Unknown Desires
Playing it safe is making us anxious and depressed, new studies show. Here are four ways cinema can revive us.
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.” – Voltaire
My nephew despises cheese. His younger sister eats cold tortillas and noodles with no tomato sauce - which both kids agree is “yucky.”
Feeding them proved an intriguing challenge when they visited me in New York last summer, given my limited (and very cheese-forward) culinary repertoire, and with pizza off the menu.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m no saint. Having tortured my loved ones for decades with my childish aversion to onions, I can hardly fault the kids for their pizza phobia (more for their uncle). But it did get me thinking about our diets in 2025 - our media diets, that is.
Smartphones and streaming services have ushered in the Age of Permission, as writer Freddie DeBoer calls it - permission to swaddle ourselves in “emotional sweatpants” and watch whatever we want, whenever we want, at whatever volume we want, even on the bus, apparently.
No longer must we eat our cultural vegetables, or consider any perspectives beyond our own. The shackles are off. School’s out forever. My inner child, the onion hater, rejoices.
And yet, something seems wrong. Perhaps you’ve felt it, too. If this is freedom, why does it feel so joyless? If it makes you happy, as Sheryl Crow once asked, why the hell are you so sad?
Move Fast and Go Nowhere
“Software is eating the world,” Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen cheerfully declared in 2011. “From movies to agriculture to national defense, over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted.”
He wasn’t wrong. Fourteen years later, eight of the ten most valuable companies on the planet were founded by software engineers. This is their world now, we’re just NPCs in it. It’s a strange world indeed: One that spins ever faster, but also seems to go nowhere at all.
The purest distillation of this queasy inertia can be found in modern movies. The multiplex is now a mausoleum of zombified IP: Sequels of sequels. Remakes of remakes. New faces repeating old lines. Old faces digitally sanded and waxed, soon to be slathered onto AI-generated bodies. The future looks oppressively familiar. Beneath the blood-flecked froth of disruption, we remain culturally paralyzed. How did we become so stagnant? So risk-averse?
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The culprit, at least in part, may be what AI researcher David Chapman calls meta-rationalism - a worldview born from tech campuses and hedge funds that now rules our lives. Where the institutions of a prior era sought to anchor society with fixed ideals and long-term moral visions, meta-rationalists zip blindly across domains in an endless present, shapeshifting in service of short-term optimization. It’s a paradigm that favors metrics over meaning, and prudence over bold initiative. Moral considerations are obsolete. Shareholder value is the sole directive.
As meta-rationalism seeps into every crevice of modern life, we have adjusted accordingly - outsourcing intuition to recommendation engines, optimizing for instant pleasure, and hedging against discomfort at all costs. In the deluge of curated algorithmic distraction, our curiosity has dulled. Knowledge is now tailored to flatter our preconceptions. We avoid the challenging and strange, shrinking our movie diets to what’s familiar: superheroes and warmed-over reboots. Noodles and cold tortillas.
But there’s a cost. A 2016 study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals who chronically avoid discomfort are more prone to depression, anxiety, and anhedonia - a numbing of the capacity to enjoy what they consume. Stripped of long-term vision and moral coherence, we spiral deeper into a tightening loop of nihilism and stasis. As consumers, that’s exactly where they want us.
It’s no accident that dive bars still blast classic rock and Hollywood keeps recycling IP from the ’80s and ’90s. Nostalgia is comforting, especially in uncertain times. But it’s also a trap.
Neuroscientist Tania Singer found that reflecting on the past, even fondly, tends to lower our mood, while imagining the future, even negatively, boosts hope. Other studies confirm that risk-taking releases serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins, chemicals associated with confidence, connection, and satisfaction. Risk, it turns out, revives us.
As David Chapman observes, “Breaking out of stasis requires agency: the capability and willingness to act in non-routine ways.” But someone has to go first. Who will?
“I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering... but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.” - James Baldwin
If risk-taking can make us happier, more resilient, and more connected, we need to embrace uncertainty again. That means stepping beyond our comfort zones and leaping into the unfamiliar. And what better place to start than a dark room, surrounded by strangers?
Four Ways Cinema Can Revive Us
1. Seek Uncommon Ground
Meta-rationalism encourages us to sort ourselves neatly into tribes. Only 25 percent of Americans discuss meaningful issues with someone from a different race, ethnicity, or political background. Four in five of our Facebook friends are politically like-minded. This has made us fragile, intolerant, and incapable of engaging with challenging ideas.
Google's own research reveals the folly in this arrangement. Their Project Aristotle found that the highest-performing teams shared one key trait: psychological safety, the confidence that taking interpersonal risks won’t lead to shame or punishment. Cinema operates on the same principle. It’s a space where vulnerable truths can be safely explored, and where shared experience breeds connection. Great films pull us into foreign perspectives and stretch our capacity for understanding.
