The Curious Case of First Man

Un-American. Treasonous. Racist. Sexist. Instead of describing the next embarrassing farce of the current American political landscape, this incendiary hyperbole is being used to characterize an innocuous Neil Armstrong biopic as one of the worst things to ever happen in Hollywood. Immune from neither the right nor the left, Damien Chazelle’s First Man is a strange casualty of today’s outrage culture, an ugly trend that is slowly suffocating productive discourse in favor of holier-than-thou fist-waving. Empathy and meaningful dialogue are dying, and the current zeitgeist has spoken in the voice of an absurd motto: if you’re not mad about everything, then you don’t care about anything.