Take a second and answer these four questions:
In the past twenty years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has:
- Almost doubled
- Remained the same
- Almost halved
What is the average life expectancy of the world today (including infants who don’t make it to birth due to complication or abortion)?
- 30 years
- 50 years
- 70 years
What percentage of the world has access to clean drinking water?
- 29%
- 57%
- 91%
Rates of violent crime (including mass-shootings, domestic abuse, and all variety of wartime violence)…
- Are about the same as always
- Are higher than ever and steadily increasing
- Are lower than ever and steadily decreasing
Check your answers here.
If you answered all correctly, you’re somewhere in the top tenth percentile.
If you answered all wrong, you might have a lot in common with Beau.
(Quick disclaimer for purists: Beau Is Afraid is a long movie chock-full of themes and undertones about fear, grief, and motherhood. This article is only going to address the fear angle. For a better plot/thematic overview, read Sam Adams’ analysis.)
The following contains potential spoilers for Beau Is Afraid.
Insulating a child from all possible danger has the side effect of training him to anticipate danger in every possibility.
Following up Hereditary and Midsommar, Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid is a three-hour-long nightmare comedy that feels less like a conventional story than a therapy session you weren’t invited to. It stars a chronically petrified Joaquin Phoenix embarking on an amphetamine-fuelled odyssey from his ultraviolent city apartment to his recently decapitated mother’s funeral. Beau’s world isn’t exactly ours; rather, it’s more like someone deepfaked ours and replaced those mild-mannered neighbors with malevolent Energizer bunnies. His neighborhood is the worst-case scenario “fear porn” of our daily news feed: gang members tattooed head-to-toe mugging everyone in the perimeter, a bearded man with a penchant for eye-gouging, police officers soliciting prostitutes, music blaring all hours of the night, and a shirtless serial stabber named “Birthday Boy Stab Man.” The lattermost ends up piercing Beau in his hands and side, catapulting Beau into the hospital bed where the reluctant journey to his mother’s house begins.
The quest is one scaredy-cat-meets-worst-possible-situation after another, including pill-popping teens who video everything, PTSD-suffering army vets, and lawyers antagonizing Beau for his tardiness. Through a series of flashbacks, the viewer meets the reason for Beau’s being afraid: a coddling, obsessive mother who channels all her attention toward keeping Beau away from harm.
The rest of the story plays out like the classic Greek myth of Odysseus, except it continuously differs in one crucial area: overcoming adversity. The point of The Odyssey was that the hero overcame his trials and returned home to be with Penelope. Beau, on the other hand, fails every single trial, only returning home because his mother—who was alive the whole time and manipulating Beau’s surroundings from a distance to test his loyalty toward her—pulled strings to make it happen.
But maybe his failure is the point. Beau’s mother kept him on a leash his whole life, which childproofed him from the risk and experience that could have matured him. He never learned the skills to overcome his trials, so what could have been a hero’s journey became a fool’s errand. The final sequence, where we might anticipate some sort of happy ending or relief, finds Beau literally deluged in fear: of his mother, of public opinion, of everything. The relentless possibility of all things bad simply becomes too much for him, so he drowns in his own anxieties.
Since the ‘50s, the West has concentrated efforts toward making the world safe. The world had always been dangerous, and now humanity would move past it. They made safer cars, safer planes, safer vaccines, safer measures against crime, safer everything. But somewhere in the middle of insulating reality from physical dangers like measles or toxic Play-Doh, a new wave of mid-’90s parenting—known retroactively as “helicopter parenting”—emerged and began insulating against mental harm. Then when their generation of kids started hitting college campuses around 2013, the “safe space” was born: places to retreat to barrier oneself against psychological harm.
I hate writing about this stuff for fear that some might dismiss me as a paranoid far-right whacko who wants to turn back the clock to the “good ol’ days” of patriarchy and socially acceptable racism. I can guarantee that’s not the case. If I had to pick a party (and for the most part, I don’t), I’d go with post-liberals like Patrick Deneen or Jonathan Haidt, the latter of whom coined the term “safetyism,” the philosophy that safety for you and your children are always and forever the highest priority.
