[light piano music]

I often discuss the negative impacts that pop culture media can have on people's attitudes and opinions.

But, if entertainment can propagate harmful ideas, then it stands to reason that it can also have positive effects on our lives.

So in this video, I want to focus on media that fosters empathy and solidarity.

Now admittedly, that's a pretty broad category, so to narrow it down,

I'll be highlighting a handful of my favorite movies from my most formative years: the 1980s.

Looking at Hollywood today, it's pretty clear that the 1980s are back in a big way.

The current nostalgia craze is largely driven by Hollywood's obsession with remakes,

reboots, sequels, and loving limoges to popular 80's franchises.

The apex of this wave of nostalgia comes in the form of the novel turned blockbuster Ready Player One.

"I was born in 2025.

But I wish I'd grown up in the 1980s."

Ernest Cline's book, and by extension the film,

is built around a long list of superficial and rather ostentatious references

to geeky pop culture entertainment.

As a boy who grew up in the 1980s,

most of the media that's name-dropped in Ready Player One I remember well.

The Goonies, Gremlins,

Weird Science, Tron, Back to the Future; I watched them all.

But thinking back to my childhood,

the cinematic moments that had the most profound impact on me and my emotional development

weren't necessarily from the most popular or iconic movies.

The movie scenes that left the biggest impression on my young mind

were unapologetically sappy and sentimental.

"Goodbye Charlie. I love you."

They're the moments that still put a lump in my throat; the ones that make my eyes water and my heart swell.

"They look like big, good, strong hands, don't they?"

Movie critic Roger Ebert once said that movies are empathy-generating machines.

By which he meant that we as viewers identify with the characters on the screen,

and that helps us understand experiences and perspectives other than our own.

Movies can also affirm the human spirit by showing us examples of what empathy and solidarity look like.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings or emotions of others.

Now, it's important to note that empathy

isn't just feeling bad for the misfortunes of other people; empathy is about feeling what others are feeling.

Solidarity is when people from diverse backgrounds find a common cause,

and then work together to achieve social change.

You can think of solidarity as empathy put into collective action.

So with those two definitions in mind here's my personal list of 5

lesser-known movies from the 1980s that helped shape our humanity

The journey of natty Gann

chronicles the adventures of a young woman and her canine companion as they hopped freight trains from Chicago to

Washington State in a quest to find her father

Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, this is a quiet film with beautiful cinematography

That shows us the world through the eyes of characters living in poverty

The filmmakers deliberately place us as the audience firmly on the side of the downtrodden as

We see police evicting impoverished families and company bosses treating workers with heartless and difference

But while this depression-era world is harsh, it's not defined by cynicism

Acts of kindness and solidarity between economically oppressed people are highlighted throughout the movie

The journey of natty Gann is also reminiscent of the classic a boy

And his dog adventure story genre except here. The boy is a girl and the dog is a wolf

it's especially important for young women to be represented as leads in their own adventure stories and

I'd argue that it's just as important for young male audiences to see these kind of representations

He's a wolf

Boys need to learn to identify with female characters and see women and girls as fully human equals with their own stories

Nausicaa of the valley of the wind is set 1,000 years after humans have destroyed

civilization and the planet in a great apocalyptic war

We follow the adventures of a young woman named Nausicaa

princess of one of the few remaining human kingdoms as she struggles to understand and heal a world that's been overrun by mutant creatures and

toxic forests

The story centers on Nausicaa struggle to restore

equilibrium to the environment and to end the violent conflicts between human tribes and the giant insects of the jungle

We are not your enemies. We mean you no harm

In group depictions of empathy for friends teammates and family members are relatively common in pop culture media

Stories, built around expressions of out-group empathy that is empathy for strangers or Outsiders to your own group are more unusual

and

Expressions of empathy for one's enemies are especially rare

And empathy for the enemy is really the guiding principle of this film

He's so badly

Nausicaa remains acutely aware of the danger posed by the gigantic bug like creatures, but she nonetheless

Extends her empathy to these mutant beasts, and it's that act of empathy that ultimately saves humanity