2. Strengthen your Curiosity Muscle
“People don't know what they want until you show it to them,” Steve Jobs once said. He understood that people actually enjoy good surprises and bold new visions. “Think Different” was once a thrilling call to expand our horizons. The corporate machine now guiding our culture has adopted a duller motto: “More of the same.”
Consuming repetitive, low-effort content delivers dopamine - a quick hit of pleasure. But novelty, complexity, and challenge trigger serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins, neurochemicals that contribute to long-term emotional well-being. Just as leafy greens boost metabolism and resistance training strengthens muscles, difficult or daring films nourish our attention spans, our empathy, and our capacity for wonder.
3. Embrace Ambiguity
Meta-rationalists view ambiguity as a bug, not a feature. Everything must be searchable, measurable, and painfully unsubtle. Many movies now over-explain everything, sometimes more than once - just in case we were distracted by our phones or folding our laundry. No silence goes unfilled, no mystery goes unsolved. But that’s not how life works - and it’s not how great movies work, either.
“It's not uncertainty we should fear,” writes Maggie Jackson in Uncertainty: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, “but a growing reluctance - and perhaps waning ability - to seek nuance, depth, and perspective.” Ambiguous stories trust us to reach our own answers, and reconnect us with our own agency.
4. Rebuild Agency
Psychologist Albert Bandura defined self-efficacy as the belief in our ability to shape our lives. People with high self-efficacy recover faster from setbacks, embrace challenges, and build emotional resilience. Without it, we slide into learned helplessness.
The more we rely on algorithms and AI to think for us, the more we begin to doubt our own instincts. But choosing to watch a risky, unfamiliar film - especially when safer, easier options are a click away - is an act of resistance training. Just as my niece and nephew will one day graduate from plain noodles, and I may yet learn to tolerate onions, we can mature culturally too. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional comfort food, of course. But we can’t thrive on Cheetos alone.
And now, this week’s Underexposed Movie Pick:
Defending Your Life (1991, Dir. Albert Brooks)
Albert Brooks always loomed large in our house. My parents adored Lost in America, but for me, the crown jewel has always been Defending Your Life, a feel-good metaphysical comedy that’s somehow both hilarious and quietly profound.
Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a man who dies in a car accident and finds himself in Judgment City, a kind of celestial DMV where his entire life is reviewed to determine if he gets to move forward or must return to Earth to try again.
Defending Your Life has gotten a bit of reappraisal lately, thanks to its Criterion release, and also due to the enormous debt owed by the comedy series The Good Place, which borrowed Brooks’s bureaucratic afterlife. Even with the new attention, Defending Your Life remains shamefully obscure. If you’re looking to lift your spirits, look no further.
Where To Watch Defending Your Life
News Reel
A few weeks ago, I wrote about movies that were banned, lost, or destroyed. One of the most infamous is Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried (1972), a controversial Holocaust “comedy” that was thought to be lost forever - until this week. Swedish actor Hans Crispin has reportedly been sitting on a copy of the movie after stealing it in 1980: “After watching it, The Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer said it was ‘a perfect object,’ adding, ‘This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.’”
Here on Filmstack,
is launching a fun film zine. Meanwhile, presents “a radical blueprint on transforming our dying theaters into cultural gyms.” I support this mission, and look forward to seeing you all in my David Lean & Lift class. It WILL get sweaty.While recovering from a concussion recently, beloved Underexposed repeat guest and Lit Hub / CrimeReads editor Olivia Rutigliano filed a fun round-up of cinema's greatest blows to the head.
- interviewed director Jeremy Workman about his hit indie doc Secret Mall Apartment: “Maybe now indie film distribution is finally catching up to what the creator economy has been building up for years: indie filmmakers of tomorrow are going to be much more of a brand and become much more of the engine behind their exhibition, which might even be a good thing.”
That’s all for this week’s Underexposed. See you next Friday!
Alex
An all-time favorite movie quote that could just as well apply to meta-rationalism: "Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything - real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can't get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you're in for the ride of your life."
Good thoughts, Alex.
And congratulations on finding the one James Baldwin quote least likely to be cited by others.
The phenomenon, if it can be defined by that term, is borne out of many tendencies and fashions and habits. For instance, the marketing mindset, which always tends to flattening, over-explaining, categorizing. The premium put on “safety,” which Baldwin handily destroys. The fear of conflict. The idea of art as some kind of pleasure delivery system. Try to sell that one to Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Dostoyevsky or Orson Welles, to take a few random examples.
I’ve never seen a film that has really stayed with me and grown that was just familiar, safe, and instantly comprehensible.
Like many other positions and panics and common ideas floating around now, it really isn’t sustainable. But people shouldn’t wait for uncertainty and exploration and grappling to become fashionable again. They should just go dive in. There’s a lot waiting for them.