Agency

To start, I'm gonna briefly mention a movie by a truly great director, but the movie is unfortunately awful and pointless.

The director in question is Robert Zemeckis.

He's legitimately a great director.

He made Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump, and other noteworthy movies.

But he recently made a live-action remake of a Disney animated classic.

All but one live-action remakes of Disney animated classics have been worse than awful movies.

Uh, they've been like crimes against the entire motion picture enterprise.

The only exception that I'm aware of was Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella, which is actually a fine movie.

It doesn't disrespect the original.

But the movie that Zemeckis made for Disney was Pinocchio.

That's the story of a lonely man who longs to have a son.

He makes a wooden puppet.

This magical fairy animates the puppet and gives him a chance to become a real boy if, and only if, he will be good and especially be truthful.

When Walt Disney made Pinocchio in 1940, he made his little animated wooden puppet face actual moral dilemmas and have consequences based on his decisions.

But the thing about the live-action remake of that movie is that all of that point of the story is completely eradicated.

In the remake, Pinocchio has no agency.

He's just a spectator rather than a free moral agent.

The movie is worthless.

It's pitiful.

What a waste of talent.

They had Tom Hanks as Geppetto, a great director like I mentioned, but the story was destroyed because the key figure in the story had no agency.

Well, I mention that horrifically bad movie because the lack of agency is the thing that connects our first two topics of the day, the Lindsay Clancy thing and the accuser of the so-called Cornell Seven.