By Jake Skubish

About 10 minutes before midnight last New Years Eve my dog threw up all over the floor. We spent the transition into 2021 scrubbing the carpet. She’s not the smartest dog, but this felt like a dismally prescient omen: the world was a mess in 2020, and we’d have to spend 2021 cleaning it up.

For the first few months of the year this omen felt accurate. The calendar had turned, but every day was the same as before: work from home, go for a walk, and isolate from others as the virus continued to surge. But in April, everything changed: I got vaccinated, moved to a new city, got a new job, and finally reconnected with people I love. Life was starting again at long last.

During the long stretches of solitude at the beginning of the year I often imagined the moment I would see my friends again. I daydreamed of elation, of exuberant hugs and laughter. That’s not really what happened, of course: reunions felt anticlimactic, because it felt oddly as if no time had passed at all. I was overjoyed to see my friends, but a collective trauma hung over the return to social life. When alone, I craved being around people again. But the conditions that necessitated that loneliness also produced an anxiety which suggested that maybe it would be more comfortable to return to solitude.

It was this sensation that defined the year, and the year in movies: the tension between needing to be seen by the world and the fear of what happens when you are. Movies themselves are a retreat from real life, and the best ones I saw in 2021 wrestled existentially with this fact. Should we embrace this retreat? Or would it be better to push ourselves back into the world, danger and anxiety and all?

I. The Fear of Being Seen

No project more directly addressed the terror of external scrutiny than Bo Burnham: Inside, a meta-commentary about what it means to have your life defined by the observation of others. This was a motivating force of Burnham’s work before the pandemic: “If you can live your life without an audience,” Burnham told a theater full of people in Make Happy, “you should do it.” With Inside, that choice had evaporated. Burnham’s newest special suggests that we must constantly perform for each other on platforms run by capitalist monsters, that the internet is destroying our brains and warping our sense of reality, and that we kind of prefer the online world anyway.

“All eyes on me, all eyes on me,” he warbles near the end of the special. It’s a cryptic delivery, both a command that everyone direct their attention toward him and a grievance that we can’t ever shake the gaze of others. “I promise, I’ll never go outside again,” Burnham declares at the end of Inside. The weight of being observed has become too much.

Burnham has more than a little in common with Pablo Larraín’s interpretation of Princess Diana in Spencer, a film that operates more like a ghost story than a biopic. Diana (Kristen Stewart) silently glides through the creaky royal residence of Sandringham, wondering how she ended up surrounded by such needless opulence and what she might do to escape it. The curtains throughout Sandringham are sewn shut; like Burnham, Diana cannot evade the cameras, even from inside the house. “Their lenses are more like microscopes, really,” Diana bemoans. “And I'm the insect in the dish. See, they're pulling my wings and my legs off one by one—making notes on how I react.”

Unlike Burnham, though, she’s got company. But while the paparazzi outside clamor to catch a glimpse of Diana, the people inside can’t really see her at all. In Spencer, the psychological trauma of being seen comes from strangers and family alike.

While Inside and Spencer confront mental anguish, in other films the threat is much more tangible. In Titane, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) finds herself on the run from the law, and in order to hide she takes on a new identity. Passing also finds a character disguising herself: Clare (Ruth Negga), a Black woman, lives her life passing as white. If her bigoted, white husband were to find out, she would be in immediate danger. Both characters mask who they really are, and the two films show the divergent outcomes that can result from such deception. By becoming someone else, Alexia stumbles upon a more loving possibility of how others may see her. Clare, meanwhile, discovers the limits of how she might be perceived by others. In Titane and Passing, there is promise and peril in hiding one’s identity.

The retreat from perception in other projects, meanwhile, was more cathartic than anxiety-riddled. In Pig, Nicolas Cage plays a former renowned Portland chef named Rob who now lives with his truffle-hunting pig in a forest on the outskirts of the city. He lives this reclusive life not because of some troubled past or fall from grace, but in pursuit of a life driven by simple virtues. Forced to return to the city to recover his lost pig, Rob admonishes a fellow chef for being motivated by values that betray what the chef really wants. “Every day you wake up, and there’ll be less of you,” Rob tells him. “You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself.”

