The Top 5 Most Harmful Myths Hollywood Has Taught Us to Accept

Let’s get one thing straight. I adore movies. I watch many movies every day with my hubby. We’ve spent entire Saturdays at the cinema theater, viewing one film after another. Our record so far is four in a row. I currently review movies for digital media, like FrameRated. I’ve argued several times for the inclusion of film in the sphere of the fine arts. Films offer an avenue of narrative that reaches practically all the senses in a way that no other media can convey.

While I adore films and filmmaking, I’ve never enjoyed Hollywood. Aside from my sentiments regarding the celebrity and gossip culture that thrives in Southern California, it also frequently feels as though Hollywood utilizes the art of filmmaking as a weapon to push multiple apparent lies as fact onto an unwary public. Now, many of these falsehoods are undoubtedly accidental and the outcome of confirmation bias, lack of investigation, and the desire not to let the facts get in the way of a good tale.

That stated, while these lies may delight us for a few hours, they can have disastrous implications for viewers, especially young viewers, who believe them as true. Here are the most detrimental myths Hollywood has taught us to believe.

Everyone is having sex all the time.

One of the worst movies I’ve ever watched (that I couldn’t complete and won’t even repeat by name here) featured numerous characters reading the male protagonist the Riot Act for “only” having sex with his fiancée three times a week. Unfortunately, that’s not an unusual thing to hear in movies and television. Since the 1980s, films and TV shows have featured gorgeous couples leaping into bed with one another after one date. Sometimes, after one incredibly brief interaction. Films like the original Sex and the City propose that a couple that is genuinely in love and dedicated will perform the deed at least three times a week, if not more. This, sadly, leaves those without sexual or romantic partners or people who don’t perceive the need to have sex as often feeling shunned, alone, and just a little bit abnormal. The unfortunate truth is, there’s no genuine reason for less sexually active, or even non-sexually active, individuals to feel like oddities in American culture.

A recent research study indicated that just 39% of American adults had sex at least once a week. In 2018, 25% of Americans reported having no sex at all in twelve months. While individuals who are not sexually active are in the minority, they are surely not unicorns. There are more of them out there than you realize. The fact is that people who are not interested in sex exist. People who don’t want to have sex or a romantic relationship for a number of reasons exist. If you’re an adult and you are not sexually active or not as sexually active as Hollywood tells you that you should be, you’re not abnormal. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are not alone.

Follow Your Dreams

The truth about this falsehood didn’t reach me until college. I was late to the reality party, in part because inspirational biopics, TV series, and a variety of well-crafted Hollywood storylines convinced me that I should only do what I, as a headstrong yet bright youngster, wanted to accomplish. I should not listen to my skeptical parents, professors, and counselors. I had passion and heart, and that’s all I needed to make my goal of being a world-famous singer/actress come true.

It wasn’t until I left the cocoon of my own Texas community, where there were relatively few classically trained singers who desired to be opera stars, that I learned a lot of young ladies shared the same goal I did. Many of them were just as talented as I was, if not more so, and there simply were not enough opportunities to go around for all of us to “follow our dreams.” When I got out of college and realized that I needed to earn a living, I had to take a hard look at what I actually wanted my life to be like. Did I want to relocate to New York or LA and compete with hundreds or thousands of other ladies for the same jobs, cleaning houses until I received my “big break”? Or did I want to improve one of my other marketable abilities and make reasonable money at that while singing and acting for pleasure on the side? I picked the latter, and I’ve been a lot happier for it.

The point is, my story is not exceptional at all. According to Backstage research, barely 2% of performers make a living from performing alone. The fraction of persons who become famous or even well-known is significantly fewer. What’s more, if you sit down and have an honest talk with them, even the folks who do make it in one of the “dream” sectors like acting, cinema, music, dancing, painting, etc., will tell you that it takes a lot of effort, a lot of industry contacts, and a lot of lucky breaks to get to the top. Many people who actually “make it” in any sector have access to finances to start with or connections to persons who had funds. The idea of someone from a low-income family making it on pure grit is, for the most part, just that. A myth.

