This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. “My bet is Spotlight or The Revenant.Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. “These days, with the academy having a much larger set of nominees, I think it just eeks in,” he writes. Think about how many lives in the developing world, or indeed in America, the money spent to bring back Matt Damon’s character could have saved instead.Īs for The Martian winning Best Picture, Cohen isn’t confident. The movies are accurate insofar as Governments indeed tend to spend much more on saving the lives of identified individuals than the same number (or indeed many more) statistical lives - those who exist but are relatively undifferentiated. It plays itself out in the real world, often to the detriment of poor and marginalized populations. The problem, Cohen asserts, is that this situation isn’t confined to the silver screen.
Stories need characters that resonate emotionally with audiences. And the expectation of the filmmakers (and my own take on audience reaction) is that the audience cheers. Imagine you had 10 million dollars to spend to save the life of one person whose name you knew or 10,000 whose name you didn’t? How would you spend it? What would you think of a government policy that chose to save the 1 person rather than the 10,000? I would think pretty badly of such a government, but that’s exactly what happens in some popular new movies. But when populations are in peril, when we’re presented with statistics rather than individuals, we’re less likely to take meaningful action. We will go to great lengths to save the identified individuals, financially and logistically. In the post, Cohen argues that we latch onto individuals in peril when they have a name and face and become a sort of cause célèbre in the media.
Not long after seeing the film in theaters, Cohen wrote a short blog post titled “Identified versus Statistical Lives at the Movies.” And the narrative thrust of The Martian-a Herculean effort to save a stranded Matt Damon-tickled Cohen’s inner ethicist. He’s a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in bioethics. The Martian, Cohen says, was one of his top 15 movies of the year, “maybe top 10.”īut Cohen isn’t a film critic. Glenn Cohen liked The Martian, which this morning earned itself seven nominations in the Academy Awards, including a slot in the coveted Best Picture category. Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) finds himself stranded and alone on Mars in The Martian.