Good ambition, bad idea. The very real result of safetyism is Beau. Insulating a child from all possible danger has the side effect of training him to anticipate danger in every possibility. It’s no coincidence that levels of anxiety, depression, social perfectionism, and suicidal ideation rose right alongside safetyism. The ultraviolent, chaotic, zany world surrounding Beau is simply a reflection of the distorted reality that his mother presented. (Or as the statement, famously but incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, goes: “I’m an old man now and have had many troubles. Most of them never happened.”)
Beau’s fear is a mirror of where the West is as a culture: perpetually afraid but having less reason to fear than ever. There’s less violent crime, less poverty, less untimely death, less wealth disparity, less war than ever (see the work of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker), but our anxiety about the state of the world is at an all-time high.
Cue the classic FDR line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Expecting the worst has a weird way of bringing the worst about. If we define the world as dangerous, Christian-hating, corrupt, and on a perpetual downward trajectory, we’ll live accordingly.
Anxiety feeds off itself like a vampiric tumor, and our media is well aware of this. In psychology, the magnetism we feel toward fear, worry, or pain is called “negativity bias.” Our brains are wired to find the needle of negativity in the haystack of joy. (Have you noticed it’s always the one negative comment that sticks in your mind at the end of the day, even after you’ve received a pile of compliments?)
This is why most news is bad news and why social media clickbait leaves us feeling angry. Fear sells. It’s much harder to stop looking at a car crash than a couple having a picnic, and so the media exploits this psychological frailty to the max. So much so that the majority truly believes our world is as uncertain and macabre as Beau’s, and those beliefs have real effects on how we live.
There’s a sociological principle known as the Thomas Theorem that goes, “If we define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” How dangerous the world actually is has little relevance to the way we live; our perception is what makes all the difference.
For example, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans started panic-buying toilet paper. Was there a toilet paper shortage? No. Manufacturers even made several announcements guaranteeing there was no need to panic. But because we believed there was a shortage, our actions followed suit.
Expecting the worst has a weird way of bringing the worst about. If we define the world as dangerous, Christian-hating, corrupt, and on a perpetual downward trajectory, we’ll live accordingly.
There’s a crucial difference between reality and perception. One defining trait of Christianity is the commitment to reality at all costs, or what Jesus calls the “truth.” Truth can be uncomfortable because it makes us accept reality as it is, not as we want it to be. And under the umbrella of truth comes the reality of suffering.
The inevitability of suffering, rejection, and trouble is one of the most common themes of the New Testament. But not in a “suffering sucks, try to minimize it,” kind of way. Rather, we’re told to adjust our perception of suffering in a way that allows it to form us into the image of Jesus. And despite how ridiculous it seems, even find ways to “rejoice” in it (Philippians 4:4).
Suffering is unpleasant. But if we don’t face adversity, we won’t gain the character muscles needed to overcome life’s trials. Instead, we’ll just slope along with the pessimistic, apathetic entropy of the rest of the world. We’ll become like Beau: people with callings left unfulfilled because we were too anxious to play our part.
Carl Jung wrote that we cause so much unnecessary suffering for ourselves simply because we avoid the “necessary suffering.” When faced with the choice to either suffer some now or suffer more later, we tend to always choose the latter.
Everything that’s good in our lives and every good thing we’ve done with our lives is won through necessary suffering; and every bad thing is basically won the opposite way. Beau is the result of putting off a lifetime of necessary suffering.
Strength is only possible through resistance, tearing existing muscles to make space for stronger ligaments to grow in their place. Rejoicing in suffering isn’t masochistic, just forward thinking. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-5).
To modify a line from Ronald Rolheiser, “Spirituality is what we do with our suffering.” We can ingest fear porn, doom scroll, and passively move through life at suffering’s mercy or we can allow the Spirit to transform our necessary suffering into something beautiful.
Beau Is Afraid reminds us that most fears are rooted in fear itself. The world is never as bad as it seems; we just have a psychological disposition to think so. Defining reality as more dangerous than it actually is turns our lives into fantasies of our paranoid imaginations. Committing to reality according to Christ lets us see through the muck and adjust ourselves to the way things really are.
