What Modern Cinema Tells Us About Our Values
Fragment from Chapter Five of Coddled Children
Earlier this month,
published a piece on how Hollywood has become a tool for social engineering. It struck a nerve, because it named what many quietly sense: the slow erasure of what makes life worth living.We no longer tell stories about love.
Not real love. Not the kind that transforms us, challenges us, softens us. What we are given instead are narratives designed to tell us how to think and how to live. Characters flattened into pre-chewed scripts, spoon-feeding us ideological beliefs about gender, sexuality, identity, and equality.
Everything must serve the message. And the message is always the same: female independence is strength, needing someone is weakness, and male desires must be managed and corrected.
What this leaves us with is a world of flawless women and useless men. Representation has replaced revelation. What used to be chemistry is now choreography. The sex is explicit, but the intimacy is gone. What once drew us in now distances us. These are not love stories. They are lectures. Stylized, polished and beautifully shot. Yet the stories are flat and emotionally hollow.
We’ve stopped protecting innocence. We’ve commodified it. We’ve turned sexuality into performance and affection into a transaction. Girls are taught to be everything. Boys are taught to be nothing. And somewhere in between, the idea of mutual giving—the essence of love—has disappeared.
What happens when we teach young women that love follows achievement, and that men are unnecessary at best, dangerous at worst? What happens when men grow tired of being dismissed, and quietly retreat into silence or indifference? We are told this is progress. In reality, it is collapse. Not the kind that makes headlines, but the kind that slowly unravels the social fabric.
No one teaches us how to be close anymore. How to give, how to receive, how to stay when things hurt. What we are left with are two worlds drifting apart, each retreating into its own safe space, no longer able to truly see the other, let alone reach out and connect. And in the absence of shared space, there can be no real encounter. And thus, we end up alone.
This is not freedom. This is not evolution. We breathe. We function. But we no longer live.
You can find The Declaration of Love by Jean François de Troy in the Open Access collection of The Met.
In Coddled Children, love is not forbidden. It is forgotten. The following fragment shows why we should do everything in our power to get it back:
"What is love? It is a concept humanity has never truly been able to define. All we know is that it is gone, that we have lost it. We feel an emptiness in our hearts where love and connection once flowed freely. We drown in suffocating loneliness, even though we are never alone. It almost feels as if we are dying a little more each day. And in that pain, our souls cry out: Nourish me, or I will perish!
"But we no longer know how to feed the soul. We no longer know what it feels like to be embraced by a father or a mother. We no longer know the warmth of a lover’s touch. Everything is impersonal. From the moment we are born, everything is decided for us. We are told who to be, what to think, what to achieve, and what to possess, but never who we are.
"Instead, we are taught how to behave, how to function. We learn everything except how to be ourselves, how to love ourselves, and how to find fulfillment in simply being who we are. What is left of us when everything we have been taught is stripped away? Are we even still human?
"But we still have everything," I hear you say. "We have food and drink, we have clothes, we have our own cabin with a bed, we have work, we have sex, we have possessions. Yes, we have all of that. Still, my question is not about what we have, but who we are!
"Once, humanity stood apart from all other creatures. Not because of our intellect, nor our inventions, but because we were capable of true connection; a perfect symbiosis of giving and receiving. To exist fully, without diminishing another. We were grateful for the love we received and gave everything in return to bring happiness to those we cherished. We nourished one another, we supported one another, we loved one another, and we made love.
"And now?
"We have food, yet we eat alone.
"We have cabins, yet we live alone.
"We have sex, yet we sleep alone.
"No longer capable of giving, we seek others only to take. We take, and we are taken, until nothing remains.
"Did we survive nuclear war only to be reduced to objects? We deserve more than this! We are human! Rise up! Love yourself! Love one another! Let love back into your life and live with all your heart and soul!"
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