4 Movie Messages That Make No Sense in the Real World

4 There Are No Shortcuts

Characters discover some magic potion or special artifact that grants them powers. They wield these for a while and have great fun, but in the end, they learn that this is no way to live, and they have to give up the powers. This teaches us all about living in the real world, where there is no magic, where we need to instead put in the work and solve problems the hard way.

For example, in Wonder Woman 1984, everyone in the world starts making wishes using a magic wishing stone, and havoc ensues until Wonder Woman delivers a speech telling people to stop. She runs through several reasons to stop, including that each wish comes with a terrible price and some people are wishing stuff that kills everyone, but her ultimate argument is that, “This world was a beautiful place just as it was. You can only have the truth. And the truth is enough.” 

She recalls a lesson she learned as a child, when she tried taking “the short path” during a race and was told that this was cheating. 

Except, shortcuts are great. Whether or not real magic exists, some routes are shorter than others, and you’d do well to take those routes.

That race? Diana cheated, but that shortcut was only a cheat because she agreed to an organized competition, in which everyone had to run the same route. If the goal were really to get to the end the soonest, rather than to determine which competitor is best, that shortcut would be the correct choice. It would be the correct choice for everyone, and if it’s too narrow to fit everyone, they could work at making it bigger. If they can’t make it bigger, it’d still be better for some people to use it than for no one to use it. 

This matters because in life, you’re sometimes in organized competitions with others, but most of the time, you aren’t. If you mistakenly think you are, you’ll start assuming any shortcut is a cheat, denying yourself (or someone else) a great solution. 

A few years ago, I wrote an article musing about what the world would be like once we’ve invented drugs that stop overeating, rendering the idea of exercising for weight loss obsolete. We’re not all the way there yet, but we do now have Ozempic, which seems to be pretty promising. Some people are skeptical that it works, while others are furious that it does. “There are no shortcuts,” say both groups. “If you want to lose weight, you need to put in the work.”

But if we have a drug that makes you lose weight effortlessly — and we will eventually, whether it’s Ozempic or something else — then you don’t need to put in the work. And you can instead spend that time working at something else, or not working at all, either of which beats working needlessly. Yes, people used to run in place for hours to keep fit, but if people don’t have to, that’s better. People also used to fetch water from wells every time they needed a drink, but then we built a shortcut. 

3 You Can’t Change the Past

This next plot is a more specific version of the no-shortcuts lesson. A character gains the ability to travel to the past, and they use it to undo something wrong in the world. But this results in something worse happening, or maybe the bad thing happens anyway. Ultimately, they give up their quest and leave the timeline how it originally was. 

Here, the real-life lesson is clear. The real world offers no way to change the past, and this story helps us come to terms with that. The muddled part, however, comes if the character does manage to change the past but fails at making the change they wanted.

For an example of this, let’s look at The Flash. I’m picking on a second D.C. movie not because all movies in that series are bad but because its fans are such good sports that we know they won’t feel hurt by the focus. 

Batman and Supergirl both die in the big fight. Flash has the power to reverse time, and he employs this to bring them back, but though he manages to avert the exact precise deaths from before, both still die. A few more attempts at this convinces him they must die no matter what. He abandons his attempts to save them and also realizes his broader quest to go back in time and save his own mother is equally flawed.

But, as you can see, he does manage to change the past every time he tries. Though those two still end up dying, they die differently thanks to his actions, and he indeed ends up changing the past in a larger permanent way before returning to his own present. That means this isn’t a lesson about the past’s immutability at all but a lesson about how some specific things are fated to happen. And this lesson, which goes back at least a few thousand years, to the time of the Greeks, is useless. In reality, nothing is fated to happen.

It’s pointless to reminisce and wish you could go back and do things differently, because you can’t. But you also mustn’t think that everything had to have happened the way it did, because it didn’t. Lock yourself into the latter way of thinking, and you’ll also think there’s no way to shape the future. 

One story that handled this in a smarter way was Lost. Much of the show concerns characters debating fate versus free will, and the characters eventually time travel, which seemingly offers the ultimate test of this. Are they going to be able to change history or not?

It turns out they aren’t able to. They change nothing in the past at all. But this doesn’t reflect on their broader struggles to change themselves, which end with some characters deciding they’re fated for certain things while others manage to defy fate. It turns out that fighting fate and changing the past are totally different battles.

