5 Books and Movies That’ll Make Your Emotions Feel Weird
Quick note: These reviews are adapted from Discovery, five star book and movie recommendations to see before you die. More here.
Aristotle (I know what you’re thinking, but Jesus, just let me finish) had this idea — basically, the best art leads to this moment.
And the moment is catharsis.
Catharsis comes from the Greek katharsis that means the purification or purging of emotions.
It’s what happens when you cry at a movie theater, you feel something, your emotions release in some way, shape, or form — and it happens in the context of the beauty or narrative pull of art.
There was this screenwriting book that made the point—the whole argument of the book, really—that said (hard paraphrasing here) ‘no one gives a shit about all the little things you give a shit about when you’re writing your screenplay. The audience just cares about how it makes them feel — if it makes them feel.’
You’re a multidimensional human being with frozen emotions trapped inside you—emotions like deep sorrow to longing to sadness to rage to everything in between. The best art speaks to those emotions—the weird ones, the sad ones, the nuanced ones, and the ones that feel hollow and strange and alien against the humdrum and repression of everyday life.
These are five book and movie recommendations that make you feel weird, which is really just code for: emotional. Something.
And they’re beautiful. Enjoy.
1. Lion, directed by Garth Davis
Speaking of catharsis: Jesus Christ.
The reason: I cried like 9,000 times during this movie. For so long, you wait for films (something) to move you, unseat the comfortable oasis of your consciousness, to completely take you away.
But what’s weird: Dev Patel in an interview was talking about how, when people watch this movie, afterwards (paraphrasing—potentially incorrectly) you want to go hug your mom, or call your brother, or hug a tree (not really), and he’s right — the film really casts this beautiful glow over life that, while easy to shake of (nothing lasts), feels powerful and profound and true.
A side digression: there’s a few movies like this—Soul, being a great example—that kind of sparks this energy inside of us, the energy that’s filled with compassion, love, a sense for the preciousness of the people around us.
This movie does that. And to the actual plot — the movie follows (I’ll try to refrain from spoilers here) a kid who gets lost, then gets found, but tries to find the people he left behind.
It’s beautiful, haunting, the cinematography (as well as the direction) here posits a kind of gritty realism with the natural beauty of India—all of it rings true—and the emotional moments of the film come like punches: straight to the gut, all haymakers, and also a few jabs in the face as well.
And what I loved: there’s a tendency (an easy one) for a movie to fall into the category of “bad melodrama”: having the emotional punches feel unearned, fake, and like the music swells, but there’s nothing there.
Lion isn’t that. Every punch to the heart is earned, narratively, the direction is filled with soul, and the movie is gorgeous to look at. Strong performances, strong hair from Dev Patel, and worth a watch.
It’s a mini masterpiece.
2. Family Life, by Akhil Shwarma
First off, I want to be clear: I’ve recommended a lot of stuff.
But I found Family Life — which took the author 13 years to write one of the shortest books on the planet (I flew through it in three afternoons) — to be one of the best novels I’ve ever read, if not all the way up there, and I thought it was the type of masterpiece that will (and should) endure through the times.
The book had a profound emotional effect on me, and it is heart-breaking and emotionally devastating in the way that makes you feel the preciousness of life with more rawness and sensitivity.
A fact: The day after I read it, I actually felt a little off — where — thinking about one of the characters, it made me tear up in the middle of a workday.
That’s a nice little aside, but the book, strangely, works so well because it is both profoundly tragic, and yet, filled with immeasurable life.
It’s this second part that I find to be tough for writers. It’s hard to write something that is two things at once, let alone hum with the realness of day-to-day living. I found this book to be filled with the stuff life’s made of— heartbreak, unadorned love, selfishness, anger, compassion, and all the rest — and as far as novels go, it is as ruthlessly self-honest as they come.
The other thing — from a technical perspective—was the fact that the book worked. And the fact that it did work, given the book, was a complete fucking mystery to me. I’ve worked extensively in publishing, and have a firm grounding in the arts (whatever that means), so I know the elements of what makes a story work — how plot should (theoretically) be constructed, how Aristotle thinks they should be constructed, and my own ideas of why different books work and why they don’t.