It has a range of 7,000 miles

And a twenty Megaton warhead

Amazing Grace and Chuck is about a small-town boy. Who refuses to keep playing Little League baseball

because of the existence of nuclear weapons and what the hell is this about

Just can't play

Can't play because there's nuclear weapons

SEC had to do with baseball

Nothing, what's my best thing? I have to give up something I

Feel real bad about this. You know that

Game

His protest inspires the professional basketball star amazing grace to join his strike and together they organize a global

movement for nuclear disarmament

Hollywood very rarely gets political activism right the depiction of activism in most movies is limited to raising awareness or

personal acts of defiance

Amazing grace and Chuck on the other hand manages to show how social change actually happens

Social change is brought about when organizers raise social costs higher and higher until it becomes more advantageous

for the powers-that-be

To give in to people's demands than to keep opposing their cause

In the movie we see this play out when so many athletes joined Chuck's strike that it forces all

professional sporting leagues to cancel their seasons

destroy professional sports most college athletics high school scores resume even such things as Little League

So far it has made a shambles of the World Cup Wimbledon and events as far away as India and mainland, China

These protests raise social costs to the point where the public the media and world leaders have to pay attention

Hello, Chuck, and then bruh grudgingly take action

In the end the world has radically changed

But unlike most Hollywood movies this social

Transformation is not brought about by defeating the bad guys or through the actions of benevolent leaders

This social change comes from the bottom up it comes from people organizing and standing in solidarity together

Harry and the Hendersons is about a typical white American family who accidentally hit Bigfoot with their station wagon

The

Family's relationship with this gentle giant who they named Harry ultimately changes their lives forever

This one really is better than a campy Bigfoot movie has any right to be

Over the course of the film the empathy that Harry demonstrates towards other living creatures inspires the family to rethink their worldview

especially in regards to hunting and guns

the father played by John Lithgow undergoes an especially striking

transformation from avid hunter and firearms dealer to someone who over the objections of his own father learns to value

Non-violence and embrace his creative side. Did you dress?

Beautiful

Depictions of men and boys who reject guns and violence as markers of their manhood are critically important in our current culture I

Wanted King Kong you brought me a god damn giant gerbil. I told you exactly what to do

Maybe it's right on the nose. I mean how do we know maybe it's not vicious at all

Maybe it's gentle even has feelings. Where'd you dream of that shit?

As this movie illustrates, there's no reason Hollywood can't present empathy as a defining feature of masculinity

Batteries not included

centers on the tenants of an old New York City apartment building who are resisting a real estate tycoons efforts to evict them in order

To build a skyscraper

The residents are a band of down on their luck

But kind-hearted misfits who find unlikely allies in a group of mechanical aliens looking for a place to recharge

our group of humans embrace their strange

extraterrestrial visitors

And they all work together to help their new friends by providing fuel and energy for the aliens reproductive process

In return the mechanical life-forms help the residents by repairing damage done to their building by the tycoons henchmen

This story is really built around solidarity on all sides

The human tenants and the alien creatures come from very different backgrounds and have very different needs

But they still feel for each other and work to provide mutual aid and support

Going back and re watching these

unapologetically sincere and sentimental movies feels like an antidote to the superficial or

Ironic appeals to nostalgia that saturates much of Hollywood today

Now I should say that none of the movies on my list are without their flaws like a lot of pop culture in the 1980s

Some include racial stereotypes and the stories mostly focus on the experiences of white people

Still the core themes of empathy and solidarity had a profound impact on me and my values growing up

My list is of course a personal one and therefore specific to my identity and my upbringing

Depending on your age your gender and your cultural background

Your own list of movies will likely look quite a bit different

If I were making a list like this one but for media from this decade there are a handful of excellent movies that I definitely

Include I have made video essay is discussing a few of them like wall-e and fantastic beasts, which you can find elsewhere on this channel

But entertainment, built around empathy and solidarity is still relatively uncommon in 2018

Which is too bad because we really need more movies that embrace their role as empathy generating machines I

Hope you enjoyed this look back at some of my favorite movies from the 1980s if you'd like to see more of these long form

video essays that examine the messages in our media then please consider going over to patreon and helping to fund this project there

There's also a link to PayPal in the description below next time

We'll be talking about a rather disturbing action movie trope called abduction as romance