We could sum this all up with the lines that Alcoholics Anonymous members recite at meetings: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is appropriate because half the characters in Lost were addicts. Half the writing staff, too. 

2 Be Yourself

A character decides they’re not cool enough, and they change their style to fit in with the cool kids. They end up unhappy, and they learn that they really should have just tried being themselves.

This storyline is very common in stories about kids and is near-universal in movies about teen girls. And maybe we should reassure adolescents that they’re fine the way they are, based on the assumption that they hate themselves more than any of them can possibly deserve. But if you try applying the lesson “be yourself” to your whole life going forward, you’re relying on a maxim that means nothing at all.

Be yourself? Be what part of yourself? The parts that are good, surely, but what about the rest? Suppose you’re really racist, should you embrace that because that’s just who you are? Or what about the part that makes you want to keep murdering people. Should you celebrate that part of yourself? 

These stories may be merely saying, “Don’t lie to get friends.” That sounds valid enough, especially when the supposedly unpopular life the kid hates involves a group of tight friends whom they plan to abandon for new ones. But what about those people who have no friends at all, and their personality is to blame? In that case, you really should stop being yourself. Doing so isn’t lying, just changing.

Other such stories seem to use “be yourself” to mean, “Don’t copy other people’s fashion sense.” That’s not terribly deep advice, and it’s also not necessarily good advice. Some people don’t care about fashion, but other people do, and if you’re going to use fashion to signal who you are, you use the language that already exists and that you learn from others. “Don’t present yourself just for others” might sound valid enough, but by that logic, you should also stop showering. 

Inside Out 2 from 2023 seemed like it was going the usual route with this lesson, but then it did something surprising. One storyline in the movie is about a girl trading in her old friends for new ones and mildly changing her look accordingly. Her parents at one point tell her, “Be yourself,” and if you just follow her point-of-view, it’s the same Be Yourself story you’ve seen a bunch of times.

Meanwhile, in her head, we follow her emotions going on a wacky adventure. They aim to restore the kid’s sense of self, and it ends with a stunning revelation: There is no such thing as the sense of self. Not yet, anyway. It has to be developed. How can you tell a child to be themselves? They haven’t determined who themselves are yet. 

1 Humans Are the Real Monsters

Characters exist in a world with zombies, or mutants, or hungry aliens. As the story progresses, they run into other survivors, who have used the chaos as an excuse to become cannibals or to install one dictator as King of the Murderers. “Oh,” you say. “This lesson again. Humans are the real monsters.”

There are two problems with this lesson, one serious and significant and the other silly and semantic. I want to talk about the silly and semantic one.

“Humans are the real monsters” cannot be the message of a story. It can be the theme of a story, maybe, but it can’t be a message we’re supposed to apply to anything. That’s because in the real world with real humans, there are no alternate monsters next to which humans are the “real” monsters. You can say humans are eviler than zombies in reality, but humans are also mushier than zombies in reality because in reality, zombies offer zero evilness, zero mushiness and zero other qualities because zombies don’t exist.

The message these authors are really looking for isn’t that humans are the real monsters but just “humans are monsters.” You don’t need to specify in that statement that humans exist while fictional monsters do not because we already know that.

All that being said, “humans are monsters” is still a dumb message because humans aren’t monsters. 

Maybe some are, but most aren’t. I guarantee you can think of at least three humans who aren’t monsters. And if the message here is that the intentional cruelty of humans exceeds the mindless hunger of fictional beasts, that’s just a failure of imagination. I have invented a fictional monster called the Ooga Woogas, who are nearly all murderers and are nearly all intentionally evil, and humans aren’t as bad as that.

Go to any city in the world with a baby stroller at the bottom of a flight of steps and signal to strangers that you need help carrying it to the top. Someone will help you, and this is true even if no one in the city speaks the same language as you. 

If you are on the planet of the Ooga Woogas, however, an Ooga Wooga will immediately eat your baby. They will spare you purely so they can watch you mourn, and then they’ll go find your mom because they use the tears of mothers to keep their antlers shiny. 

And if you think it’s completely pointless to contrast humans against some imaginary monster I just made up, well, yeah. It kind of is, isn't it? 

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