When I was reading this book, all I kept seeing was a book that, technically, shouldn’t have worked at all — but it did, because the writer (who talks about this extensively in interviews) wanted the writing to have a specific effect.
And yet, in order to do that, he had to break certain “rules” of storytelling, and in effect, compensate for breaking those rules.
Which goes to say — the only thing that matters isn’t if a story or work of art is following ‘this rule’ or ‘that rule’, or a constructed theory of how storytelling “should” be.
The only thing that matters is if something works — and Family Life works beyond measure.
It’s the type of book that makes you want to be a better person, the type of book that makes you more sensitive and raw to the preciousness of the world we’re in and the people around us, the type of book that gives you the courage to be honest and brave in the face of imperfection, and a book that, while all about an Indian family, you don’t have to, like me, be Indian to enjoy.
Trust me — just ask my girlfriend.
3. The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
What a beautiful fucking book.
Just great.
First off, the book works on two levels: it feels like a dream, slippery, vague, shifting between points in time — and yet it’s specific, works with specific people and specific problems, and you see a very linear plot start to sharpen into focus the more and more you read it.
The whole book’s like that — it’s something you can grasp, and you know you can grasp it, but when you look down at your hand, it slips right out.
So — while that might have you scratching your head and banging it against a hardwood floor, I’ll try to describe the book, which is equally complicated to do.
The book centers around two, specific events and halos around them (getting closer, closer, closer) until it hits them, and the two events are a fictional (but very inspired by real events) Ponzi scheme collapse, and a woman falling off a boat.
From a macro lens, the book’s about regret, finding purpose in the world (a major theme in the book and in life), getting caught up in bad decisions, and discusses these issues through the characters themselves.
But the book, strangely, feels alien, strange, almost ghost-like in nature. You wouldn’t think a book about Ponzi schemes would feel like this. But it does, and it’s that texture, that feeling, that tonal quality that amplifies the material in a world where most material feels relatively straightforward.
Personally, it was a huge inspiration. I loved it, I think you’ll love it too, and to boot, the book is gripping.
(I’d like to hone in randomly on this point for 2 seconds: I’ve found that books can largely fall into three categories — books that hook you (you can’t stop reading, and your sleeping schedule is screwed), books that kind of hook you (you’re loving what you’re reading but you have to set aside time to read it), and books you have to work at. This book hooks you, and I think the clarity, precision, and innovation of Mandel’s storytelling is ticket admission alone)
Either way — look at that cover, right?
4. Soul, directed by Pete Doctor
The best way to describe Soul is that it has great “lake”.
I understand you have no idea what that means, but to describe what that means, I need to take you back to a BBC interview with J.K. Rowling.
The interviewer basically asks J.K. Rowling (author of the Harry Potter series — for those of you who were born in 1695) where she gets her ideas.
Here’s her reply:
“Well, I’ve never said this before because I always think it sounds so bonkers, and, although it’s something I think about a lot, I’ve always been a bit wary about articulating it to anyone else.
But I envisage my process thus: I feel as though I go through a lot of trees which are my day to day concerns, what we all deal with all the time, and those I see as trees inside my head and then I get to a place which is my work place where there is a lake and there’s a shed. And this is my process.
I feel as though the inspiration is the thing that lives in the lake that’s very mysterious, that I never see. But it hands me stuff. And then I have to take this unformed stuff — sometimes it can be reasonably formed, sometimes it’s very blobby like molten glass or something, and then I have to take it into the shed and there I have to work on it.
And because I’ve had this metaphor in my head for many many years, when I read something that I’ve written I have a sort of shorthand that I say to myself, “too much lake, not enough shed.” When I go back over something — I should have spent longer in the shed.
And then there are some bits you think, “Oh that’s too sheddy. I’m not sure you added a lot out of the lake that day.” And in a dream world, obviously, the lake gives you something good, but then you work on it properly in the shed and you turn out the finished product. And I even apply this to other writers. I’ll read something and I’ll think “This is pure shed.”
