My friend Holly Johnson invented this useful term in the late 1990s: Endreal — where the explicit message of a film is the antithesis of its implicit message. Perhaps even an unintended subversion. For example: Ducky’s rejection in John Hughes’ PRETTY IN PRINK; Trinity’s perfect eyebrows outside of the perfect world of the MATRIX. Such a helpful term to describe what would otherwise simply be a mindfuck.

And really, endreal doesn’t only describe a trope of film: it applies to numerous populist political campaigns and revolutionary movements. Can you think of other examples?

I remember Holly offering FIGHT CLUB as another film where this happens, if I’m remembering correctly, because of the emphasis and implicit glorification of toxic male violence as the means by which revolution and liberation are effected.

This post was first published on my Facebook page here.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Endreal” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.