How To Build Your Perspective
I have a movie recommendation for you. I'd deem it required educational content for men, and ironic tragedy for women in our Western culture.
The movie is Ladies First starring Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike. It transports a male chauvinist, who suffers a major blow to his head, to an alternative reality where the social constructs of society are framed around a female (vs male) perspective. A few of my favourite moments include;
At the end of a prayer at a funeral, everyone recites 'in the name of the mother, sister, and holy spirit'.
Billboards, buses, and magazine ads all feature mostly naked men, posing seductively to sell products and services promoting skin glow, health, and fitness...for men.
The female protagonist (Pike) finishes her meal at a restaurant, dismisses her colleague, and calls over two men, all dolled up (tight outfits, make-up), swooning over her, and buys them a drink.
When the movie presents a reality that is, in many respects, flipped from the reality that we all accept as 'normal', it looks completely absurd.
The genius of the film is that absurdity makes what we accept as normal look equally absurd.
I loved it. Whitney did too.
I went to Rotten Tomatoes, expecting rave reviews from fans as well.
For those who are not familiar, Rotten Tomatoes is a website where anyone can become a movie critic, leaving a review for the world to see. Most movies will get anywhere from 50 to thousands of public reviews, and it gets a score out of 100%. Most great movies, like grades in school, get an 85% or better.
To my shock, this was not the case. It got 27%, and when I dug in, the low rating resulted from vastly polarized opinions of the movie.
I'm cherry picking here, but from the reviews, most men hated it, and many women liked it. Here are two selected contrasting reviews;
Critical review (from a man): Nearly a complete failure, a movie with an extremely dated understanding of gender relations, which doesn't allow Sacha Baron Cohen to do anything he's good at.
Generous review (from a woman): Every single man needs to see this film. Rosamund Pike can do no wrong and absolutely nails this role.
I side with the women on this one. And I struggle to understand the notion of what was meant by 'dated gender relations'... but that's a whole other topic.
I'm going to take a leap... and it's my blog, so I'm going for it...
I think it would be easy to watch this movie and miss the point. To see it as 'lazy' and a ‘failure'. If you're tuning in to see Sacha Baron Cohen (aka, Borat) do something outrageous and ridiculous, this movie will absolutely be a miss for you.
What this movie does instead is put something directly in front of your face that is ugly and absurd, and forces you to sit with it for two hours without looking away. You find yourself laughing, but also feeling sad at the same time, because you start to realize that absurdity that you're seeing is a real thing. It exists all around us and you're being forced to confront it.
What I loved about this movie was that I went in intrigued by the concept, but came out having experienced an entire perspective shift. I was entertained AND transformed. That's good comedy.
What has stayed with me about watching this movie is how powerful it is to have an experience that makes your 'normal' feel or look completely ridiculous. When that happens, it changes how you think, and it helps you grow.
When your perspective shifts, and you look at something from a totally different angle, what you create and build will get better. How you lead will get better. How you partner or parent will get better.
A few weeks ago we had a conversation with Ahmed Moneka, an Iraqi-born actor and musician who came to Canada as a refugee back in 2015. I went in without a practical understanding of the immigrant and refugee experience. Ahmed transformed everything I thought I understood about that experience by bringing me into another reality (his reality) and sharing his experience of what that was like.
By the end of that conversation I was thinking differently about the dozens of people I've encountered and (to my embarrassment) dismissed over the years whose realities don't match my own.
The mechanism at work here is empathy. Not the kind you perform, or decide to have. The kind that gets built by actually experiencing something from the outside in. A rich conversation does this. A good book does this. And a movie like Ladies First does this. Once you've genuinely seen something from the other side, you can never unsee it.
I'm someone who has spent most of my life not being naturally empathetic. What I've learned is that trying harder doesn't do much. What does work is putting myself somewhere that makes my default feel strange. Ladies First did that for me. I suspect it might work for you too.
Go watch it - you won't regret it! If not transformed, at the very least, you’ll be entertained.