February 23, 2025

The cultural bind of the uplifting movie

This weekend my husband watched the 1970s Charles Bronson movie Death Wish. I sat through about five minutes of it, but my husband reported it was a “slog.” And that makes sense: it espouses a conservative world view and that world view is unpleasant to experience.

In the movie, Charles Bronson’s character, an architect, has had a change of heart after his wife is slain and his daughter raped. He transforms from a “bleeding heart liberal” (my husband’s words) to a cold, murderous conservative vigilante.

In talking about the movie with Matt (aforementioned husband, incredible writer), we were trying to figure out what the opposite journey looks like in film. What does it mean to have a character who is conservative become not-conservative? What genre is that kind of movie?

And we realized: it is the uplifting movie. Almost every uplifting movie you know features a grumpy, closed-off person becoming more open, more caring, more… liberal. From Ebenezer Scrooge to Jerry Maguire, watching men discover morals is the backbone of the uplifting-movie-industrial complex.

So we enter a strange cultural nexus. Growing up in actual George W. Bush’s America, “uplifting” cinema was often synonymous with “family movies.” And, as someone who went to Catholic school, these movies often took on religious themes as well, many of them serving as conversation starters for religion class discussions.

But the entire arc of the uplifting film is anathema to our current political climate. As multiple Christian voices publish books on the alleged horrors of empathy, what will be the great cultural output of this moment?

It seems to me that every Bush-era movie that we watched and rewatched would be rejected on the merits. Remember the Titans (2000) is about the ills of segregation at a point when our leaders are actively trying to resegregate us. Mona Lisa Smile (2003) is about female access to higher education, at a time when they are trying to remove the ability of many married women to vote. Billy Elliot (2000) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) are on the cultural chopping block for expanding ideas of what femininity or masculinity look like. Even movies like Ray (2004) would be cast aside for showing the abilities of the disabled, at a time when eugenicist language and thought reigns supreme.

Put in these terms, it seems hard to imagine what the desired cultural output of this moment would be for those in power. What would those films look like? What could they look like? Are we all just trapped in Death Wish now?