Article

Culture

Film & TV

3 March 2025

5 min read

The Oscars celebrate a basic human trait - telling stories

A ‘seemingly absurd ritual’ reveals a little of who we are.

Belle Tindall

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

Mikey Madison, wearing a ball gown, clutches a golden Oscar statue.

Mikey Madison, star of Anora.

ABC.

I’m becoming more and more resolute in my belief that nothing is ever trivial.

Not really.

Not when you look at it for long enough, not when you offer it the gift of your curiosity, not when you’re convinced that culture is made up of a myriad of restless hearts.

This resolute belief is the reason I tend to give the Oscars my attention. My full, non-judgmental, attention.

The Academy Awards may seem trivial, especially this year. Especially this week, even. I mean, are we really going to talk about Timothée Chalamet’s yellow suit or Demi Moore’s gracious-loser-face when pockets of our world are being torn to shreds? I get it. Even the people in the eye of the showbiz-storm (mostly) get it. In his opening monologue, this year’s host, Conan O’Brien, called the ceremony a ‘seemingly absurd ritual’.

And it is.

But we are story-telling creatures. We are, to quote Charles Taylor, ‘Storied Selves’. Story is how we wrestle with what has been, what is, and what we think/fear/hope may be. And so, I want to know what stories we’re telling: what stories have we deemed worthy of excavation? What stories are drawing us in and sending us out again with slightly tweaked perspectives? What are we celebrating? What are we lamenting? What are we trying to change? What are we trying to hold on to?

Plus, I’m religious – who am I to assume there’s no meaning behind ‘seemingly absurd ritual’, aye?

The Oscars is an event dedicated to just a handful of the stories that have been told over the past year – the ones that are being told the loudest, I guess. That makes it a sample pool of our collective heart-cries, the tip of our meaning-making iceberg, the headline that sits atop our cultural moment.

Is it somewhat superficial? In part.

Is it a little sanctimonious? Oh, heck yes.

Is it opulent to the point of discomfort? Most definitely.

Is it meaningless? Absolutely not. Storytelling never is.

So, in that vein – what are the stories that were celebrated at last night’s 97th Academy Awards? And what do they teach us about... well… us? I noticed a couple of interesting themes.

In so many ways, movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human.

Firstly, the ceremony opened with a tribute to The City of Angels, herself. The most sparkly city there is, the home of Hollywood – Los Angeles. Terrifyingly large swathes of which were, of course, razed to the ground by historic wildfires earlier this year. Borrowing a line from The Wizard of Oz, ‘there’s no place like home’ was spoken over a montage of the city acting as a backdrop for so many iconic movie scenes.

It made me think of the role that ‘home’ plays in many of the movies that were platformed last night – and I realised, it plays a leading role. ‘Home’, in itself, is a character. There’s the omnipresence of Brighton Beach, New York, in Anora (by far, the big winner of the night), Mexico in Emilia Perez and, of course, ‘Oz’ in Wicked. These films aren’t just set in these locations, they’re utterly dependant on them.

Then there’s the more complicated stories of ‘home’ – stories of home being both here and there. The Brutalist, for example (for which Adrien Brody won the ‘best actor in a leading role’ award), tells the story of a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor trying to make a new home for himself in the United States. Or A Real Pain, in which Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed the film) and Kieran Culkin (winner of ‘best supporting actor’) travel to Poland to honour their late grandmother, and therefore, their own lineage. In both movies, ‘home’ is a stranger that the characters must introduce themselves to and befriend.

It's fascinating.

In art, as in life, home provides identity. It’s the geography that we’re made of, the history that runs through our blood, the place where our circumstances become our meaning. At least, that’s what these movies tell us.

Another, more obvious, theme I noticed was that so many of the movies on display were telling notably complex stories of a female experience.

The Substance, one of the most interesting films of this year, tackles the theme of aging. Age-a-phobia, you could say. The experience that countless women have of becoming less valuable as they move through life – the feeling that you’re vanishing from society’s sight with every change of your body. Or there’s the afore-mentioned Anora. I’ll be honest, this one took me by surprise, racking up the most awards of the night, including ‘best picture’. Its story centres upon ‘Ani’, a young Russian American sex worker who weaves in and out of powerful ranks. Wicked, the story of a drastically misunderstood, commonly marginalised and terribly manipulated woman (who just so happens to be a witch). And winner of ‘best international picture’, I’m Still Here, tells the true story of Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, is abducted by military operatives in 1971 and never returned. Eunice is left to care for their five children as she seeks justice for her husband as well as indigenous people in the Amazon.

