Films are subjective and generally allow audience members to craft their own interpretations. In some cases, this ambiguity leads to a critical misinterpretation of the filmmaker’s intent. Commonly misunderstood movies often suffer from issues of media literacy, skewed cultural connotations, marketing, or some combination of these factors.
When a film is not viewed in its entirety, but distilled down to its major parts, subtle yet critical themes are lost. This is a major issue in the haste of modern communication, which abets the cultural misinterpretation of major movies.
Once a misinterpretation of a film takes hold in the cultural consciousness, it is difficult to undo. As such, a plethora of great movies continue to be completely misunderstood and misremembered by audiences today.
RoboCop (1987)
RoboCop is a searing satire on unchecked capitalism—foretelling a future in which all social services are privatized. In this imagined future, the police department’s corporate owner unveils a cyborg law enforcement officer as a revolutionary innovation intended to boost efficiency and profitability. The company boardmen are unconcerned by the potential of brutality from mechanized policing.
RoboCop screenwriter Ed Neumeier gets audiences to engage with the film’s dark and somewhat radical ideas by covering it in the gloss of a high-action blockbuster.
“I hide behind genre so I can say these other things and you accept it because it’s silly and funny and bright, it’s not asking you to take it too seriously. People like to laugh, and the laughter gives you a distance to take on tougher issues like police, use of force, crime, murder, fascism, and politics at a bit of a distance,” Neumeier tells SyFy.
However, pop culture often reflects the gloss of RoboCop while missing the deeper messages within. The poignant satire on capitalism and police brutality is misremembered as a standard ’80s action flick that promotes policing.
Fight Club (1999)
The hyper-violence of David Fincher’s Fight Club often eclipses the film’s central thesis. The movie is not about male aggression, it is a critique of consumerism.
Based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, Fight Club follows a white-collar worker (Edward Norton) who has achieved upward economic mobility and is left flailing in an incurable emptiness. In his desperation, he and a reckless acquaintance establish a men’s fight club and, eventually, an anarchist plot to disrupt the capitalist establishment.
While the dark satire attempts to expose the suffocating limitations of consumerism, a common misinterpretation replaces consumerism with social gender norms. Some audiences believe that the film’s protagonist is trapped in a gendered world that attempts to control his natural fighting instincts. This misinterpretation of Fight Club is popular among some online men’s rights communities (via Vice).
American Psycho (2000)
The protagonist of American Psycho is misinterpreted as a successful antihero, though the film depicts him as a bumbling villain.
An adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho follows a successful Wall Street investment banking executive as he indulges in violent and explicit fantasies. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is a bumbling but violent character written as a harsh take-down of excessive consumerism and white male privilege.
While the novel and film explicitly portray Bateman as foolish and contemptible, he has amassed a cult following among the very population he parodies—investment bankers.
The film’s director, Mary Harron, has expressed that she and her fellow screenwriter (Guinevere Turner) are dumbfounded by this misinterpretation of Bateman, which entiely misses the film’s intended message.
“I don’t think that Guinevere and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all,” Harron said in an interview with Letterboxd. “That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them.“
Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Jennifer’s Body is intended to literalize and reverse the male gaze, dominant in the horror genre. This is a film theory that describes the act of displaying on-screen female bodies for visual consumption by male viewers. In a blatant subversion of the male gaze, Jennifer (Megan Fox) literally consumes boys.
A satanic boy band attempts to offer Jennifer’s body as a sacrifice, but unintentionally turns her into a demonic man-eater. Jennifer’s Body also focuses on the depth and autonomy of its female leads—creating a female gaze.
Amanda Seyfried told GQ that the movie’s marketing completely mischaracterized the story and ultimately ruined public perception of the movie. The female-centric movie was marketed on the attractiveness of Megan Fox, an antithesis to its message. Marketing has indelibly mischaracterized Jennifer’s body as a sexy, high-action thriller.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Based on Jordan Belfort’s memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street chronicles the former stockbroker’s meteoric rise and fall. The Martin Scorsese film displays Belfort’s immorality as he rises and sits atop the capitalist food chain.
Despite Scorsese’s use of exaggerated satire to criticize the protagonist’s actions, the film is commonly mistaken as a glorification of Belfort’s success.The Wolf of Wall Street exuberantly displays the money-fueled debauchery that occurs within the upper echelon of businessmen.
While some mistake the film as a celebration of Belfort’s party-centric lifestyle, it attempts to depict the corrupting influence of unfettered wealth. Intended as a critique of immoral finance execs, The Wolf of Wall Street has unintentionally inspired future brokers who admire the extravagant life displayed in the film. This is a critical misunderstanding of a sharp satire.
Starship Troopers (1997)
Starship Troopers criticizes militarization and fascism by contradicting the systems’ principles. Based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, the sci-fi satire depicts a future society in which citizenship and the human rights that come with it are earned through military service.
In the film, the Troopers must destroy giant alien bugs, a race that they know little about. This plot subverts the military complex and questions both an inclination toward conflict and the dehumanization of supposed enemies.
The satire is regularly misinterpreted as military and nationalist propaganda. Audiences and critics take the film’s satire at face value and mistake its over-the-top militarism as the movie’s ethos, as Danielle Ryan explains in SlashFilm. Starship Troopers is so commonly misunderstood that it is rarely marketed as satire, but as a serious action/Sci-Fi flick.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Taxi Driver follows veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) as he develops a disgust for the modern society that he observes from behind the wheel of his New York City cab. Bickle feels called to violently take down the world that he believes has irrevocably lost its way.
Travis Bickle is mistaken for a hero in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic film. Certain groups idolize Bickle as a man who finally fought back against a society that continuously tested him. However, Scorsese explicitly depicts Travis as an unwell, violent, and implicitly bigoted character.
While Travis sees himself as a hero, the film does not so readily agree. Audiences’ idolization of Bickle may be due to the conflation of violent retribution and heroes that action movies have popularized.