Article
Culture
Film & TV
4 min read

The Oscars and ourselves

Beyond the shiny escapism, the awards spotlight all our stories.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A closely cropped group of gold Oscar statues showing mostly their head and shoulders.
Oscars.org

The Oscars are a funny old thing, aren’t they? Every year, I find myself wondering why we care about them so much.  

And sure, we could go for the low-hanging answers: because the show is brimming with glamour, because it’s packed with celebrity, because we may be treated to Ryan Gosling performing his Barbie anthem with Slash. We’ve been trained to gravitate toward such things, and that makes the Oscars the jackpot. And so, while shiny escapism is an undeniable aspect of the enormous hype attached to the Academy Awards, I think it would be unfair to assume that these are the only reasons we are still so drawn to this event.   

If we’re meaning-making creatures, and I believe that we are, then these films mean something.  

I once heard renowned mythologist, Dr Martin Shaw, say that ‘story is the best way to talk about almost anything’, and I wonder if cinema is evidence of how heartily we agree. The stories that are being crafted and told are important, they matter, they actually affect things. Or, at least, the good ones do.   

And this year, when I assess the films that swept up the majority of the prizes at the 96th Academy Awards, I noticed a trend. I noticed that these films are essentially humans talking to humans about what it means to be human.   

In many ways, for better or for worse, we spent 2023 telling stories about ourselves. Allow me to break down what I mean.  

These movies tell us of our own brokenness, our own breaking-things-ness.

Oppenheimer, which won six awards, and Zone of Interest, which was the first British film to win the Oscar for Best International Film – they tell our darkest stories. We know the 20th Century horrors of the dropping of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, but these two movies introduce us to the faces behind the horror. And, what’s more, they hauntingly remind us that those faces could have been ours. They introduce us, not to monsters that we can keep at a comfortable distance, but to people who sanction, create and do the unimaginable, and then go home for dinner with their children.   

People did these things. People like us. These movies tell us of our own brokenness, our own breaking-things-ness. They remind us that the possibility of evil is not beyond us, it is within us, and that the most dangerous thing one could do is to believe otherwise.  

But then there was the acutely tender The Holdovers, and the deeply profound Past Lives. These movies tell of our gentleness, our fragility, our innate need for intimacy; they remind us that we were designed to be known and loved. They reintroduce us to our deepest and most innate needs - The Holdovers, in particular, tells us of the sacrality of relationship. Its success has me wondering if a story of three lonely people forced to spend Christmas together in an empty boarding school could tell us more about what our souls require than any academic deep dive. 

Yet again, these films seek to tell you the story of you; they aim to be windows into the souls of the characters, while also acting as mirrors through which we can catch glimpses of our own.  

Each movie, in one way or another, was a wrestle with personhood. What makes us, us?

And finally, there were two films, Barbie and Poor Things, which, to criminally over-simplify them, are the stories of two women (or, rather, one toy and one new-born baby in the body of a grown woman… don’t ask) who are working out what it means to be a person. Both Barbie and Bella Baxter walk through worlds that are entirely new to them, but completely familiar to their audiences. They assess the good and the bad of humanity as if utterly detached from it, until they are forced to confront their own place in the worlds that they are slowly coming to terms with. As is written into the script of Poor Things and was read aloud over a montage at the Oscars ceremony,  

‘We must experience everything. Not just the good, but degradation, horror, sadness. This makes us whole Bella, makes us people of substance. Not flighty, untouched children. Then we can know the world.’ 

(Is it me, or is there a little touch of – ‘just take a bite of the apple, Eve’ in there?) 

So, you see my point – this year, in the world of film, humans talked to other humans about what it means to be human. Each movie, in one way or another, was a wrestle with personhood. What makes us, us? Where does our propensity for goodness come from? How are we this clever? And how are we this clueless? Why do we do such evil things? And why do we have such tender needs? What is the difference between the worst and the best that we could possibly be? What and why are we? Or, in the simple words of Billie Eilish’s Oscar-scooping song – what were we made for?  

