This is why the discourse around “representation” has become so fraught. Representation is vital, but it has been hollowed into a metric. A show with perfect demographic checkboxes can still be intellectually vacant. Meanwhile, a film like Past Lives —which is deeply specific—achieves universal resonance precisely because it refuses to be a coping mechanism. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. It asks you to sit in ambiguity.

For most of human history, storytelling was a campfire. It was communal, fleeting, and bound by the physical limits of memory and voice. Then came the printing press, the silver screen, the cathode-ray tube, and finally, the glowing rectangle in our pocket. Today, we don’t just consume entertainment content—we live inside it. And in that shift from campfire to current, something fundamental has inverted. Popular media no longer merely reflects our desires; it architects them.

Every other show is a “trauma drama” ( Beef , The Bear , Succession ) where screaming, moral collapse, and generational pain are served not as warning but as validation. We watch characters self-destruct and feel a strange comfort: I’m not that broken . But this is a trap. The endless loop of “relatable trauma” transforms art into therapy, and therapy into performance. We no longer ask, “What does this story teach me about virtue?” We ask, “Does this story see me?”

This conditions the audience for a life without closure. We scroll past a film’s credits as fast as we scroll past a relationship’s end. We binge a season in two days and feel nothing at the conclusion because we’re already three episodes into the next algorithmically generated distraction.