The lake is a metaphor, because there’s a facet to human creativity that’s subjectively mysterious. Ideas come out of, seemingly, nowhere.
But when you watch a movie like Inception, or Soul, what you’re struck by isn’t just a focus on great narrative storytelling and the nuts and bolts of craft (the shed). You’re struck by the sheer originality (and freshness) of the ideas themselves, and it’s this originality that takes your breath away.
In essence — it’s the lake.
Soul was, truly, one of the best movies I’ve seen, and one the most “lake” movies I’ve ever seen. Not only is the narrative true to form for Pixar — the storytelling is magnificent — but I found the ideas, themes, and message of Soul to only be true, but profoundly true in the deepest of ways. It moved me.
It’s a film that leaves you looking at life differently, a film that’s guaranteed to make you feel (read: cry), and it’s a film that reminds you that a great story is a great story — animated or not.
A must-watch.
5. Minari, directed by Lee Isaac Chung
I loved this movie. I loved it even more the second time I watched it (sneaked away to a movie theater just a few blocks away, ate popcorn, had fun) and here’s what I loved: the movie is like watching your childhood again. Feeling it.
Obviously, the specifics from everyone’s childhoods are different, but the feeling of childhood, the feeling of growing up, of being in a new place, of adjusting — all of that’s captured with such tender grace, a beauty, and a messiness to reality that I just loved watching it.
The movie’s human, and you’ll feel that humanity vibrating at it’s core.
The movie also does something else that, from the outside looking in, is hard to do from a technical perspective (and therefore, from a storytelling point of view, you have to compensate for).
The plot is somewhat thin and loose.
By thin and loose, what I mean is — there’s no ticking time bomb, no set of structured plot events that are tightly connected like a wound-up coil. Really, it’s just a family, a series of events, and them trying to make it. It’s not a tight and cohesive goal-oriented plot (like, say, Mission Impossible, or Gone Girl).
It’s a vignette of a family, and these types of plots (looser, less goal-oriented) are harder to pull off.
(Note: technically, you could argue it’s a goal-oriented plot from the protagonists’ view — he’s trying to grow his farm and sell his vegetables, and technically, you’d be right. But I’m talking about how it feels — and it has that looseness to it)
But look — Family Life is the same way, and both of these just work. Minari feels tender, cinematic, nuanced, and bigger than life, and yet — they use the raw materials of everyday life (laughing, small jokes, grandmothers) to show that beauty.
A point I want to underscore: there’s movies (and books) that use the everyday (making a dinner, smiling, family dynamics, etc.) as material, chop it up into a narrative, and then — by virtue of cinematic alchemy — elevate the everyday into something beautiful.
I love those movies, because they remind you that real life — not just spy life, or life with explosions, or life jumping out of airplane — can be beautiful, too.
With six Academy nominations, doesn’t matter who you are. Watch Minari.
Also: the score. I wish there was more of it, goddamn it.
P.S. Discovery is books — books you love, books that move you, books that will freak you out — plus, it’s all in one place, every month. If you liked this, I think you’ll like getting it in your inbox (unless you don’t — then don’t). It’s a place to have fun and join the scores and scores and hundreds and hundreds of people, adventurers, lovers, exciting sea captains (not true), and fiction-book-people / film buffs that subscribe and love it. Some people just say it’s a great newsletter. Some people go nuts over it. I think you should check it out, it’s free, and don’t take it from me: try it for yourself.
Mohnish Soundararajan is the author of the upcoming science fiction thriller novel “Signal”, the director and screenwriter for an upcoming independent feature film, “Afterlife”, and was the host and producer of the show, Moonwalk, a highly-produced narrative podcast with over 150,000+ downloads and featured on Apple iTunes New and Noteworthy.
He is the author of “How to Take Notes at the Speed of Light”, the founder of SIGNATURE, and has ghostwritten pieces for The New York Times Blog, VentureBeat, as well as for Lance Armstrong, Aubrey Marcus, and JP Sears in the book, Unlearned. He’s worked on projects for #1 New York Times and Wall Street bestselling authors with millions of books sold, like Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene.
He lives in Portland, Oregon.
