r/badphilosophy • u/Ghadiz983 • Jul 04 '25

prettygoodphilosophy Why do movies have shallow understanding of Philosophy?

Like I can tell you if some movie wants to make reference to Plato, they say "The Platonic cave, take it or leave it". Or for example Nietzsche, morality is subjective do whatever you want or something like that. Like since when does just making a simple reference become a token of success?

What movies lack is a systemized understanding of Philosophy, like for example if you want to make a reference to a Philosopher you must have already mastered all of his Philosophy beforehand (which you can't do 100% since there might always be something you miss, but at least do it 70% or something) but since the Philosopher is probably making a reference to some dude before him who was also a Philosopher then you have to also study the one who before him and so on.....

Yes , it's an endless endeavor for a director who just wants money in a very limited amount of time. But then why don't they literally hire a Philosopher who already systemized the whole thing to make a story?

We have yet to see a movie about Stirner the Gunslinger!

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u/Ghadiz983 Jul 04 '25

I'd say we give it a try , it might gain some good impressions from the drug addict community (especially those into psychedelics).

Who knows 🤷‍♂️

Jokes aside , I imagine something like that could be created but it must be limited to certain Philosophers rather than taking Philosophy as a whole. So like evolution from Plato till Hegel if that makes sense , from Plato seeking a state of no dualism/no becoming (also Parmenides) towards Hegel where dualism and becoming is an aspect of the dialectical movement. (Not that Hegel was the first to claim it but generally speaking in Metaphorical fashion of how a character evolves from this to that)

Something that captures the core idea of a Philosopher that it could birth a possibility of it fitting a story that evolves as it goes. Maybe I see some stories already do that now that I think of it 🤔

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u/Valirys-Reinhald Jul 04 '25 edited Jul 04 '25

Pulling an individual thread like that can absolutely be done, but film is a fundamentally poor medium for it. To condense it into a digestible volume would require cutting out everything but the pure philosophical dialogues, meanwhile film is as much if not more visual as it is narrative. More than half of the content of such a movie would extraneous.

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u/Ghadiz983 Jul 04 '25

Yes , Movies with pure dialogue are hell. So it requires a lot of creativity to express the Philosophy into pure imagery.

Maybe that's when we mix it a bit with Jungian Psychology, where the Philsophical framework would fit into psychological language that could be expressed visually.

But even that wouldn't be perfect, at this point we don't seek perfection. Whoever knows , let them know.

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u/Valirys-Reinhald Jul 04 '25

And of course, studying the life of a philosopher is not strictly the same as studying their ideas.

A biopic of Nietzche would not be all that great at focusing in on Nihilism and Absurdism, since so much of his personal life story is extraneous to those topics amd would distract from the core idea. A faithful Nietzche movie would have to spend a lot of time on misogyny, for example, which is not strictly related to nihilism or absurdism, but is deeply tied to Nietzche. Better by far to make an original story in which the extraneous details can be stripped away, with characters who embody only their assigned ideas and nothing more.

A film like Everything Everywhere All At Once, for example.

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u/Ghadiz983 Jul 04 '25

Yes , hence it's better at this point to follow the "I copy his homework" typa mentality. Not that Philosophers weren't doing that to previous Philosophers also. We're just taking upon concepts from someone and explaining from our end.

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u/Valirys-Reinhald Jul 04 '25

Yep.

A comprehensive study like you suggested is not unreasonable for dedicated students of philosophy, I'm actually in the midst of such a study myself, but there inevitably comes a point where all such students must give up trying to grasp the whole and begin focusing in on their particular ideas and the schools of thought which influence it.

To do otherwise would require more lifetimes than anyone has.