Realistically drawn characters will contain ambiguity. Artists will often lean into this ambiguity, where the "point" of the work isn't to present a tidy moral, but shine light on a difficult conundrum that we all must wrestle with, like "how much crap are you willing to put up with to be able to take a really sick drum solo?"
Often artists do this knowing that audiences are trained on simplistic good guy-vs-bad guy entertainments, and that encountering ambiguity will on occasion cause them to have an uncomfortable and frustrating reaction called "thinking." Artists who succeed in tricking their audiences into thinking about stuff experience a perverse delight in their resulting confusion.
I am not sure that Boon Joon Ho intended a “poor people good; rich people bad” reading. I think it is a character study, a comedy, and a tragedy, not a polemic (though I agree some audiences received it that way). If anything the message is a much more modest “sucks to be poor! Makes you nuts and miserable!”
Speaking of Boon Joon Ho (spoilers for Snowpiercer), the actual message of that movie is “keep the poors down or they will end human life on Earth” lol. So if you are right he is a repeat offender!
I think if there is a political through-line to Bong Joon-Ho's movies, it isn't so much "Keep the poors down," but more like, "Keeping the poors down too hard causes them to do terrible things that ruin everything for themselves and everybody else." Basically, oppression causes revolution, but revolution is also bad.
That’s an interesting reading but more plausible for Parasite (which is also a much better movie). In Snow Crash the ending seems to be striking a hopeful tone, despite being ACTUALLY incredibly bleak, and the rebellion is portrayed as consistently heroic except for the evil secret collaborators, IRRC.
Also: Dead Man Walking, and probably every other anti-death-penalty film: ends up demonstrating that the main (Sean Penn) character arrived at a measured assessment of his own misdeeds only as a result of being sentenced to death. Ergo: implicit argument for the death penalty.
A lot of the conservative-leaning criticism of OBAA is a bit weird. They seem to want it to be a balanced electoral treatise instead of a movie about specific characters. They seem to not realize how ridiculous everyone in the movie is supposed to be. You're not supposed to want anyone in the movie in charge of anything important. The movie doesn't hide the fact that di Caprio's character is a self-destructive idiot and a burnout, but conservatives seem to think PTA thinks he's amazing.
For me, the highlight of OBAA is the drunk-driving arrest. That is the moment when the film most clearly shows competent, well-intentioned people doing exactly what they should be doing. Del Toro’s smile as he comes into the custody of actual public servants is a tell. Left-wing agitprop would not have had that smile, I think.
He's a great character and he's definitely the most competent of the named characters, though along the lines of copans's comment, even he's a bit of a weirdo getting arrested for drunk driving.
Di Caprio came across a burnout and kind of a moron. Many of the other radicals came across as either idealist, dumb kids or psychopaths, which is a pretty accurate description of all the 60s/70s radicals. The Panthers, Weather Underground, and so forth - psychopaths, idealistic morons, idiots. It’s not as bleak as Baader-Meinhoff Complex, but 1) that’s a German movie, so of course it’s bleak 2) this movie clearly was not that serious
Yeah, I don't think you supposed to take people called "Rocket Man," "Perfidia Beverly Hills," and "Junglepussy" seriously within the movie. I thought it was pretty obvious during the bank robbery scene that the characters were supposed to seem like a combination of ridiculous and nuts.
Exactly. It’s clear the movie and book were influenced by actual events, like the SLA shoot out and various robberies. These people were not serious thinkers.
I’m an Education professor, and I have my students watch Whiplash to consider the question you raise - Can we have excellence without pain. A few years ago a coach was fired at Rutgers because videos showed cruelty towards players. But could a sweet coach have a winning team, no matter what Ted Lasso tries to say? I hope that the maker of Whiplash wouldn’t have a problem with your perfectly valid interpretation. The teacher’s cruelty is at the heart of the movie.
Well this is the thing about "messages", isn't it? Given a movie is generally about a specific situation and a small number of specific fictional people, it can't comprehensively say anything about issues in a broader sense, unless one assumes that the filmmaker is deliberately using that specific situation as representative of much more sweeping trends. So you make a movie where a handful of poor people are horrible violent criminals, and it's ridiculous to suppose that this means the movie is saying that all, or most, poor people are by nature horrible violent criminals. Except that if you take the view that a movie MUST have a point beyond their own story, you have to extrapolate something, right?