And listen, perhaps this is always somewhat the case. Maybe every film can be boiled down this way, and maybe the Oscars are just a storm in a particularly glitzy tea cup. And maybe nobody would be talking about it this morning had Slash not been involved.  

But I just have this sense that these movies, and the prizes that they won, mean something. These existential-yearning kind of films, I’m not sure they’re going anywhere anytime soon – if we’re wondering what we were made for in such public places, I’m wondering if it’s because we’re also wondering the same thing in the most personal places.  

If you’re asking me, last night was filled with as many cultural heart-cries as it was prizes.  

Article
Culture
Justice
Trauma
4 min read

Why are we so obsessed with true crime?

Our prurience often mistakes curiosity for compassion

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Crime scene tape
Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.

Last month, Terry Barnes wrote in The Spectator about the ‘Trial of the Century’: that of Erin Patterson, a middle-aged Australian woman accused of murdering a dinner party-full of people with deadly mushrooms. 'All this week, on unusually cold and frosty southern Australian winter mornings, pre-dawn queues of rugged-up and puffer-jacketed hopeful spectators formed outside the rural courthouse, breath steaming in television spotlights as people stamped their feet to stay warm.' 

Journalists covering the ongoing trial compete with those spectating - and reporters have flown in from around the world to an obscure, otherwise undisturbed country town. The general fascination mirrors the streaming charts, where you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to observe a pattern in what’s hot. True crime – whether recreated on TV or happening in the courts - is having a moment.  

The attention of criminologists, the press, law enforcement and the justice system on real life cases such as Patterson’s is paramount. But is ours? 

A voracious appetite for true crime isn't new. In St Augustine's Confessions, he writes about a friend called Alypius who resisted peer pressure to go into the gladiatorial amphitheatre. Augustine writes about his friend being dragged in: 

'When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty.' 

Alypius kept his eyes closed, but eventually gave in to the spectacle: 

'As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure.' 

Alypius' story is one of being freed from this addiction, but there's still a thirst for blood today in the arena of both true crime and cancel culture. The human condition, as well as being predisposed to voyeurism, is closer to William Golding's Lord of the Flies than we'd like to admit. It doesn't take much displacement of order for chaos to unravel. 

And this is why we're so fascinated: that true crime is true. The whodunnits of Agatha Christie have kept people entertained for decades, but truth is stranger than fiction. The perpetrators aren't ridiculous 2D villains and monsters, but men and women who for whatever reason have given themselves over to darkness. The mixture of motives, methods and mania aren't easily unscrambled, so we like the serialisation. The devil is in the detail, and it takes time to pore over. 

The Russian author and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, when he was sent to the gulag, gradually solved his own puzzle: that evil can be observed, but it is much closer than we think: 'Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.’ 

Even so, we don't like to admit that sobering reality, or nuance. We like to think we're on the side of justice. We confuse curiosity with compassion. But the Netflix shows, podcasts and twists and turns of the courtroom upend our 'just world hypothesis': we see that justice often isn't fully served in this life, making us wonder if it might be possible eternally. 

Then there's also the reality of truth being contested. The prophet Isaiah writes of a time where 'Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far off. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter.’  

Perhaps our thirst here is not just for all the gory details, but for justice and truth. It's a theme picked up by St John in the New Testament, writing 'And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.' Jesus declares later in this same gospel: 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ 

The only way we can begin to make sense of evil is to consider one who absorbs our darkness, absorbs all darkness, and yet remains light, even against the backdrop of our world’s darkness.  

So what's the right balance? Can I enjoy a true crime show and be filled with light? The tipping point will probably be different for each of us. St Paul, himself a victim of injustice, writes from his prison cell: 'whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’ 

This isn't a call to turn a blind eye to evil. Paul isn't escaping his prison cell with escapism. He is starkly, soberingly honest about the nature of his own sin and its pervasive, polluting quality in the human condition. And we all have a responsibility to one another to detect, be vigilant and call out where there's injustice. To be ready for it. Our world is in a mess because of blind eyes and burying heads in the sand. Jesus quite clearly says he brings that light to expose the darkness. But meditating on and marinating in darkness as entertainment? That is something different.  

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