Those inspiring biopics frequently give less than half of the tale. Freddie Mercury didn’t just stroll up to a random band, start singing, and establish Queen. He roomed with his bandmates long before they performed together (connections). Chris Gardner, the stock trader from The Pursuit of Happyness, didn’t charm his way into an unpaid internship. The internship was compensated, and they took just about everyone. Most of the genuine stories don’t make for fantastic narratives. So Hollywood leaves them out. But that also means Hollywood leaves us with a theme and message that are considerably less honest and sets youngsters up for disappointment and failure.

So, by all means, do the things you want to do. Act, sing, dance, crochet, write, etc. Those are all lovely characteristics that make being human so amazing. But be realistic about your odds of “making it” in a competitive sector. Make art because it makes you and others happy. But don’t stake all your life plans on a dream that Hollywood has promised can be yours if you merely “believe.”

The Simplification of Minorities

Hollywood has a long and complicated history with its representation of minorities and non-European civilizations. From the iconic Birth of a Nation, which encouraged a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, to John Wayne’s cowboy-versus-Indian flicks, these images degraded non-white people to little more than animals, causing considerable cultural harm. While the tendency to portray minority groups as soulless murderers, robbers, and pillagers has mostly vanished, it has frequently been replaced with an equally problematic trope: the “noble savage.”

This cliché is possibly best demonstrated in cinema’s representation of Native American tribes. After seeing the harm inflicted by films like Stagecoach and Disney’s Peter Pan, Hollywood swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. For years, it became unacceptable to show non-white characters as villains or morally complicated persons unless these features were clearly positioned as anomalies. Native Americans moved from being represented as ferocious and violent to being cast as peaceful, land-rejecting custodians of nature—a change typified by Disney’s Pocahontas. The film shows intelligent and peaceful Indigenous people who exist almost only to teach misled white protagonists.

However, this simplifying distorts history and destroys the complexity of minority cultures. Native tribes formed empires, battled for their families and territories, and adapted to their circumstances long before European invaders came. Likewise, other minorities in the United States were not always passive victims of white aggression. History is rich with examples of Black, Asian, and Native American outlaws in the western U.S., as well as armed rebellions against repressive regimes.

Focusing entirely on either the violence or the idealized purity of minority groups provides a false view of reality. When people—especially minorities—are depicted in such severe terms, they’re denied their humanity. This generates excessive expectations: persons from these groups are either held to unrealistically pristine standards or reduced to villains matching obsolete stereotypes. Human beings, regardless of their origin, need to be represented as multifaceted individuals with flaws, strengths, and goals.

Portraying minorities with authentic human qualities is not bad; it’s realistic. It’s a vital step toward actual equality. By stepping away from both destructive stereotypes and excessively idealized images, we may produce stories that resonate with honesty and truth. Progress is happening, although slowly. Now is the moment to step up the pace and fully embrace nuanced depictions in popular culture.

It’s Not a Red Flag, It’s Romance!

From The Notebook to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, this cliché has arguably done more damage to young people and their conceptions of love, marriage, and romance than any other Hollywood falsehood. We can easily identify at least five movies where this topic takes center stage. A man with a bad history and a predisposition for childish antics or temper issues finds a charming, bright young woman who opens his heart and cures all his scars. The lady continues with him even when he pushes away from her, even when he doubts that he is lovable. She loves him with all his insecurities, bad memories, and more. In the end, she is able to transform and release him. It took a lot of us women (and many men) a long time and multiple dangerous situations to discover that relationships don’t work like that.

In real life, if someone breaches your limits like the title character did to his love interest in Fifty Shades of Grey, his poor background or history is not an explanation for his actions. If someone threatens death until you agree to go out with them, as our hero did in The Notebook, it doesn’t indicate he’s eccentric and spontaneous. It suggests he’s unstable and probably requires a mental health expert, not a relationship.

