Column: Do movies have a message? (They do, whether studios like it or not)

The medium is the message. The phrase was coined by philosopher Marshall McLuhan decades back to push us to think about the various tools of expression around us — the technology through which ideas are conveyed — as more than just neutral delivery devices. The medium itself “does something to people,” McLuhan wrote. “It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were.” When new advances in media increase the pace and scale of all of it, that leads to a “general roughing up” as he termed it. This was long before the internet and newsletters and social media were even a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye, but his words have been borne out. Who hasn’t felt more than a bit knocked around in the last few years?

For nearly a century, movies were one of the most powerful mediums around, and while they’ve lost cultural capital in the last decade, it’s dispiriting to contemplate how many people who make films — be they executives or creatives — are helping to hasten that irrelevance. Maybe you think I’m referring to artificial intelligence. That’s a real concern. But I’m also thinking about a blandification that has become all too pervasive.

While doing press last week to promote “Twisters,” the big-budget follow-up to “Twister,” the 1996 disaster movie about scientists and adrenaline-seeking tornado chasers, director Lee Isaac Chung explained to CNN why not a single character in the movie says the words “climate change”:

“I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

I blinked a few times. Films aren’t meant to be message-oriented? News to me.

Nobody falls in love with storytelling that is only “this happened, then that happened” with no larger arc somewhere about the human experience. That’s true even of comedies, where the message might be as basic as: Silliness is fun!

In the case of “Twisters,” the erasure of climate change — in a movie about the weather — becomes a message all its own.

So let’s make some guesses as to what’s going on. It’s possible that jumpy studio executives, rather than Chung and screenwriter Mark L. Smith, made the call. Either way, it’s likely the marketing team knew Chung would be asked about it, so maybe this nonsensical, laughably disingenuous response was brainstormed in a frenzy of media training ahead of the film’s rollout. Because there is a difference between preaching a message and simply acknowledging a reality. Chung, who previously made the 2020 Oscar-nominated drama “Minari” — which has a lot to say about the hollowness of the American dream — is too smart to convincingly pretend otherwise.

But also, if studios and filmmakers are working off the assumption that large swaths of the moviegoing audience would avoid “Twisters” if climate change were mentioned, that isn’t borne out by polling.

In fact, a recent study found that Americans “almost universally underestimate the extent of climate concern among their compatriots. They also underestimate the extent of public support — at the state and national level alike — for policy measures to address the climate emergency.”

How much does Hollywood have to answer for influencing what the study’s authors describe as a “false social reality,” especially when Chung is out here defending the erasure of climate change in his movie on artistic grounds, of all things?

“The more the business coalesces, the more these brands are afraid of offending their audience or offending anybody,” Robert King, co-creator of shows including “Evil” and “The Good Wife,” recently told The Hollywood Reporter. This is what I mean when I talk about the blandification of Hollywood.

Every so often, I’ll revisit big studio movies from the last couple of decades to try to understand the ways in which they are better constructed than most of what gets made today. And here’s a funny thing you realize watching something as fizzy as “Miss Congeniality.” The 2000 comedy stars Sandra Bullock as a FBI agent with no interest in her physical appearance who transforms into a glamazon to work undercover at a beauty pageant. The movie (streaming free on Tubi) isn’t nearly as overt in its messaging as something like “Barbie,” but it has all kinds of points to make about not judging a book by its cover and being a woman in a predominantly male workplace. None of it feels onerous. None of it steps on the comedy — if anything, it accentuates it.

We watch movies to be entertained. But we also watch because stories — meaningfully told and willing to take a risk — shape and deepen how we think and talk about the world around us and what it means to be human.

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic