Can We Just Enjoy Movies Again?

Why it’s harder to just watch a film — and be happy.

In the late 2000s, we had Jennifer Lawrence. Most of us only knew her as Katniss in The Hunger Games, Mystique in X-Men, or that woman stuck on a spaceship with Chris Pratt. We didn’t know who she was dating, her political donations, how many dogs she had, or what hot takes she might’ve dropped on Twitter. It didn’t matter. We went to the pictures for two hours, felt something, and left.

It was simple. The character on screen made us laugh, cry, root for something. And then it was done. Jennifer Lawrence’s personal life or politics didn’t shape whether we thought The Hunger Games was a good film. Our relationship was contained. Clean.

Fast forward a decade, and we have Rachel Zegler. A young actress - barely in her twenties - who by all accounts is talented, should be a rising star, and still figuring life out.

And yet somehow she’s become a kind of internet punching bag. Not because of her performances, but because the ecosystem around pop culture thrives on digging up every unguarded comment, every half-formed opinion, and feeding it back to us as outrage content.

What’s striking is: I don’t even follow her. I don’t follow gossip accounts or read interviews with her. And yet I still know all the little sound bites people love to rage-share. Because pop culture commentators, even the ones I otherwise enjoy for film analysis, love to farm clicks on her name. It seeps in, whether you invite it or not.

And for it, we’ve lost something small but precious. Watching a movie - or more relevant for this, not watching it - has become a kind of allegiance. A signal. A minor act of tribal warfare in the endless online culture skirmish.

I travel a lot and I’ve spent countless hours on planes with what’s becoming quite a large and new-ish selection of movies on Emirates and Cathay. In another timeline, I might’ve watched Rachel Zegler’s Hunger Games prequel just to pass the time, formed a quiet opinion based on how I felt while watching the film, and moved on. Maybe I’d have liked it. Maybe I wouldn’t. But it wouldn’t have carried any extra weight beyond the length of the movie.

Now, because of all the background noise, I didn’t press play. Not out of principle, not really - more because it was tangled up in a frequency that didn’t feel good. And for it, I missed out on what could’ve been a harmless afternoon story.

That’s a small thing, but life is mostly made up of small things. Enough of them accumulate, and they shape our overall sense of happiness or unease.

I think about Rachel herself. Barely out of adolescence. Expected to have fully formed, palatable, politically nuanced takes on every subject under the sun. When most of us, at her age, would’ve been lucky not to embarrass ourselves on a friend’s Facebook wall. It’s unfair. And it robs her - and us - of what the artist-audience relationship used to be.

Maybe we’d all be a little happier if we let entertainers entertain us. If we didn’t demand they become philosophers or political proxies. If we gave ourselves permission to just enjoy the story, for two hours, without turning it into a referendum on someone’s entire character.

Maybe then we’d be just a little less unhappy.