Regardless of whether film is the cause or the effect of our behavior—art imitating life or the reverse—movies aren’t “just” movies. They mirror us and we mirror them. But whether the good or the evil mirrors us more accurately is entirely up to us.

I used to think everyone was wooed by the characters and qualities they admired onscreen. Turns out, many aren’t even aware of the ways movies subtly impress upon us visions of character, virtue, and vice.

“It’s just a movie,” someone will scoff, as if a multimillion-dollar work of art isn’t worth taking seriously. Unfortunately—given our natural human inclination to be bad unless we’re striving to be otherwise—this obliviousness tends to increase film’s capacity for evil, while minimizing its potential to promote good.

The fact is, we resonate (or don’t) with films in large part because we see ourselves in them—either who we are now or who we hope to be. We connect with films on the basis of realism (how it matches the world as it is) and fantasy (how it depicts a world we wish were real). When it comes to the narratives we celebrate, then, we ought to consider: Why do we find cynicism more convincing than hope? Why do we consider villains more relatable than heroes?

And if films imitate life, and vice versa, how can we argue that they are “just” movies?

What if Hope Were Convincing?

In 2010, CNN reported that fans of the hit film Avatar (2009) were experiencing suicidal thoughts because “they long[ed] to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora.” A thread on Avatar Forums generated 2,000 comments on “ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible.”

Site administrator Philippe Baghdassarian said, “The film was so beautiful . . . I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world.” Avatar had a harmful effect on viewers’ mental health because it revealed the gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary—without offering any hope of a real-world solution. The film was “just” a fantasy, but it spoke to people in a very real way.

Often, when people call a film “realistic,” what they really mean is that it’s dark and cynical, with little to no light at the end of the moral tunnel. Game of Thrones was lauded as a more realistic version of The Lord of the Rings, despite being littered with more sex, violence, and tragedy than the average person could reasonably experience in a lifetime.

For those of us who don’t ride dragons to work or wear swords on casual Fridays, the most relatable thing about George R. R. Martin’s gritty fantasy series was the character development—and by “character development,” I mean the characters’ fatal flaws. The darker and more tortured the characters, the more realistic they’re said to be. Yet Tolkien’s black-and-white treatment of good and evil gives us a glimpse of something Martin’s doesn’t. And unlike Avatar, that glimpse is enough to give us hope.

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