When David Stratton – critic, TV presenter and hero to a generation of movie lovers – died last week at 85, he was immediately honoured as one of this country’s true soldiers of cinema: a relentless advocate who spent his life championing the artform he loved.  

Cinema had a loyal, passionate and fiercely intelligent friend in David Stratton. He was a man who worked hard to make loving movies seem serious and worthwhile – so much more than just a hobby. 

But over the course of his long and varied career, Stratton didn’t just kindly, patiently and honestly explain his passions. Along with his onscreen co-host Margaret Pomeranz, he also taught us a deeply valuable ethical lesson, time and time again: a lesson in the fine art of disagreement.  

What do Lars Von Trier and Vin Diesel have in common?

Pomeranz and Stratton were, from the very start of their time together, opposites. Pomeranz, who began her career in television as a producer, and was encouraged to move in front of the camera by Stratton, prized a curiously outrageous form of entertainment far more than Stratton.  

Stratton loved to laugh, make no mistake, but he drew a line at anything he considered tacky. Pomeranz, by contrast, loved that stuff. When they butted heads, it was over films like Team America: World Police (Pomeranz loved it; Stratton hated it); Sex And The City 2 (Pomeranz said it contained a “jacket she’d kill for” and gave it three stars; Stratton called it “offensive”).  

These differences in opinion weren’t just a casual “let’s agree to disagree” partings of ways. Once, memorably, Pomeranz gave Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in The Dark five stars, while Stratton gave it zero. When Pomeranz stood up for Vin Diesel, a performer Stratton hated, Stratton lightly poked fun at her, saying she wanted Diesel to “save her.” Possibly their biggest disagreement was over the classic Australian film Romper Stomper, starring Russell Crowe as a wild-eyed neo-Nazi. Stratton not only thought the film was terrible, he thought it was actively ethically harmful. Pomeranz gave it five stars. 

Sometimes these disagreements got a little heated. Stratton could be dismissive; Pomeranz seemed occasionally exasperated with him. But the pair never lost respect for one another, no matter how far apart their tastes pulled them – and, importantly, they never started throwing barbs at each other. Their disagreement was localised to the thing they were disagreeing about, not ad hominem snipes at the other’s character.  

Pomeranz herself acknowledged this, in a recent tribute written to honour her friend and colleague. “I think it’s extraordinary that, over all the time that David and I worked together, we never had a falling out”, she wrote. Disagreements between the two were common. But true breaks in the relationship – true threats to their working together – never were. 

The power of disagreement

Sometimes, disagreement is cast as an impediment to societal functioning. We can all be guilty of occasionally speaking as though disagreement is the enemy – as though for us to all flourish, we should all get along, all the time. That’s not to say that there are some matters where disagreement should be encouraged – the power of disagreement is not a free card to put every matter up for debate, no matter how harmful. 

But the history of philosophy shows us there’s power in sometimes parting opinion. Plato, for instance, presented almost all of his arguments in the form of debates, with characters going back and forth amongst each other on what is the correct behaviour. Plato’s “dialogues”, and thus, his entire ethical worldview, were fashioned out of disagreement.  

It is in disagreement, after all, that we get to honour one of the beautiful things about our world – difference, uniqueness, and the full richness of human experience.

It would be a very boring, and perhaps even insidious, world if we all thought the same thing. After all, a forced unity of opinion is one of the hallmarks of fascism.  

Disagreements, if handled and conducted well, can also guide us away from extremes. In some matters, truth lies in the middle of two poles. So it went on The Movie Show at least – I am not convinced we always agreed with our favourite from the pair. As viewers, our own tastes fluctuated between the extremes of Pomeranz and Stratton. In their disagreements, we could pick and choose elements of their tastes, and construct our own. 

And again, these were debates that never descended into name-calling, or anger. In this, Pomeranz and Stratton taught us another ethical lesson – that we can treat someone disagreeing with us as someone offering us kindness. Having to justify and argue for our own positions helps us better understand them. And it helps us better understand the world around us; the people around us.  

Laying my own cards on the table, I’ve always been more of a Pomeranz person (I love Von Trier, Romper Stomper, and Team America). But that’s just the thing. No matter how much I, a viewer raised on The Movie Show, found myself grumpily disagreeing with Stratton, it never made me dislike him. And when he passed, the loss I felt was not just the loss of a man I had always admired. It was the loss of a defender of art and a good sparring partner – no matter that it was one-sided sparring, through the TV. Disagreement done well is a gift. And no one more generously gave out that gift than David Stratton.