But then, it really comes down to the way movies are labelled - by critics, by the media, and consequently by audiences before they've even seen them. Colonel Lockjaw is not Paul Thomas Anderson's vessel for saying that all right-wingers are psychotically racist perverts, unless you have decided ahead of time that OBAA is a Message Movie, in which case he has to be, because in a Message Movie characters are a means to the end of communicating the message.
Conversely, if your movie is not a Message Movie, people don't assume that the characters are avatars of political stances. Which is why nobody complains that Jason Statham movies are woke anti-capitalist propaganda.
Whiplash: I think you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable with the ending. Like “was he right?”, “was it worth it?”, and even “was he actually trying to get revenge at the end, or was this part of the plan?”
Parasite: Us poors will continue to fight each other and ineffectually lash out at the rich with no real results. Some don’t care about the poor family’s lack of ethics because leftist ideology removes any blame for the actions of the oppressed class. And that might be authorial intent.
The Master: I don’t remember this one too well, but remember at the end thinking, “What was the point of that?”. So I got nothing. Maybe I’m dense, but this is not my favorite PTA film
I came here to say the same about Whiplash. Jeff writes, "We thought that we were watching a movie about the costs to a young person when they sacrifice everything in pursuit of a goal, but we were actually watching a movie about how Simmons’ character was a methodological genius and his actions were completely justified." To which I would say: yes, we are watching both those movies at the same time, which is part of its genius. Teller's character is triumphant in the last scene, but just a few scenes before that he's quite pathetic when trying to get back with a girl he had a single date with and her response is, "Move on, dude. I did." Negative capability, baby!
This is how I feel about Dogville. From the articles I read about it at the time, I think people (at least other liberals like me) were taking the message as something like, "Isn't it horrible how violent Americans are?" The message for me was more like, "An ethical system in which people are held responsible for their bad behavior is consistent and workable." I love the part at the end where (and I may be paraphrasing/misremembering) Nicole Kidman's character's dad is like, "But might you not have acted the same way in their shoes?" and she is like, "Yeah and then I would deserve what they are getting."
Related to this: as I get older, I'm increasingly sympathetic to Tolkein's view (or at least my crude half-hungover paraphrasing of his view) on applicability versus allegory, and how the former is better because it allows the reader to engage with the story on their own terms and in their own contexts, whereas allegory is fundamentally limiting because it basically tells the reader there's only one 'proper' way to understand it.
"I would understand if the movie had been embraced by JD Vance types pushing the message that poor people live in a hell of their own making and the welfare state is a waste of time."
Is that true of JD Vance in 2026? I was under the impression that he embraced more of a New Right "use state funds to support the people we like" position.
I don't know that he ever really turned away from the Hillbilly Eligy "these disphits are poor because they're a bunch of dipshits" philosophy, more just that he doesn't emphasize that as much now that it's not really a driving force of mainstream right wing sentiment anymore.
Your Whiplash commentary had me thinking about Noma, and honestly, I don't think you're that far off. It was consistently ranked as the world's top restaurant and had three Michelin stars, and a head chef who used to berate his employees and smack them around. Apparently, enduring this abuse wasn't entirely without benefit -- from the NYT:
"Many former employees said that working at Noma, while never easy, was worthwhile because of how Mr. Redzepi had opened fine dining to practices like foraging and fermentation. “We got to be outside studying the progression of ramsons, then in the shipping container lab learning about koji,” said Julian Fortu, an intern in 2015. Like many others, he said that after Noma, doors opened to him that he would otherwise never have been able to walk through."
This is the paradox at the heart of The Bear (spoilers follow) - Carmy is one of the best chefs in the world, but he achieved that only because his neuroses pushed him into an unhealthy obsession with excellence, combined with a former boss who cruelly pushed him beyond his previous limits. So he's great, but miserable.
And then he sets out to transform his family's beloved (but poorly run) neighborhood sandwich joint into a fine dining establishment. He succeeds, but at the cost of his sanity, while starting to become the same sort of abusive boss that he hated. Plus the fine dining part of the restaurant loses money hand over fist, while the greatly-reduced sandwich joint is profitable. This seems to be setting up a final season that reveals that none of the psychological torture was worth it - it would have been better to just stick with the good, but modest, sandwich shop. Though I suppose they might chicken out and go for an ending where Carmy gets to have it all.
Parasite has the same themr as all Bing Joon Ho movies--capitalism is bad. In Parasite, the point is that the precariousness of poverty pits all thr poor people against each other to survive, and leaves the oblivious rich untouched. I don't see how you get any other message from the movie. It is not his best movie, much less the best picture from that year. I also think it helps to understand the essentially feudal nature of Korean economics and how real and desperate you would be to hang on to that lifeline of serving the rich guy at the expense of your own family. But I had to talk to a korean culture scholar after seeing the movie. While watching I sort of kept thinking-go work somewhere else, but that turns out not to be a real option for those characters.