Female experiences – in all their complexity, nuance, grit, strength, and truth – truly took centre stage.

Movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human. And I just love that we do that. I’m never not fascinated by how much we all share – how the particular can tap into the universal. We have so much to learn about each other, and movies are a way we seek to do that, but one of the things that we constantly have to learn, re-learn, and learn again is how much we have in common.

And I know that a sentence like that sounds face-palmingly glib. But if it weren’t true, if we weren’t – at some deep and true level – made by the same stuff and for the same stuff, I’m not sure movies would exist. I’m not sure that they could exist.

And so, all of this to say that there’s more to the Oscars than meets the eye – even when what meets the eye makes it roll. Give it the gift of your curiosity, it’s worthy of it. I promise.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Article

Culture

Israel

Middle East

Politics

27 June 2024

7 min read

Netanyahu’s baffling ability to bounce back

Disliked and embattled, the Israeli premier’s purpose strengthens him.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Between two generals wearing camouflage uniforms, a man in a black shirt listens.

Bibi ponders future plans.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

Are the dreams of Bibi Netanyahu about to be crushed? As the Israeli prime minister’s coalition teeters, what is remarkable is that he has survived so long. Central to this survival is his purpose – a dream of a secure Israel. We need to unpack such leaders’ dreams and understand why they are so potent.

Langston Hughes, in his poem ‘Harlem,’ asks what ‘What happens to a dream deferred?’ Several possibilities are put forward: ‘Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? And an alternative: ‘Maybe it just sags like a heavy load?’ And finally ‘Or does it explode?’

It’s possible that Hughes referred to Harlem race riots in the 1930s and 1940s, but no-one knows for sure. The question is what happens when a dream is put on hold – or worse, destroyed – in the face of struggle?

Do we press on? Do we give up? What happens if we press on, and things do not work out? Or perhaps we press on, and things do work out. Hughes’ poem encourages us to ask these questions.

Looking back, Hughes’ poem is interesting but obviously gloomy, without hope. A dream is deferred. It withers, and then vanishes. But what if a dream is – when encountering struggle – maintained, kept in tact? The dream, perhaps nearly lost, emerges in the end, stronger than it was before.

Hughes’ poem is one of struggle and eruption. Not struggle and emergence. It is a despairing poem, one that denies the possibility of resurrection from the brink of death, even if the obstacles are significant.

We all have dreams, perhaps about peace, career, family, community, love, or something else. Inevitably, these dreams are – as dreams always are, in order to test our faith - met with opposition.

In these moments, we have two options: we can believe in what we see – the dream faltering, withering on the vine, ever so slowly. Or we can believe in the unseen, in which the dream re-emerges from whatever resistance it encounters. The former values the material, what we can actually see. The second values and trusts in what we cannot see. This brings us back to the point of faith.

'I have lost count of how many political obituaries I have written about Netanyahu — and how many resurrection stories.’

Nicholas Goldberg

The ability to struggle and emerge, in which death or near-death is followed by resurrection, is a quality that is in short supply in modern political leadership. It is easily – and not surprisingly – overlooked in a culture prone to despair and hopelessness, in which we are met with a new crisis at every corner.

But some leaders have a unique, if not baffling, quality: the ability to struggle and emerge stronger, somehow renewed. They resurrect themselves where this was thought impossible. And when they have this quality, they become unrelenting forces, whatever you might think of them.

No leader better embodies this quality in the political West than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (or ‘Bibi’ for short). Netanyahu strengthens whenever he is on the ropes, perhaps because he is on the ropes.

Although a profoundly disliked figure by many, Netanyahu’s ability to struggle and emerge merits serious study from any student of politics. It is worth asking where his ability to struggle and emerge, resurrecting oneself from the depths of despair – in seemingly impossible situations – comes from?

