How Films Shape Society

Last week, I wrote about a simple fact of this work: we have influence over our audience whether we know it or not.

This week, I want to follow that influence a step further, because it does not stop with the person watching the film.

A movie isn’t finished influencing people when the credits roll. In some ways, that’s only where the influence begins. What a viewer carries out of the theater goes home with them. It shows up at the dinner table, in the car ride, in the conversations they have the next day. In short, it spreads; it grows.

And that growth should be paid attention to. It moves from one person, to their circle, to a community, to a society. When a story reaches more than one person, and those people reach others, we are no longer talking about entertainment value alone. We are talking about a force that has the ability to and has, at times, changed how a whole society thinks and what it tolerates.

How does a story’s influence travel?

Think about how influence actually spreads.

One person watches a story and it plants a seed. Maybe they begin to see a person they’d previously dismissed or stereotyped as fully human for the first time. Maybe they find language for something they’ve lived but never articulated. Maybe they leave a little braver, a little angrier, a little more hopeful, or a little more convinced that a harmful thing is normal.

The thing about seeds is that they take root. And they grow. And what grows produces seeds of its own. People talk. They recommend the film, or they warn people away from it. They quote it. They reenact it. Something they saw influences how they respond to a friend, treat a stranger, or make a decision. They spread what took root in them through their own circles, where it can take root in someone else.

And those people have circles of their own.

One seed becomes many. What grows from those first seeds produces more seeds, and those seeds grow and travel, too. The influence keeps spreading.

No single filmmaker controls all of that. That’s not the point. The point is that the effect is real, it starts with the choices we make, and it does not end where we can see it. A story we made to reach one audience can end up shaping people we will never meet, in places we will never go, long after we have moved on to the next project.

Can one story really move a whole society?

This isn’t theory. History holds proof of it.

In November 1983, more than 100 million Americans watched The Day After, a television movie about a nuclear attack on the United States and what came after it. President Ronald Reagan saw it before it aired and wrote in his diary that it was very effective and left him greatly depressed. In his memoirs, he drew a direct line from that film to his later work toward the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 — the first agreement to eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons. A made-for-television movie did not do that work alone. But by the president's own account, it helped move the man who did.

And in 2013, the documentary Blackfish told the story of Tilikum, an orca held at SeaWorld, and asked audiences to look again at keeping orcas in captivity. The film was seen by tens of millions of people after it reached television and streaming. Attendance at SeaWorld and the company's value fell, public pressure grew, and in March 2016 SeaWorld announced it would end its orca breeding program and phase out its theatrical orca shows — saying, in its own words, that society was changing and it was changing with it. A single documentary had helped change what society would accept, and a major company changed with it.

In each of these cases, a story reached individuals first. Then those individuals talked, decided, pressured, and led — and communities and institutions moved.

What happens when it travels in the wrong direction?

The seed does not check our intentions before it grows. The same power that can help a society can also wound it.

The clearest early warning came in 1915, with The Birth of a Nation. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and portrayed Black Americans in demeaning, dangerous ways. Historians of Georgia, where the revived Klan was founded that same year, describe the film's popularity — especially its arrival in Atlanta — as the major impetus for the Klan's reemergence, after it had been shut down decades earlier. A story told people a group built on hatred was noble. Some believed it, organized around it, and real people lived — and died — with the consequences.

A more recent example asks for honest, careful language. When Netflix released the series 13 Reasons Why in 2017, which centers on a teenager who dies by suicide, mental-health experts raised concerns right away. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health later found that suicide rates among Americans ages 10 to 17 rose significantly in the month after the release — about 29 percent above what would have been expected. The researchers were clear that their study showed an association and could not prove the series caused the increase. But they also cautioned that young people are especially vulnerable to what media shows them, and that how a subject like this is portrayed matters.

I don’t raise that example to point a finger. I raise it because it shows what is at stake in the choices themselves. A subject can be important to portray and still be portrayed in a way that puts vulnerable viewers at risk. The intention to start a conversation does not settle the question of how the story was told.

For good or for not so good, the pattern is the same: the story reaches a person, the person reaches others, and at scale, a society feels it.

Is this only about filmmakers?

I write as a filmmaker, and I have kept this post focused on film and television, because that is my craft and the craft I teach. But I know filmmakers are not the only media makers whose work has this kind of influence. Journalists, musicians, podcasters, authors, and anyone building an audience online also put ideas into people's homes and heads, and those ideas travel the same roads.

Film and television do have a particular way of connecting with people, though. A headline tells you what happened, but a story helps you feel it. For the length of a film, or for season after season, an audience does not just hear a perspective. They live inside a world, bond with its people, and practice seeing life through their eyes. That is a deep way to learn what is normal, what is admirable, and who counts. It is why those of us who make these stories cannot shrug off our responsibility.

How far does a filmmaker’s responsibility reach?

In today’s world a scene can be clipped, shared, and argued over by people who never saw the whole film. A series can find a new audience ten years after it was made. A story can cross an ocean in moments and take root in a culture its maker never thought about, and it can grow and spread in ways that were never considered. The work can travel farther, faster, and longer than the maker will ever be able to follow.

That doesn’t mean our work should be driven by fear. It means we should be intentional. It means we should make our work knowing it may travel. The casting choice, the joke, the ending, the way a vulnerable subject is handled — when we don’t consider our impact, they feel like they're decisions on a single production. Out in the world, they become part of how any number of people learn to see their neighbors and themselves.

If the reach is that wide, then responsibility cannot be an afterthought. It has to begin where the choices are made — in development, on the set, and in the edit. And this is where Responsible Filmmaking puts it.

Make it as if it will travel — because it will

Societies are shaped by stories. Not just the ones that make history or get credited with changing a law or ending a harmful practice, but the everyday stories too — the ones that reach one person, change how they see something, and influence how they interact with the people around them. It happens one story at a time. And one of those stories is yours.

Your audience member will interact with somebody. They will talk to somebody. They may treat somebody a little differently because of what your story made feel true, or funny, or acceptable, or brave.

We may never see what grows from the seeds our stories plant. We may never know how far that influence reaches, or what grows from the seeds produced along the way. But not seeing that growth doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Your influence doesn’t end with your audience. It branches outward from them, to everyone they touch.

We cannot control how the seeds we plant will grow, where they will take root, or what grows from them. We can only decide, with care, what we plant.

Sources

• "Facing nuclear reality, 35 years after The Day After" — Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
• "How 'Blackfish' helped end SeaWorld's killer whale programs" — Reuters
• "Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century" — New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Bridge et al., study on 13 Reasons Why and suicide rates — Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2019

Last week’s post: Why Responsible Filmmaking Matters.

The free Responsible Filmmaking Guide is a practical introduction to the framework — it walks through deciding the purpose of a story, who it’s for, and how it may influence the people who watch it.