Something that I think a lot of Americans missed is that even the rich and UMC in Korea is often only a generation or two removed from poverty. Korea was one of the world's poorest countries when my parents were born. There were hints throughout the movie that the woman from the rich family may have come from a more modest background.
This glosses over what terrible people the family is. They don't even work hard at the job they do for another small business (the pizza place). If your message is "capitalism fails the poor even though they try their best" you may want to have those people try their best. Because the impression I got is that "these people are lazy and that's why they're poor."
“ Not "Rich but still nice." Nice because she's rich, you know? Hell, if I had all this money, I'd be nice too!”
They all but state it. Decency is a luxury of the rich; the poor are crabs in a bucket by necessity, because they’re fighting for the meager spillover from the excesses of the rich.
And as for Whiplash--all Chezelle movies wrestle with what it means to sacrifice for greatness and art, and he seems to come down on the side of sacrifice. Look at the ending of La La Land. The romance is a beautiful fantasy-- reality is artistic success at the expense of the fantasy. Although I do think that Teller's character "wins" at the end by achieving greatness in apite of Simmons' teacher trying to embarass him at the final show, it isn't a clear cut case of Simmons as villain.
Not a movie, but man oh man is The Boys a show that tries desperately to make many big political proclamations and SAY SOMETHING, and just ends up being incredibly insufferable as a result. I often wonder if the showrunner is okay whenever I’ve seen it.
Whatever the message was of Parasite was wasted on me. I came away from that movie thinking, "Damn, that house is awesome."
Realistically drawn characters will contain ambiguity. Artists will often lean into this ambiguity, where the "point" of the work isn't to present a tidy moral, but shine light on a difficult conundrum that we all must wrestle with, like "how much crap are you willing to put up with to be able to take a really sick drum solo?"
Often artists do this knowing that audiences are trained on simplistic good guy-vs-bad guy entertainments, and that encountering ambiguity will on occasion cause them to have an uncomfortable and frustrating reaction called "thinking." Artists who succeed in tricking their audiences into thinking about stuff experience a perverse delight in their resulting confusion.
"Thinking." Ugh, I hate when that happens.....
I am not sure that Boon Joon Ho intended a “poor people good; rich people bad” reading. I think it is a character study, a comedy, and a tragedy, not a polemic (though I agree some audiences received it that way). If anything the message is a much more modest “sucks to be poor! Makes you nuts and miserable!”
Speaking of Boon Joon Ho (spoilers for Snowpiercer), the actual message of that movie is “keep the poors down or they will end human life on Earth” lol. So if you are right he is a repeat offender!
I think if there is a political through-line to Bong Joon-Ho's movies, it isn't so much "Keep the poors down," but more like, "Keeping the poors down too hard causes them to do terrible things that ruin everything for themselves and everybody else." Basically, oppression causes revolution, but revolution is also bad.
That’s an interesting reading but more plausible for Parasite (which is also a much better movie). In Snow Crash the ending seems to be striking a hopeful tone, despite being ACTUALLY incredibly bleak, and the rebellion is portrayed as consistently heroic except for the evil secret collaborators, IRRC.
So glad to see this commentary!
Also: Dead Man Walking, and probably every other anti-death-penalty film: ends up demonstrating that the main (Sean Penn) character arrived at a measured assessment of his own misdeeds only as a result of being sentenced to death. Ergo: implicit argument for the death penalty.
Have the death penalty but if the guy seems to genuinely repent you fake his death at the last minute and yoink him into witness protection
A lot of the conservative-leaning criticism of OBAA is a bit weird. They seem to want it to be a balanced electoral treatise instead of a movie about specific characters. They seem to not realize how ridiculous everyone in the movie is supposed to be. You're not supposed to want anyone in the movie in charge of anything important. The movie doesn't hide the fact that di Caprio's character is a self-destructive idiot and a burnout, but conservatives seem to think PTA thinks he's amazing.
We might be seeing the reason why you have to be on PTA's level careerwise to get to make a movie like this.
Director: "I want to make a political movie."
Producer: "So it has something to say about our world?"
Director: "Our world? Not really. Every character is ridiculous."
Producer: "So it's a comedy? Like a Will Ferrell movie?"
Director: "No, it's mostly a tense drama."
Producer: "So a Will Ferrell movie with no laughs, like Holmes & Watson."