Rob warns against seeing oneself through the faulty values of others, and his solution is to remove himself from the world entirely. Pig’s poetic ending recalls the wisdom given by Michaela Coel earlier this year in an Emmy acceptance speech for her miniseries I May Destroy You. “In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible ... do not be afraid to disappear,” Coel said. “And see what comes to you in the silence.”

The fear of being seen, then, can lead to something beautiful. This does not give license, however, to permanently remove oneself from everything. Sometimes, the world cannot move forward without us seeing something we may not necessarily want to engage with.

II. The Necessity of Being Seen

It would be hard to miss the colossal threat in Don’t Look Up: a five-kilometer wide comet on course to wipe out humanity in six months. Hard to miss, of course, unless you don’t want to see it. The structure of the film mirrors its aims: the scientists (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) who discovered the comet plead with those in power to do something about it, and director Adam McKay begs us to give a shit, too. The film is willfully unsubtle, because it believes that subtly is not appropriate when we must stare a difficult truth right in the face.

“There is a huge comet headed toward Earth,” DiCaprio says. “And the reason we know that there is a comet is because we saw it. We saw it with our own eyes using a telescope … If we can’t all agree at a bare minimum that a giant comet … hurtling its way toward planet Earth is not a fucking good thing, then what the hell happened to us?”

It’s an excoriation of the world’s slow slide toward authoritarianism, or climate change, or any number of existential threats we face. But Don’t Look Up is not entirely cynical. If we can begin by seeing the danger we all share, perhaps we might still be able to do something about it.

The complacent public ignoring this apocalyptic danger might include someone like Mikey, the detestable protagonist of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Mikey can see nothing beyond what will help himself, and if that destroys the lives of those around him, he’d hardly notice. The film is an examination of American narcissism, of the downsides of needing to be seen no matter what it does to the world around you.

As Mikey craters the future of a girl he meets in his small Texas hometown, she sings him a gorgeous cover of “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC. “And now I’ve really come to see,” she sings, “that life would be much better once you’re gone.” Yet Mikey sticks around, exemplifying the cockroach nature of white male narcissism, that core component of American identity that always manages to find a way.

Meanwhile, other films showed that Black Americans’ attempts to carve out a space to be seen was not a matter of self-aggrandizement, but of basic dignity. With Summer of Soul, a documentary chronicling the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, director Questlove excavated never-before-seen footage to bring the memory of a glorious celebration of Black art to life. The very act of resurfacing the footage speaks to the importance of being seen, of granting weight to an event like the Harlem Cultural Festival that history had otherwise ignored.

The film’s alternative title, ...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised, also speaks to the mission of the documentary. For the festival’s Black artists and audience, Questlove shows, this was a revolutionary space, a sanctuary of joy in a time when Black leaders were being murdered for fighting for basic rights. For the oppositional forces in power, though, it was something that could not, and should not, ever be broadcast. And it wasn’t, until now.

The need to establish autonomy is even more imperative in Barry Jenkins' poignant miniseries adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad. The series follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a woman enslaved in 19th-century America, as she attempts to escape to freedom. Her journey is aided by a literal underground railway system run by abolitionists across the nation. Cora seeks community undefined by whiteness, as does Jenkins in crafting the series.

To preview The Underground Railroad Jenkins released a non-narrative filmed titled The Gaze. The film fixes Jenkins’ camera on the many background actors from the show, each image lovingly composed. In a written introduction to The Gaze Jenkins remarks that he is often asked about the white gaze, but never about the Black gaze. “This is an act of seeing. Of seeing them,” Jenkins wrote. “And maybe … of opening a portal where they may see us, the benefactors of their efforts, of the lives they lived.” Jenkins recognizes the necessity of historical documentation, and knows that we cannot fully reckon with those things from which we choose to avert our eyes.

