Adventure movies hijacked my mind

and what does "sonder" mean?

Justin was traveling last week so I tucked myself in bed early every night and watched movies. I watched both Jungle Cruise and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and I’ve been letting the two have been dialoguing in my mind ever since.

I think Temple of Doom is the worst of the original Indiana Jones’ movies.¹ I watched it because I couldn’t remember it, and because I wanted to see if our almost-thirteen-year-old could watch it. Spoiler: absolutely not right now. There is a demonic cult, child slavery, and they offer a human sacrifice that is mostly unfiltered. It was the 80s after all.²

Jungle Cruise is neither the worst adventure movie nor the best. The quality of the movie felt explained once I read that the movie was based on the Disney ride. However, I really enjoy Jungle Cruise. I do love adventure action and it had a lot of adventure action. It also had a female lead that was allowed to be a whole character.

Regardless of how we feel about movies nowadays, the way we portray women onscreen has radically changed. In the case of these two movies, in a good way. Dr. Lily Houghton is a scientist who is not accepted by the scientific community because she is a woman. She is an active agent in her own life, not a passive recipient. She cares for people deeply. She makes mistakes. She has hobbies. She is courageous and she is afraid of some things. She knows what she wants and she goes after it. Things do not always work out, but sometimes they do.

In contrast, Willie Scott is a flat portrait. She’s not a whole person. We don’t know one thing about her background, her likes and dislikes,³ her accomplishments or her failures. She rarely acts in the movie; she only reacts or is acted upon. She screams and whines in response to every difficult thing that happens. She’s only interested in money. She’s mostly there for her sex appeal, and so that Jones can look “manly” rescuing her.⁴

It reminded me of watching The Princess Bride again with the boys. I have many of the same criticisms about Buttercup. She’s a very passive creature. I frequently roll my eyes at the stuff she does. But there was one point in the movie where I paused the movie to have a discussion with the boys. The little boy in the movie listening to the story said it wasn’t fair for Buttercup to marry Humperdinck because Westley had done so much for her. I told the boys that wasn’t how relationships with women work. Women don’t owe you marriage or love or sex or anything because you “do something for them.” You are either a man who helps others when they need it or you aren’t.⁵

(I was also disturbed that in The Princess Bride there is no mention of Buttercup’s actual position in life. The chances that she could refuse to marry Humperdinck and just walk away are minimal at best. This is the whole argument about David and Bathsheba in a nutshell.)⁶

I still love The Princess Bride. It’s a fun movie. I’m not here to spoil the fun. I am here to complicate the stories.⁷ The stories we tell ourselves about other people matter. Whether they are stories we absorb through movies or books, through news articles and influencer posts, or whether they are the stories we refuse to listen to, they are shaping our views about other people. Any time we flatten out the personhood of someone else or a whole group of people, we rob both ourselves and them. We might roll our eyes about how women were portrayed in movies in the 80s and 90s—Lisa, you’re taking this too seriously. But we tell ourselves (or absorb without critique) these same flattened stories about Democrats, Republicans, immigrants, people from the city, people from Appalachia, people from California, people from other countries, people across the street.

Apparently we are all prone to flatten other people. We carry big main character energy and think we are the only ones. We all seem suffer from this. John Koenig wrote The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—which I am now convinced I must read—and he describes this phenomenon:

But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs, and inherited craziness.

He called this realization sonder: “the profound feeling of realizing that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as one’s own.” Each random passerby. Sometimes I can barely remember this about my husband, whom I love deeply and have been married to for almost 18 years. To remember this about every single person, whether I like them or not, whether we have something in common or not, feels almost unmanageable.

And yet, that is what we see Jesus do in the Gospels. He gave everyone the dignity of being human, of having agency in their own lives, of being deeper than what other people were willing to see. He interacted this way especially with the ones who would not have expected it because of their status in society. As people who follow Jesus, we are called to do this as well. We have to continually reorient how we see people and the stories we tell ourselves about them.

Stereotypes are easy but they harm us. Caricatures might win debates or follows on the internet, but they remove the complexity and texture of being human. And we are each human.⁸

1. This doesn’t seem like a hot take but I didn’t search the internet to find out. It was so awful that I didn’t remember any of it and I know I’ve watched it before.

2. And you know what Bandit has to say about the 80s.

3. Except we do know that she doesn’t like creatures or bugs—hence most of the screaming.

4. We could have another conversation about how men are portrayed on tv.

5. Obviously there’s a more complex conversation to be had here about when someone leads something else on or is being manipulative, but that wasn’t what was happening in the movie.

6. This felt too important for a footnote. I know you really want to watch movies with me now.

7. If they write on my gravestone “complicator of stories,” I’ll be thrilled.

8. Even the women. Women are human too.