What Movies Say vs. What They Show

In the world of movies, there is maybe no question as fraught and strange as that of what a film "means." The shortest and best answer to this question is also the most unsatisfying: it is exactly what it means, or, it means exactly what it is.

In other words, if the filmmaker were trying to write an essay about a topic, they would simply have written that essay. But instead they made a film, and that film, from first frame to last, is a unified (which isn't to say always successful) vision.

And in this unified vision, the question of meaning is complicated. If the filmmaker wanted to ensure that their work "means" feminism, for example, they could simply have chosen to make a film that shows a feminist reading an essay on feminism. Or, more succinctly, they could have made a film that showed a feminist saying "feminism" over and over again. (Many adventurous filmmakers indeed gesture in these directions; see Derek Jarman's Blue from 1993 or much of James Benning's work – Deseret from 1995 is a good example – if you're interested.)

But as soon as we reflect on this idea – say, a feminist repeating the word "feminism" over and over again – we see the difficulty: what, exactly, would make this a feminist film? What if it were instead an ironic film, satirizing some perceived stridency of feminists? How would we decide which it was? (Compare it, for example, to an imaginary film in which a Trump supporter simply chanted "Trump" over and over again: many folks out there would want to read this as a searing indictment of conservatism, or conformity, or whatever else they wanted to read it as.)

So talking about "meaning" means making interpretations. This is a complicated and nuanced process, involving things like trying to understand what a character is feeling, working through the relationship of a single image to the whole fabric of the film, attempting to articulate the relationship of the film to the world outside the film, etc.

Significantly, making interpretations in this way also means being open to ambiguity, and to the idea that if you're not wrong now, you certainly may be in the future.

Few of us, I would hazard, understand a movie the same way we do when we are thirty or forty that we did when we were twenty. This doesn't mean that any of those understandings are wrong, necessarily, simply that understanding and meaning change with time and experience; what was once seen as a statement of liberal idealism (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) might now be seen as a racially repressive wolf in sheep's clothing, and what was once seen as an idealistic and patriotic statement about the power of the people confronting a corrupt political system (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) might come to be seen as a rather naïve celebration of a political system that is functionally unworkable.

So ambiguity is key. And one of the difficulties of living in a moment when everything is politicized is that ambiguity has gone out of style. Not just the commentariat but many filmmakers themselves seem to embrace the notion that their films must embody political meanings, or make political statements. (Whether or not this is a sincere attempt to forward a set of values or a monetary and careerist ploy to increase ticket sales and trumpet their own relevance seems to me to be something best tackled on a case-by-case basis.) And this is where things get interesting, and fun, for those of us who like to think about film.

Because it is not always the case that what a film says and what a film shows are the same thing.

Take, for example, Captain America: The Winter Soldier from 2014. What the film seems to want to say has a lot in common with a rather flabby, commonly-made liberal critique of America. With its story of its titular hero figuring out that his own government is involved in nefarious operations around the world, the film garnered a lot of "this is what real political entertainment looks like" accolades at the time of its release.

In a representative piece, Darren Franich, writing for Entertainment Weekly, noted that "when, in the middle of the movie, Captain America becomes a fugitive from his own government, it means something. ('Captain America Vs. America.')" And Franich quotes with approval Captain America's proclamation – when he learns that his country is preparing a system that can sniff out wrongdoing from the chaos of internet data and prevent crimes before they happen – that "You hold a gun on everyone on Earth and call it protection. This isn’t freedom. This is fear."

The case seems sound. The film wants to be about, and tells us that it is about, the dangers of government surveillance systems run amuck, and the perils of American military adventurism. But what does the film show us? Here, things get a bit more complicated.

First off, the primary entertainment draw of the film rests on titillating violence. Throughout the course of the story, the good Captain dispatches legions of baddies in fantastically inventive ways, choreographed to the inch and precisely filmed for maximum thrilling impact. It is, in many ways, astoundingly violent. And yet, like virtually every superhero film, it works assiduously to make its violence not all that violent.

We are not asked to consider the home life or marital status of the random henchman who dies by having his skull crushed (does this fellow have a partner or kids who will be devastated by his death? is he perhaps an ex-soldier with PTSD who's just trying to figure out a way to make ends meet?), nor are we treated to any of the gouts of blood and viscera that actually result when high-velocity bullets exit human bodies, or explosions tear limbs from torsos.

Beyond this, on the symbolic level, what the film shows us (as opposed, again, to what it tells us) is a citizenry that is entirely powerless and in need of defense by super-powerful people whose abilities and costumes both set them definitively aside from "normal" folks.