Director: "I guess. May I have $130 million?"
I will say, the answer to "what time is it?" was almost the loudest I laughed at a movie that came out last year.
For me, the highlight of OBAA is the drunk-driving arrest. That is the moment when the film most clearly shows competent, well-intentioned people doing exactly what they should be doing. Del Toro’s smile as he comes into the custody of actual public servants is a tell. Left-wing agitprop would not have had that smile, I think.
The sensei is pretty sympathetic and cool. I think you are supposed to like him in deliberate contrast to the French 75 bozos.
He's a great character and he's definitely the most competent of the named characters, though along the lines of copans's comment, even he's a bit of a weirdo getting arrested for drunk driving.
Di Caprio came across a burnout and kind of a moron. Many of the other radicals came across as either idealist, dumb kids or psychopaths, which is a pretty accurate description of all the 60s/70s radicals. The Panthers, Weather Underground, and so forth - psychopaths, idealistic morons, idiots. It’s not as bleak as Baader-Meinhoff Complex, but 1) that’s a German movie, so of course it’s bleak 2) this movie clearly was not that serious
Yeah, I don't think you supposed to take people called "Rocket Man," "Perfidia Beverly Hills," and "Junglepussy" seriously within the movie. I thought it was pretty obvious during the bank robbery scene that the characters were supposed to seem like a combination of ridiculous and nuts.
Exactly. It’s clear the movie and book were influenced by actual events, like the SLA shoot out and various robberies. These people were not serious thinkers.
I’m an Education professor, and I have my students watch Whiplash to consider the question you raise - Can we have excellence without pain. A few years ago a coach was fired at Rutgers because videos showed cruelty towards players. But could a sweet coach have a winning team, no matter what Ted Lasso tries to say? I hope that the maker of Whiplash wouldn’t have a problem with your perfectly valid interpretation. The teacher’s cruelty is at the heart of the movie.
Well this is the thing about "messages", isn't it? Given a movie is generally about a specific situation and a small number of specific fictional people, it can't comprehensively say anything about issues in a broader sense, unless one assumes that the filmmaker is deliberately using that specific situation as representative of much more sweeping trends. So you make a movie where a handful of poor people are horrible violent criminals, and it's ridiculous to suppose that this means the movie is saying that all, or most, poor people are by nature horrible violent criminals. Except that if you take the view that a movie MUST have a point beyond their own story, you have to extrapolate something, right?
But then, it really comes down to the way movies are labelled - by critics, by the media, and consequently by audiences before they've even seen them. Colonel Lockjaw is not Paul Thomas Anderson's vessel for saying that all right-wingers are psychotically racist perverts, unless you have decided ahead of time that OBAA is a Message Movie, in which case he has to be, because in a Message Movie characters are a means to the end of communicating the message.
Conversely, if your movie is not a Message Movie, people don't assume that the characters are avatars of political stances. Which is why nobody complains that Jason Statham movies are woke anti-capitalist propaganda.
Whiplash: I think you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable with the ending. Like “was he right?”, “was it worth it?”, and even “was he actually trying to get revenge at the end, or was this part of the plan?”
Parasite: Us poors will continue to fight each other and ineffectually lash out at the rich with no real results. Some don’t care about the poor family’s lack of ethics because leftist ideology removes any blame for the actions of the oppressed class. And that might be authorial intent.
The Master: I don’t remember this one too well, but remember at the end thinking, “What was the point of that?”. So I got nothing. Maybe I’m dense, but this is not my favorite PTA film
I came here to say the same about Whiplash. Jeff writes, "We thought that we were watching a movie about the costs to a young person when they sacrifice everything in pursuit of a goal, but we were actually watching a movie about how Simmons’ character was a methodological genius and his actions were completely justified." To which I would say: yes, we are watching both those movies at the same time, which is part of its genius. Teller's character is triumphant in the last scene, but just a few scenes before that he's quite pathetic when trying to get back with a girl he had a single date with and her response is, "Move on, dude. I did." Negative capability, baby!
On the other hand, she's TV's Supergirl. Worth being a pest for.
This is how I feel about Dogville. From the articles I read about it at the time, I think people (at least other liberals like me) were taking the message as something like, "Isn't it horrible how violent Americans are?" The message for me was more like, "An ethical system in which people are held responsible for their bad behavior is consistent and workable." I love the part at the end where (and I may be paraphrasing/misremembering) Nicole Kidman's character's dad is like, "But might you not have acted the same way in their shoes?" and she is like, "Yeah and then I would deserve what they are getting."
