In Two Minds: The Disconnect Between News and Film
Good Time is a film wrought with tension from the opening shot, the unrelenting hum of life in a bustling city only acting to increase the already palpable anxiety. It’s the story of a bank robbery gone wrong, and follows Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) on a night of adventure as he desperately struggles to free his brother Nick (Ben Safdie) from jail.
The characters' backstories remain shrouded in mystery. The first scene depicts Nick visibly uncomfortable in a court ordered therapy session, assumedly there for his involvement in injuring his grandma. His mental disability prevents him from being able to understand the repercussions of his actions, but as the doctor appears to make some sort of headway, Connie bursts into the room and removes Nick from it. Other than this event, there’s little else revealed about the history of the brothers.
Good Time (2017)
Connie talks Nick into a bank robbery, and that’s when things begin to unravel. But what’s never explicitly communicated is why Connie wants to rob this bank. Is it out of necessity? Is it to pay for the court proceedings? Is it to get financial support for Nick to move out from his seemingly unsupportive grandmother? Or is it just for some sort of high? These questions are never answered - instead the film leaves a bitter taste in our mouths as the actions of an able bodied man result in Nick having to navigate the social complexity of prison alone.
We are positioned to root for Connie to get his brother out of this jail. The film communicates the unforgiving nature of prison, the cruelty of putting a disabled man there alone, and the far lengths that people from lower socio economic classes are forced to go to, to earn the same privileges that those with money have (including affording bail). So how is it that a film which lapped up 4.1 million dollars at the box office manages to position us on the side of people who are so regularly vilified in the news?
Good Time is far from the only A24 movie that achieves this. In fact, a film in the top 3 highest grossing A24 films focused entirely on this, depicting a poor, black, gay man navigating life in a world designed to oppress him. Moonlight pulled in 65 million USD at the international box office, and of course earned the prestige of winning the academy award for best picture. The Place Beyond the Pines firmly places cops into the role of ‘villain’ as it communicates why those with low incomes are forced into crime. The social model of disability is critiqued in The Peanut Butter Falcon, while another academy award winning film Parasite outlines the unforgiving nature of rigid class systems and how opportunities to become successful and earn a lot of money are only afforded to those born into wealth.
Moonlight (2016)
This intensely juxtaposes what happens when you click just one button on a remote to change the channel, as the news relentlessly demonises the working class, the disabled, queer and disadvantaged. It’s never the class systems which are responsible for leading someone to commit a crime in the eyes of the mainstream media. Nor is it the colour of a person’s skin, which already marked them as criminal in the eyes of the law. Nor is it the social model of disability, which is responsible for hindering a disabled person's ability to properly secure a job. Instead it’s always just the person, and the person alone, who is at fault, and not any other system.
There’s a dichotomy in what’s being communicated to us through film, and through the news. Movies rake in millions of dollars, generate ‘oscar buzz’ and spark conversation in many different circles, for communicating issues that are so happily perpetuated by the mainstream media. After the news does a segment on the new film released, the very thing it is critiquing then gets its own section in the spotlight. How is it that we so easily fall prey to biased media coverage and propaganda, while critically consuming the stories shown to us? Why is it that we’re so much happier to accept critiques of our systems if they’re shown through the lens of fiction, as opposed to a segment on the news?
It could be that when we watch the news, the onus falls on us to do something about what’s happening. When there’s a direct point of blame, and that’s to a system we benefit from, it’s much more difficult to accept responsibility. The object is too close to us, it’s too real, and it’s too frightening to admit the repercussions our actions have in contributing to a society which remains systematically classist, ableist, and racist. However, when these same themes are communicated through fiction, it is purely down to the characters within the world. We can write them off as being ignorant for blindly following a system which is so clearly only made for one type of person to find success in. Or we can discuss the ideas raised as only theory, instead of facing the reality that it is our world.
Is it up to us to critically consume news in the same way we do film? Or are we meant to accept these two entities as entirely separate bodies? And at what point of hypocrisy do we realise that we cannot continue to root for people to succeed when they are characters, but support their downfall when we find out they’re real humans who were simply born into a system that we benefit from?