I'm trying to find an essay, research, or any deeper analysis about why some people, most often conservatives, don't understand film. One of my FB friends posted this meme and it got me thinking about this phenomena.
Some people watch a film* and take the characters and the story completely at face value. They don't see any deeper message from the director. They don't understand that Goodfellas for example, is not a film about a couple of cool guys. Scorsese is not endorsing their behavior or their values.
Any help diving deeper into this topic is appreciated.
*By the way, you could say the same for literature, but since most people don't read past high school. I wanted to focus my question on film.
ETA: Thanks everyone for engaging with me. I've been a lurker and commenter since the early Reddit days, this was my first post.
As a hobbyist fiction enjoyer (only being semi-sarcastic here) I agree with the sentiment. But. A lot of these characters are cool. Sure, they're pieces of shit. But a lot of them also get to live out people's wildest dreams. Even if it all comes crashing down in the end, these films make such a spectacle of the drug-fueled ragers or the machiavellian violence or the suave high-life that these character live through that it can be easy to forget you're watching an old-school fable about the evils of greed. I've never even seen Wolf of Wallstreet but the only thing I know about it, the part that's stayed in the popular conscious, is Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill having fun extravagant coke parties.
It's not like Macbeth where the parts I remember from it are the tragedy as Macbeth learns his wife is dead and later lives to see the witches prophecy fulfilled, cruelly twisted. Half of Macbeth's runtime is not taken up with Macbeth fucking hot chambermaids and drunkenly singing about how good it is to be king. If it were it woulda sent the wrong message.
Though I think some of the examples from the meme are better than others. I don't know how anyone could watch more than the first episode of Mad Men and think Don Draper was someone to aspire to. And the Joker. I liked Joker but I can't imagine anyone seeing the film and really identifying with the guy. I also think Goodfellas' message is pretty clear because those guys never even made it to the really extravagant stuff. But like the most recent Great Gatsby probably isn't clear enough because all people remember is the party.
See also The Big Short, where it cast a bunch of people trying to profit off the implosion of the housing bubble as rougish antiheroes who knew everyone was fucked and decided, perhaps against their better natures, to get theirs. Could they have really done anything about it? I guess not. But they were still pieces of shit who chose to prosper off the suffering of the people. It's kinda fucked the movie casts them in a sympathetic light. Yet when I think of that movie, what's the first thing I think of? The nice suits. The fancy offices. I think about what I would do with all the money in the world. I think of Margot Robbie when I should be thinking about the Robber Barons of Wall Street.
So my theory is it's a problem of framing. Sure, these movies go "oh yeah, and then these people were fucked and had miserable lives ever after" but they don't always dwell on that the way something like Mad Men does so what people take away is all the fun cool stuff.
Yes, usually the comeuppance happens in the last act of the film, often only lasting a few minutes. The funny thing about the coke parties from Wolf of Wall Street is those are all fictional scenes that had to be shot. So when you think about it, filming that and trying to keep up your energy level for the scene, multiple times for multiple cameras, is pretty exhausting. Just like the party itself.