Do Unto Others

THE INDIAN FILMMAKER Mira Nair—one of the most imaginative, vibrant, and humane directors—told me recently that she sees two frontiers in the spiritual evolution of cinema. Her dream chimes with the notion that the stories we tell don’t just shape our lives, but in some senses actually become them.

The guy in the airplane seat in front of me blowing up pixelated images of Middle Eastern desertscapes is but one reminder of how the boundaries between self and story and “reality” are collapsing. Of course, technology permits us to tell more humane stories too, and to connect across distances as vast as continents. And there are signs of hope as more films seem to challenge the idea that threats must be ended by titanic force. Even some blockbusters depict human vulnerability, or conversation across lines of difference. It is these areas in which Mira Nair invites a deeper response.

She would like to see more balance regarding the action/spandex spectacles in which oppression (or sometimes merely disagreement) is typically confronted—without damaging consequences—by firepower, and those in which imagination plays more of a role in conflict resolution. In other words, fewer films in which things are “fixed” by blowing stuff up.

Nair’s second frontier is perhaps just as obvious, but as with many obvious things, it’s easy to forget because everyone assumes it’s being talked about by everyone else, or that it’s too naive to actually be enacted: Tell stories that “show us life through the eyes of the other,” says Nair, who turned such a challenge into eloquent cinematic magic in her beautiful films Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and most recently Queen of Katwe, one of the under-appreciated gems of the past year. It resonates with other recent gorgeous works of hope and other-seeing such as Arrival, 20th Century Women, Rams, Paterson, Loving, Jackie, and Moonlight. And Marvel’s Doctor Strange is also a sign of hope: an action movie that doesn’t limit its climax to total destruction.

Mira Nair is courageous—and right—in asserting that the industry within which she works requires a reboot. Imagining what we could be depends on listening to voices other than “our” own. There’s a reason why “do unto others what you would have them do unto you” is understood as among the great spiritual teachings. It has always been so. And Mira Nair’s films do well unto others.