Matt Webb intuitively sensed that there’s been “considerable jeopardy inflation” in movies between the 1980s and today. In other words: the scenarios faced by main characters have become routinely extreme.
He compared recent films featuring entire cities facing destruction with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a film he’d enjoyed as a young man, in which “the jeopardy is a car with too many miles on the clock, and Ferris running to get home in time”.
To test whether his intuition was right, Webb devised a list of five types of jeopardy:, from mild and personal via dangerous through to life-threatening, then communal threat and finally existential wipeout.
Then he created code to analyse the key motivational driver of major films over several decades.
The analysis confirmed his hunch: mild jeopardy has become increasingly rare, while existential threats have become commonplace. And this, he suspects, affects the way we see the world more generally:
When we are all exposed to media that normalises death and mass threat… something in the psyche kicks in… We need to find new collective futures.
I think he’s right.