These things need not be from the distant past, though, and the most vital act of historical documentation I saw this year was the COVID-19 documentary The First Wave. Director Matthew Heineman and his team embed themselves inside a New York hospital during the pandemic’s ascendance in spring 2020, and the courage of this filmmaking emphasizes the importance of the story being told. We all suffered during the pandemic, but the true scale of death was confined to hospitals. Heineman brings this horror into view for all of us to see, and it should be essential viewing for anyone who ever denied the seriousness of the crisis.

In showing the toll of the virus on screen, The First Wave also powerfully confirms the racial inequity of the pandemic. “The majority of my patients are Black, Hispanic, or immigrant,” says Dr. Nathalie Dougé, a physician at the hospital. “It’s tough to see your people constantly have to suffer. When you are struggling to take a breath, every second feels like an eternity. That is the look that I see multiple times a day. But people don’t see that.”

Not long thereafter in the film Dougé is at a protest following the murder of George Floyd, “I Can’t Breathe” written across her face mask, and her words take on renewed meaning. Like Jenkins, Heineman recognizes that we can’t approach justice without first looking directly at our sins.

It’s an admirable mission, and I want to believe that recognizing the ills of the world can take us down the path toward addressing them. But that’s not easy when one is preoccupied with inner turmoil. Sometimes, before we can see the world, we have to see ourselves.

III. Seeing Ourselves

In Locked Down, Anne Hathaway portrays a corporate executive who begins to reexamine her values as the world grinds to a halt in the early days of the pandemic. “Now I’m looking at myself,” she admits. “Since lockdown I’m looking back at myself like that was then and this is now.”

Locked Down is not one of the best films of the year, but as a time capsule for the psychology of the pandemic it clearly articulates one of the public health disaster’s most widespread effects: an opportunity for many to reflect on themselves and whether the direction they were headed was the right one.

Such journeys of self-discovery were on display in four of my favorite movies of the year, each about a young woman’s exploration of her identity: The Worst Person in the World, Licorice Pizza, CODA, and Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.

Two of these young women, Julie from The Worst Person in the World and Alana from Licorice Pizza, wander through their mid-twenties without any clear sense of where they might be going. Their career prospects are stagnant and their romantic pursuits are self-destructive. But the lack of direction each possesses becomes an opportunity for discovery, and if neither woman is fully realized by each film’s conclusion they’re both somewhere closer to becoming the person they’d like to be, a little more jaded, wiser, and self-assured.

The other two, Billie Eilish and CODA’s Ruby, are introverted teens driven by their love for music, trying to figure out how their pursuit of musical self-expression will affect their relationships with friends and family. Each ultimately discovers her voice not by honing her craft, but by becoming more comfortable with herself. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” Ruby sings in a Joni Mitchell cover. “From win and lose / and still somehow / it’s life’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know life at all.”

For all four of these women, there is no concrete resolution. The journey toward knowing themselves is ongoing. But by better understanding themselves, they more fully recognize their own value. These films suggest that we see our place in the world, and the world sees us, once we see ourselves.

The magic of these films is that the self-discovery process showcased by their characters can also facilitate the same process for the viewer. In “An Incomplete List of What the Cameraperson Enables,” a short essay read aloud in C’mon C’mon, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson outlines what movies can do for their subjects. It gives them “The chance to see themselves as subjects worthy of time and attention,” Johnson says, and “the opportunity to see themselves from a different perspective.”

So it is for the audience, too: taking in different perspectives allows us to more fully see ourselves, and it’s what I love about watching movies. “I think the most important thing is just being aware of what’s going on around you,” opines a character at the beginning of C’mon C’mon. Such is the paradox of learning from the movies: they remove you from seeing the world directly, but at their best can help you learn to more fully see your place in it.

The question of whether to thrust yourself into the world or draw away from it has a renewed sense of urgency in recent days. The virus is surging, and in response we are forced to balance the fear of seeing others with the downside of not seeing the world at all. Is there a correct way to respond? If there is, it’s not clear to me. The world’s a little blurry, after all. But as we care for loved ones and try to make it through each day cleaning up the mess of the last one, perhaps the best approach for enduring it all is the one that helps us see each other and ourselves as subjects, worthy of time and attention.

2021 in review: the fear, and necessity, of being seen