Insight
10 o'clock, September 30, 2004
I wasn’t going to see the movie anyway. But I did like this bit of criticism, as criticism.
The Forgotten purports to be about loss and grief, but putting aside the dubious agenda and motivations of the Sky-Hurlers we seem to end up with a movie with a curious message: Never Heal, Never Let Go. 5,999,999,999 times out of six billion that’s gonna be the wrong way to respond to the death of a loved one, but The Forgotten manages to dig out that one curious case where remaining forever trapped in your grief turns out to be the way to get your son back. Good for her, but it doesn’t really offer too much to the rest of us.
A lot of works end up with similar curious messages. How many of them are conscious? How many of the wrong messages have you accidentally put in your own work? Hmm. What does your therapist think of that?
There's a certain man-ape simplicity to the implied demand that of course movies/books/stories/songs should have "messages", especially messages that are so widely applicable as to already be in the realm of common sense.