Online discourse has become a fun part of enjoying and dissecting big pop culture events. But after seeing all the commentary around Ryan Coogler's Sinners - one of the biggest cultural juggernauts of the year - Brittany has one question: are we in a media literacy crisis? Difference of opinion is one thing, but it feels like some viewers are missing important clues or misreading the film entirely - and it doesn't stop with Sinners. To help work through this, Pop Culture Happy Hour's Aisha Harris and Code Switch's B.A. Parker join the show to figure out what this could mean for the way we engage with the world at large.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What sparked the discussion about media literacy?
Yes.
And I was like, oh, we don't have subtext anymore. Like we have subtext, but we can't read it. Like someone has to blatantly say, hey, remember that thing we did like five years ago? This is how it made me feel. Yeah.
But let's get into the meat and potatoes of why I brought you both here today, because the online discourse around the film centers has broken my brain. They had me concerned about not just how people were misunderstanding story, as each of you have discussed, but also how people were misunderstanding pretty common racial dynamics. And a lot of these reactions were coming from Black people.
I want to talk about a specific situation. There's a character in the film named Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld. Mary is a character who actually, like the real-life actress Steinfeld, has a grandparent who is mixed race.
One of the main characteristics of her character is that she is passing for white, but she is aware, and at least privately acknowledged, like many white-passing Black people, that she has Black ancestry and she was raised around Black people. Yeah. And I have seen so many people saying that she actually was white. She should be considered white.
People simply just not understanding how the one-drop rule worked back then, how segregation worked back in the Jim Crow South. What in the Lena horn are we doing here? It stressed me out. But my concern with this is two-pronged because, you know, this seems like people don't know, A, how to understand history, B,
and locate a story within a certain historical context, or B, that they also don't understand storytelling, or in this case, how to understand cues and clues that a movie will give you to understand what it's trying to tell you. What do you all make of this phenomenon? Aisha, we'll hear from you first.
This is something that I've written about and thought about a lot, which is that for better and to some extent for worse, we come to pop culture with all of our baggage, all of ourselves, and especially women.
In the age of the Internet, when we are all kind of identifying amongst groups and demographics, whether it's like I'm a Trekkie or I'm a Harry Potter fan or I'm whatever, it's like everything becomes super personal. And you often think about things from your perspective and then you project your perspective onto others. film, TV, whatever, in ways that maybe aren't always there.
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Chapter 2: What are the wild takes on Ryan Coogler's Sinners?
But this makes me wonder, like, if audiences can't accurately read a film or TV show where the writer and director are giving them clues... and directing their attention to what they need to be focused on, how might they understand or misunderstand complex news stories with huge real-life implications?
In the same way, right? Like I think about that story about Katie Couric and The Pit, right? It's like there are clues, but if you are half watching on your phone, you're going to miss it. And so is it media literacy in the sense of like people are watching and just not picking up what is being put down? Or is it also just like they are literally not even seeing it half the time?
And The Pit is the type of show that you like kind of need to give all your attention to because –
it's not giving you everything it's not it's not Grey's Anatomy it's not broad it's not but that's also like very direct of like choose me love me yeah exactly you don't you do not you do not have these big grand pronouncements of love or lust or whatever it's all taking place in a single day so like only so much can happen yeah even the way it duels out information is a way that like I think a lot of modern audiences are perhaps not attuned to or used to
getting information, which is usually like those big grand pronouncements. And instead, it's like it comes out in the way it would if you were actually there on that first day. Like you wouldn't learn everything about this one doctor in two seconds. Like that's not how it works.
No, thank you.
I don't need this. I'm like, please pay attention to me. But that's a really good point. People's attention is very split. And I see those things pop up in the way that people consume news. I see that pop up in the way that people are engaging with our rapidly changing political landscape.
And also, I think that makes me think about algorithms, like people's individual worldviews are now also deeply affected by their algorithms. I wonder, like, where does that take us as a society? Like, where does that leave us? Where are we going, y'all?
Yeah, I think we're already in the abyss. It's just like, how long are we going to wait here? And when are we going to pull ourselves out? I mean, I even just think about sort of this same idea of how we all project our different ideas and beliefs onto our pop culture. I think about Luigi Mangione and how there have been such differing reactions to what he does. is accused of having done.
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