These "heroes" are aligned against similarly powerful people who are "evil." In other words, it encourages us to believe in a binary world of "good guys" and "bad guys" in which those of us without a lot of power must rely on those of them who possess a lot of power. One does not have to stretch one's imagination to see the ways in which this exact set of symbols could be used by anti-democratic forces to convince people to believe that their charismatic, powerful figurehead is the only person who can save the world, regardless of the standing norms of society and politics. It is not an accident that totalitarians extol force and wear uniforms.

For an example running in another direction, one might think through Get Out, from 2017. Rightfully lauded on release for its exploration of race and the experience of being black in America, the film tells the story of a black photographer who falls into the clutches of a white family that is involved in a terrifying and long-running procedure of stealing the bodies of black people by implanting their own (white) consciousnesses into those bodies. The film is a kind of "social horror" tale, using its allegorical content to lead its audience into an awareness of some of the horrific ways the concept of race has historically played out in America and continues to do so.

This is, through both thematic content and dialogue, what the film tells us it is about. What gets less-frequently commented on, however, is the way Get Out incorporates into its cautionary parable a long-standing, regressive trope of which it is, perhaps, entirely unaware.

In this case, the "showing" – the thing that diverges from the "telling" the film engages in about its own meaning – is not simply tied up in what appears visually on the screen. It is, instead, centered on the incorporation of a long-standing narrative pattern.

This pattern, or trope, is that of the so-called "spider woman" or "black widow": a female character who uses her sexual allure to draw male characters to their doom. From early 20th Century American literature – books as otherwise different as The Maltese Falcon and The Great Gatsby put this trope through its paces – through things like the psycho-sexual thriller movie boom of the 1980s and '90s – things like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct work as interesting examples – many, many stories have been constructed along these lines.

What's worth understanding about this narrative structure, from a "meaning" standpoint, is the way it brings to light a set of subterranean fears and anxieties. Needless to say, the authors and filmmakers who make works that operate along these lines are nearly all male, and if we strip away the specifics of plot and setting, the tales they tell share a strikingly similar set of beliefs about the world. Women are the prime agents of duplicitousness, men are their primary victims, and the thing about these women that is most to be feared, the horrifying element they use in their attempts to ensnare men and lead them to their doom, is their sexuality.

Get Out fits precisely into this narrative pattern. The film's main antagonist is a woman named Rose, who lures the protagonist Chris into her family's evil machinations by seducing him. He thinks they are engaged in a real relationship, and one of the film's main horrors (from this perspective) is when he finds out that not only is the relationship a sham, she's done the same thing to many other men before him.

Which is to say that while the film tells us that its meaning is about the destructions wreaked on people by a culture founded on massive disparities in racial power, it also clearly shows us an allegiance to the kinds of stories told by men for decades, in which a ravening insecurity about female agency, and female sexual agency in particular, takes on the shape of the claim that behind all the deceit in the world lies feminine seductiveness. (Alas poor Eve in the garden, still scapegoated after all these centuries.)

So what's the point? Should we really be excoriating Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Get Out as politically regressive movies, that respectively trumpet the virtues of a super-powerful elite and the overarching duplicitousness of women, no matter what they tell us they're really about? While those are the kind of arguments that do well on Twitter, out in the real world they're next to useless, as they presuppose the kind of binary thinking that prevents any real consideration of meaning in art.

Instead, we're better off embracing complexity and ambiguity, and understanding that movies tend to be portals into those things, rather than escapes from them. We might say that Captain America: The Winter Soldier (along with much of the current superhero film cycle) is caught in a web of cultural contradiction, and that its "political" commitments are bound up in a form that tends to run counter to them. So one way to understand its meaning is as demonstration of the way our culture pushes us in two directions at once, urging us at the same time to be wary of the machinations of the people in charge and to believe that ungovernable power and violence are okay, as long as they're wielded by the right people.

Similarly, we might say that one of the meanings of Get Out is the way it demonstrates a certain blindness in the cultural discourse of our moment. In focusing so heavily on making a racially progressive political statement, it neglects to consider the nature of the older storytelling tropes it employs, which emerge directly from a long-standing reactionary male habit of finding terror – and placing blame for the world's ills – in feminine sexuality.

Or we might say something entirely different. There are, as I said, many interpretations of a movie available; some are more convincing than others, but all of them are, or should be, complicated and nuanced and provisional. And we should certainly be wary of taking at face value the things a film tells us it's about, as opposed to what it shows us, when we start opining on what it means.

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