One of my all time favourite films. I also took the film as you described and I would not be surprised if that was what LvT was going for honestly. 😁
Related to this: as I get older, I'm increasingly sympathetic to Tolkein's view (or at least my crude half-hungover paraphrasing of his view) on applicability versus allegory, and how the former is better because it allows the reader to engage with the story on their own terms and in their own contexts, whereas allegory is fundamentally limiting because it basically tells the reader there's only one 'proper' way to understand it.
"I would understand if the movie had been embraced by JD Vance types pushing the message that poor people live in a hell of their own making and the welfare state is a waste of time."
Is that true of JD Vance in 2026? I was under the impression that he embraced more of a New Right "use state funds to support the people we like" position.
I don't know that he ever really turned away from the Hillbilly Eligy "these disphits are poor because they're a bunch of dipshits" philosophy, more just that he doesn't emphasize that as much now that it's not really a driving force of mainstream right wing sentiment anymore.
Not incompatible.
Your Whiplash commentary had me thinking about Noma, and honestly, I don't think you're that far off. It was consistently ranked as the world's top restaurant and had three Michelin stars, and a head chef who used to berate his employees and smack them around. Apparently, enduring this abuse wasn't entirely without benefit -- from the NYT:
"Many former employees said that working at Noma, while never easy, was worthwhile because of how Mr. Redzepi had opened fine dining to practices like foraging and fermentation. “We got to be outside studying the progression of ramsons, then in the shipping container lab learning about koji,” said Julian Fortu, an intern in 2015. Like many others, he said that after Noma, doors opened to him that he would otherwise never have been able to walk through."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/dining/rene-redzepi-noma-abuse-allegations.html
This is the paradox at the heart of The Bear (spoilers follow) - Carmy is one of the best chefs in the world, but he achieved that only because his neuroses pushed him into an unhealthy obsession with excellence, combined with a former boss who cruelly pushed him beyond his previous limits. So he's great, but miserable.
And then he sets out to transform his family's beloved (but poorly run) neighborhood sandwich joint into a fine dining establishment. He succeeds, but at the cost of his sanity, while starting to become the same sort of abusive boss that he hated. Plus the fine dining part of the restaurant loses money hand over fist, while the greatly-reduced sandwich joint is profitable. This seems to be setting up a final season that reveals that none of the psychological torture was worth it - it would have been better to just stick with the good, but modest, sandwich shop. Though I suppose they might chicken out and go for an ending where Carmy gets to have it all.
Parasite has the same themr as all Bing Joon Ho movies--capitalism is bad. In Parasite, the point is that the precariousness of poverty pits all thr poor people against each other to survive, and leaves the oblivious rich untouched. I don't see how you get any other message from the movie. It is not his best movie, much less the best picture from that year. I also think it helps to understand the essentially feudal nature of Korean economics and how real and desperate you would be to hang on to that lifeline of serving the rich guy at the expense of your own family. But I had to talk to a korean culture scholar after seeing the movie. While watching I sort of kept thinking-go work somewhere else, but that turns out not to be a real option for those characters.
Something that I think a lot of Americans missed is that even the rich and UMC in Korea is often only a generation or two removed from poverty. Korea was one of the world's poorest countries when my parents were born. There were hints throughout the movie that the woman from the rich family may have come from a more modest background.
This glosses over what terrible people the family is. They don't even work hard at the job they do for another small business (the pizza place). If your message is "capitalism fails the poor even though they try their best" you may want to have those people try their best. Because the impression I got is that "these people are lazy and that's why they're poor."
“ Not "Rich but still nice." Nice because she's rich, you know? Hell, if I had all this money, I'd be nice too!”
They all but state it. Decency is a luxury of the rich; the poor are crabs in a bucket by necessity, because they’re fighting for the meager spillover from the excesses of the rich.
Great line, but I also read it as cope by the mom tbh. Interesting characters; great movie.
And as for Whiplash--all Chezelle movies wrestle with what it means to sacrifice for greatness and art, and he seems to come down on the side of sacrifice. Look at the ending of La La Land. The romance is a beautiful fantasy-- reality is artistic success at the expense of the fantasy. Although I do think that Teller's character "wins" at the end by achieving greatness in apite of Simmons' teacher trying to embarass him at the final show, it isn't a clear cut case of Simmons as villain.
I agree about Parasite.
Not a movie, but man oh man is The Boys a show that tries desperately to make many big political proclamations and SAY SOMETHING, and just ends up being incredibly insufferable as a result. I often wonder if the showrunner is okay whenever I’ve seen it.