The Oscars and ourselves

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

Belle Tindall

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

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.