I felt, after watching Goodbye Solo, like I'd never seen a real movie before. I can't at this moment think of anything that matches it at exploring human nature and human experience, both the good and the bad, realistically enough to be anthropological rather than didactic--and yet not boring.
Then I came to IMDB and saw its dismal ratings. That made me sadder than the movie did. I read some of the poor reviews, to try to understand why most people didn't like this movie. I'll try to explain why I did, in a way they might understand.
I don't think this is a case of "pretentious art film" versus "unwashed masses". I think that most people who hated this film ground their thinking in spiritual metaphysical assumptions, where by "spiritual" I mean any ideology that requires the behavior of animals, groups of people, or organizations to result from its essential nature, rather than materialisticaly, as the result of mechanistic interactions; and that imagines it already knows what causes life's problems, and already has all the answers to them. So "spiritual" includes, for instance, Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, and the Social Justice movement.
Humans are, and always have been, bad at noticing the good. We tell our own histories as a series of wars and tragedies, presenting even our greatest achievements (say, the industrial revolution) in a negative light, never mentioning the millions of small moments of joy that more than make up for the periods of destruction.
In fiction, this manifests as the Milton effect--we make our villains more interesting than our heroes, and it is they, rather than the heroes, who are the "protagonists", the first movers, in our stories, to whom heroes merely react. There are no villains in Goodbye Solo, but William is the negative element, and the (technical) protagonist to whom Solo reacts.
But Solo is not merely reacting to William. His response to William is part of his whole personality, and we see him enact optimism and generosity in every aspect of his life. William is a fascinating negative character, but Solo, the positive character, is even more fascinating. It 's so rare to see fiction where the positive character outshine the negative without falling into false oversimplifications.
In any other story, the conflict between William and Solo would be the focus of the story; we would watch the movie to "find out what happens". In this story, that conflict is just the handle by which we first grasp each character. We learn only a little more about William, but a good deal more about Solo.
And here's where audience worldviews collide. Spiritualists believe in a simple world with simple answers. Every person is an instance of some universal type ("the elect", "sinner", "Jew", "Volk", "proletariat", "bourgeois", "awoken", "racist", etc.), and differs only in what Aristotle would call "accidental properties" from other members of that type. Groups likewise are instances of types, and history is the working-out of conflicts between these groups, as understood by conflict theory.
Spiritualists expect a movie to resolve its problems, because they think all problems can and should be resolved. They want only the emotional catharsis of seeing another problem resolved, whether successfully or tragically. They aren't thinking deeply about any of it, because they have no reason to; they think their religion or ideology already gave them all the important knowledge and wisdom about life. So this movie, which is about the particular characters of William and Solo, holds no interest for them once they think they've figured out what type to cast each of them as, and what social class to categorize them as.
Whereas true materialists understand the world as full of complex, unique individuals, unbounded by "essential natures", and are always looking for more insight into what kinds of people can exist and how they might interact. A movie, to them, is not merely a cathartic validation of their own preconceptions. It is an experiment, in the same sense that Emile Zola used to explain naturalist fiction in the 19th century.
To a scientist, the most-satisfying experiments are those which succeed, validating a new theory. But the most-interesting experiments are the experiments that fail--the ones where you don't get the expected result. That's what Goodbye Solo gives us. It isn't meant to pat you on the back and congratulate you for being a good person in harmony with the Right and Proper beliefs which always win in the end. It's meant to disturb you, and give you new data that doesn't fit your expectations, to think about.
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