Marvel’s in trouble. The once box office-dominating brand has hit every branch on the way down as of late, from cancelled shows to thinning audiences. So, consider it a sign of the times that the folks behind the behemoth have attempted to enliven their cinematic futures not by looking forward, but instead casting their gaze way back. 

The Fantastic Four, the third attempt to make the family of superheroes work on the big screen, jettisons the usual digital sheen of superhero properties in favour of old-fashioned nostalgia. Set in an alternate, 1950s-style world, the film’s visual style and production values have been heralded as a bold break from the norm – which is funny, given how deliberately re–trotted they are.  

Not only has ‘50s fantasy been done before in, y’know, the ‘50s, but we’ve already had multiple recycles of that trend, from the glossy world of Mad Men to the screwball textures of films like Down With Love. Marvel’s “new” style is not just a throwback. It’s a throwback of a throwback.  

The antidote to irony

The film’s not alone in that open nostalgia, either. James Gunn’s Superman reboot attempts to make the gung-ho, gee-wizz character work by similarly leaning into an old-school fantasy, where journalism is heralded as truth-telling, and unabashed optimism is the name of the day. Then there’s Lena Dunham’s new rom-com series Too Much, which offsets its decidedly modern story with near constant references to Jane Austen-inflected romance, openly lusting after a bygone world where manners ruled the day, and sincerity was the default response.  

This sudden rush of nostalgia can be read, above everything else, as a society trying to shake itself free of cynicism and layers of irony. The 90s saw post-modern go mainstream, with every cinematic hero affecting a wise-cracking, subversive mode, and over the decade and a bit after, that irony only got more layered. Eventually, you end up with someone like Deadpool, who can’t take a breath without acknowledging that he’s a character in a movie. 

It was the writer David Foster Wallace who saw where this was all going to take us, writing over 20 years ago that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in US”. Irony reduces and destroys, and is inherently oppositional in nature – not just aesthetically, but ethically, leaving us paralysed by our own smartness and subversion, without any energy left over to actually do anything. 

And our need to do something is only greater than ever – as the world gets darker and more dangerous, it makes sense that we would turn back to the forward thinking and action of the ‘50s. The Fantastic Four and Superman come from a time where heroes actually believed that the world was a good place, and fought to make it even better. Being nostalgic for them means being nostalgic for proactive ethical agents, who, rather than spending their time brooding and moaning, fought for something. In short, it means being nostalgic for hope. 

Nostalgia’s trap

But if we seek to distance ourselves from the dangerous trap of irony, then we should be careful to not run too open-armed into nostalgia. Nostalgia, after all, is its own kind of trap. Rather than making something genuinely new – something that responds to the world as it actually is – nostalgia is inherently regressive.

Philosopher Mark Fisher wrote about exactly this, seeing nostalgia as part of the “slow cancellation of the future”; the eradication of possibility and free-thinking. No wonder that conservatives the world over, Donald Trump chief among them, have aggressively nostalgic worldviews: nostalgia, when used improperly, can be a form of ethical despair and stasis too.  

The nostalgia trap is laid bare in another film released this year – Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later. In the film, an isolated community trying to get by in a post-apocalyptic world, find their strength in visions of nostalgic Britain. In one montage, early in the film, two of our heroes making their way across a dangerous landscape are intercut with images of British soldiers at Agincourt, all scored to a Rudyard Kipling poem – Kipling being that hero of early British imperialism. The heroes in Boyle’s film try to survive and draw their strength from remembering how things used to be. And in turn, they end up trapped, locked into regressive and cruel worldviews that damage them. 

That thesis is made shockingly clear in the last five minutes of the film, where the young hero (spoiler alert), finds himself saved by a roaming gang all made up of thugs dressed like disgraced pedophile Jimmy Savile. The young hero accepts them, open-armed. The kind of nostalgia that he has been raised on has no room for nuance. It’s essentially flattening, making a sort of caricature of England’s past. 

In this way, Boyle criticises the nullifying effects of nostalgia: it casts the entire past as something to return to, without remembering its horrors and its shortcomings. If all we ever want to be is what we once were, then we will never truly change.

Nostalgia might be useful to energise us, but only if it’s used selectively and critically – if we aim to be better than what we once were, not merely the same.

