws most readily available to us. This idea is, to me, an optimistic one. Much has been written about the declining attention spans, literacy skills, and comprehension ability of Americans, so I find it cheering to think we are naturally wired to seek out and participate in complex thought.

The dangers are twofold: first, artists and creators are no longer appropriately incentivized to create good art. Instead, they are incentivized to create any art, and roll the dice on whether it will strike at the right moment and reach the right audience to receive credit for profundity. This will lead to less good art, which will in turn prompt viewers to project profundity onto even worse content, and the cycle perpetuates.

I’m not even sure the second danger is a danger. There is something that makes me squeamish about the dissolution of a true connection between thought and the basis for that thought. Maybe it’s because projected profundity means not being critical enough, and less critical thinking is pretty much always a negative for global progress.

That said, though, I think it’s nice that we are subconsciously looking for the best in the content we consume. And given the choice between enjoying a movie and not enjoying a movie, I’m not sure it’s dangerous when people opt for the former. Maybe my handwringing stems more from FOMO than anything else. As a person who constantly wants to participate in the culture but often misses the mark, I wish I had a better understanding of what interests and galvanizes and inspires large swaths of the population (such understanding would also help me optimize my content for virality and make my first million, of course).

But while I’m waiting for my fairy godmother to grant that wish, I guess I’ll keep working on my doctoral thesis about the most profound piece of art of them all: Twilight.