We Made This Movie: A Search For Authenticity

We Made This Movie--abbreviated as WMTM for the purposes of this post--is about a generation of kids who are desperate to make something but have nothing to say. Like hipsters who draw from the past to define their consumer choices, and people who take the same picture and add different captions to create a meme, our generation seems bounded by what already exists. Our nature is to create but we can't find anything creative to say, so we're re-purposing and recreating what already exists in a desperate effort to break into new ground. The way WMTM avoids this depressing reality is by creating a moment of true (creative) authenticity at the end when LeBron realizes that his movie is really about the personal stories of himself and his friends. Even though it by accident, his persistence allowed him to created a “break” in the culture industry (as used by critical theorists in the Frankfurt school). He (re)discovered what it means to create something of value. Value doesn't come from ripping off Jackass or Borat; value comes from saying something authentic about the condition of human existence. .

I still think this generation has something to say. Like LeBron in the earlier stages of the movie, we are simply still in the process of understanding what is worth saying. Perhaps a break will eventually surface, but in a way that requires a paradigm shift in our understanding of authentic creation. Sure, all these memes are the same thing, but perhaps we can mine from the captions some message that tells us something true about human existence, and that will be our new creative form.

So basically, WMTM is an allegory about finding authenticity, and I would say it succeeded.