As with so many things, we find our way forward through the mid-ground. Not just recreating the 50s, but taking what we want from it – the hope, the energy, the sense of optimism – and jettisoning what we don’t. The way to avoid the cancellation of the future, after all, is by believing that the future exists – that there’s still room, even now, to use the past to create something that has never occurred before.

This is a story about moral panic: a familiar social pattern where fear swells, villains are cast, and quick solutions race ahead of careful thought. Like any good tale, it begins with a wolf.

Charles Perrault (1628-1703), grandfather of the modern fairy tale, knew that morality could be controlled through stories – such as those later adapted by the Brothers Grimm – like Little Red Riding Hood, where characters like The Wolf are easily understood as folk devils. 

But morality plays, where the terrible actions of evil people teach us to be good, aren’t just a staple of fantasy: they are also a key feature of media storytelling. The British sociologist, Stanley Cohen, argued that the media creates moral panics by creating ‘folk devils’, which incite panic in the community. In a way, the media is saying the Big Bad Wolf is real. 

We saw this in the 1980s, when the media fuelled the “Satanic Panic” that surrounded the tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, amplifying claims that it led to self-harm and Satanism. In this story, the children who played the game were folk devils, coordinating to corrupt their peers. 

Many times, a moral panic is an exaggeration of a social challenge that does exist. It’s often based on real events, but the story is blown out of proportion, especially compared to other, more serious, problems. When something becomes a moral panic, we’re inspired to act fast, often without careful consideration or scrutiny of the narrative we’re fed. Its moral nature can more easily justify a harsh response because the stakes feel so high. This can lead to hasty or bad decisions, which can end up doing far more harm than good. 

It’s important that we can identify the signs of a moral panic, so we can respond appropriately. Using a diagnosis tool with embedded ethical questions, like the steps below, can help us think critically about what we are being told. We can think about which bits might be exaggerated or amplified, and whether the solutions offered will actually address the core issue. 

Prevention becomes prejudice 

The first stage in the creation of a moral panic is the identification of a folk devil. Cohen noted that there are several clusters of who, or what, gets branded as a folk devil, with it often resting on pre-existing prejudices or stereotypes. Common candidates are young people, working class or violent men. Sometimes it’s new media, like rock music, social media or video games. Other times it’s groups that are often the targets of discrimination, such as single mothers, welfare cheats, refugees or asylum seekers. 

One of the risks of a moral panic is that it becomes a mask for prejudice. Not all wolves devour grandmothers, just as not all young men are violent, or all childcare workers are predators. Although real danger can exist, moral panic begins when appearance, identity or difference becomes mistaken as a threat.

It is the leap from concern to caricature that makes a folk devil.

Once we know the villain, we construct the story. A challenge to the social order becomes a moral panic because of the way it’s communicated. When the media goes beyond describing something and injects morally judgemental language, using words like “thug” or “bludger” or “monster”, it is more likely to trigger an emotional response.  

How the media and community tell the story also determines not just who the suitable enemy is, but who the suitable victim might be. The victim will be someone the public can easily identify, such as children or innocent girls and women, but typically someone everyone knows.  

This next stage is crucial to how moral panic is sustained. This is where the media calls on public experts to comment. Religious leaders are often drawn in to help sustain concern about a social challenge as they are already framed as guardians of morality. Sometimes it’s academics or activists or the representative of a non-government organisation who is called upon to argue over the nuances of the case, lending it greater credibility.  

Hasty solutions 

A moral panic demands solutions. But, just as there is no rescuing Little Red without an axe, solutions can be extreme while temperatures run high. The very urgency of a moral panic can inspire us to look to options we might normally reject due to their high cost or because of the compromises involved. A moral panic might lead to blanket bans, a reduction in civil liberties or even calls for the death penalty.  

This leads to the last step in a moral panic, when policymakers get involved. When the media, backyard barbeques, school pick up and letters to MPs are all begging the government to intervene, it’s more likely for the government to do so, lest it look weak or, worse still, complicit in the moral failing. But good policy can take years to develop, but a moral panic demands it is made fast, as seen with the Australian government’s youth social media ban. Sometimes that produces more problems while failing to solve the deeper underlying issues that contributed to the moral panic. Banning Dungeons & Dragons wouldn’t have solved the underlying mental health issues that triggered the panic in the first place. 

The Big Bad Wolf never really left the storybooks, we just keep giving him new names, faces and new reasons to panic. There really are wolves out there, and we need to find ways to deal with them. But when temperatures run high, we risk offering fairy tale solutions to real-world problems.

Image: Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893