Ishaan Tharoor puts it well in a recent Washington Post article: ‘Yet Netanyahu is expert at defying the odds.’ However, puzzlingly few articles are written on this topic – Netanyahu’s ability to come back from seemingly impossible circumstances.

Columnist Nicholas Goldberg comes even closer to the essence of resurrection in a Los Angeles Times op-ed in 2020, in which he writes ‘Over the years, I have lost count of how many political obituaries I have written about Netanyahu — and how many resurrection stories.’ He later comments on Netanyahu’s single life mission focused on security.

Both articles are more anti-Netanyahu than they are a reflection on the why and how of his countless resurrections. So it is worth asking: what is behind this quality?

A mission is fundamental to resurrection, in which certain politicians find a way through whenever the world counts them out.

While commentators focus on the ills of Netanyahu’s tenure as Israeli Prime Minister – indictments of corruption and possible future jail time, thwarting of a two-state solution in favour of the Abraham Accords, and the security failures that contributed to the October 7 disaster – they fail to consider deeper questions related to Tharoor’s description of Netanyahu as constantly ‘defying the odds.’

Neglected in analyses on Netanyahu is the deep trauma of his brother Yonatan’s passing in the famous Operation Entebbe. Neglected is the fact that he was wounded, sometimes severely, on many occasions while fighting for the Israeli special forces. And neglected is the influence of his father Benzion, a notable academic well-known for his writing on the historical oppression of the Jewish people (and on his own later rejection by the Israeli academic community).

These are powerful, deep-seated experiences if not major traumas, which – as Israeli friends well-acquainted with Netanyahu wisely note – underpin his clear life mission of increasing Israeli security in a dangerous world.

Goldberg puts this mission, even if uncharitably, as follows in his column: ‘Netanyahu has stood for one key proposition: that peace is not to be trusted; it is a pipe dream pushed by starry-eyed doves who fell hard for the likes of Yasser Arafat. According to Netanyahu, only battening down, fighting back hard, building walls and rejecting compromise protects the country.’

Netanyahu provides us with a crucial lesson in political leadership: a clear and simple life mission provides the ability to claim victory from the jaws of defeat, even in the most seemingly intractable of circumstances. A mission is fundamental to resurrection, in which certain politicians find a way through whenever the world counts them out.

A mission – simple because it is grounded in brokenness (the death of his brother) – provides Netanyahu (and other politicians that have this quality) with a strategic and tactical advantage that cannot be replicated by opponents without similar purpose. Such mission is not fleeting but enduring, Netanyahu resisting all temptations that might thwart his single-minded purpose.

In the case of Israel, no other Israeli political leader has operated with the same sense of mission as has Netanyahu over the last two decades. For if this were the case, Netanyahu would not currently be in power.

Our focus therefore should never be on dreams deferred, as per Hughes’ poem, but rather on the realisation of our dreams – underpinned by unique and consistent life missions.

Commentators, focusing on external circumstances – the current direction of the war, certain decisions made, the opinions of well-read ‘experts’ – neglect these deeper human questions at their peril, because the answer to the question of purpose helps people find ways through where none seem to exist. Purpose, not circumstance, allows a political leader to struggle and emerge in circumstances where most others falter.

For wider context, we can here turn to the example of Jesus, whose resurrection follows his trials at Gethsemane. When Jesus prays in Gethsemane, it is not clear how he should act. Jesus does not know what God wants from him. But he knows that he must carry out the will of his Father.

He asks ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want’. Jesus is alone in his deliberation. He asks and waits, and in this waiting, the way forward is revealed. Here we see, in its most poignant form, struggle and emergence. Jesus is resurrected three days following his death, when even his disciples had counted him out.

Our focus therefore should never be on dreams deferred, as per Hughes’ poem, but rather on the realisation of our dreams – underpinned by unique and consistent life missions. Discerning these missions is not easy. If anything, there is considerable pain involved in doing so.

Yet, struggle that involves the possibility of failure of a dream, within a consistent and singular life mission, contains within it the seeds of success. The dream emerges intact from whatever short-term struggle it faces, if not strengthened.

A way is found where none previously existed, when those focused merely on the seen long counted a person out. In the long run, mission enables victory: the realisation – not deferral – of dreams.