In one of the worst romantic movies ever produced, Something Borrowed, Hollywood carried the difficult relationship cliche to its ultimate conclusion. The film presents a lady who chooses to sleep with her best friend’s fiancé and the fiancé, who totally allows himself to be seduced by his girlfriend’s best friend, as the romantic heroes of the narrative. Luckily, this looked to be stretching the ‘complicated relationship’ stereotype too far for most film reviewers and the audience. But more subtle variants of this relationship are still present in classic romantic comedies that purportedly survive the test of time.

The fact is that enduring relationships are founded on honesty, respect, and mutual trust. If you’re in a relationship where one of you constantly needs to do the heavy lifting, always has to pursue the other, or is always attempting to love the other into submission, it’s time to reconsider. In actual life, these “complicated relationships” rarely have a happy conclusion.

The Dark, Dark Middle Ages

Historians have long been rolling their eyes at the “dark, dark, middle ages” stereotype that is still reproduced in Hollywood films. Why Hollywood continues to spew drivel about former ages, even when that foolishness has been fully discredited, is anyone’s guess. The reasons might be as simple as directors, writers, and producers not wanting the facts to get in the way of a good tale. There are also concerns that depicting the years before the Reformation as dark and joyless is left over from the pro-English, anti-Catholic perspective of history that is still frequently taught in the United States. Whether intentional or not, portraying people during the Middle and Dark Ages as universally coarse, illiterate, uneducated, and backward is not only historically inaccurate but also sets the audience up to believe that their current age and culture are the only ones throughout the world that are truly civilized.

Films like, for example, Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and the Nicholas Cage feature Season of the Witch, which portrays European men of the Middle Ages as nearly universally boorish, dogmatic, violent, and superstitious, set the stage for the audience to dismiss every piece of learning, philosophy, and art that came out of that period. There was a lot of literature, artwork, scientific discoveries, and philosophy that came out of the Middle Ages. The first university, for example, was created in 1088. At the university, students learnt to read and speak Latin and Greek and carefully studied the writings of Greek philosophers and Roman poets to the point of memorizing such works. This was the same period that, according to Hollywood, illiterate and superstitious peasants were going around Europe trying to burn witches at stakes (a phenomenon that didn’t actually take on popularity until the mid-1500s). The early universities produced works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, which became the defining work of the modern Italian language. They also assisted to aid in current navigation skills and launched the beginnings of naturalism. A line of scientific thinking that looked for natural causes for an event rather than attributing it only to God or the devil.

When we continue to depict all historical periods before our own as backward and all human beings inside those ages as uncouth and ignorant, we do ourselves a huge disservice. We do not allow ourselves the chance to mine our forebears for the wisdom that they all held. We also don’t allow ourselves to learn from either their accomplishments or their faults. We are not necessarily “better” than anyone, European or elsewhere, who lived hundreds of years ago. Our enhanced technology does not make us ethically or intellectually superior.

How to Watch Movies

Spielberg is correct. Movies are dreams. Movies entertain, inspire, and offer us an escape from the everyday grind. Yet, as much as we appreciate the power of storytelling, we must equally realize that movies are made by humans. People have their own prejudices and incorrect assumptions that come along with their stories. Some of these prejudices generate falsehoods. These toxic myths—from unrealistic descriptions of relationships and success to simplistic interpretations of history and minority groups—may impact how we see ourselves, others, and the world in detrimental ways. They generate expectations that are hard to achieve, remove subtlety, and prolong misunderstandings.

The solution isn’t to quit watching movies. Instead, it’s to watch critically, with a readiness to challenge the messages being given. Remember, a movie is never simply a movie. The motifs or tropes inform us how the filmmakers perceive the world and how they think we should see it. As the audience, we have the authority to judge whether or not the message of the film we just witnessed is accurate.

By acknowledging Hollywood’s limitations and rejecting its most destructive stereotypes, we may appreciate the brilliance of cinema while being anchored in reality. As viewers, we possess the capacity to demand tales that reflect the range, complexity, and veracity of human experiences. And in doing so, perhaps we can move Hollywood toward a future where its movies delight and inform without pushing particular agendas or damaging ideologies.