GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Treating the Audience Like Adults.

(Warning: this essay contains movie spoilers for both “Conclave” and “Judgment at Nuremberg”)

Growing into adulthood requires many things of us, and one of those things is that when debating politics or morality, we have a grownup’s obligation to engage with the opposition’s best arguments, rather than the arguments we wish they were making.

Once upon a time, dramatic movies made for adult audiences seemed to understand this rule of growing older and wiser. Filmmakers of the past often challenged their audiences with difficult morally complicated stories that could easily have been made simpler through pure black-and-white political demagoguery. Resisting the temptation to make the lazy demagogic argument, it seems to me, was an indication that Hollywood once trusted its audience in ways that its modern counterpart rarely seems willing to do anymore.

In the world of modern messaging where the most important thing seems to be that audiences come away from a film having learned the appropriate lesson, most movies these days do not leave it to their audience to appreciate nuance, and they certainly don’t trust their audience to make the correct moral judgment when presented with villains who, while they may be wrong or even evil, have a point.

What got me thinking about this was a recent weekend of movie watching which included my first viewing of “Conclave” (2024) juxtaposed with my annual re-watch of “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

Read the whole thing.

Related: Rick McGinnis: Holy Mess: Anthony Quinn in The Shoes of the Fisherman.