One Good Thing, Over and Over Again
[LINK DROP] Finding hope in little bubbles of kindness.
Hello!
It’s been a while since I’ve rounded up what I’m reading and thinking. So here’s a Link Drop at long last.
I watched Erin Brockovich over the weekend. Actually, I watched it twice in the same day (once alone, and then again with friends). It’s my comfort movie, which is perhaps strange given that it’s about a bunch of people being poisoned by an evil corporation and developing dozens of different types of cancer.
There are a few reasons I find solace in it. The most obvious reason is that Julia Roberts is so hot and slay. The second most obvious is that it’s one of those movies in which everything works out. Not only do the residents of Hinkley get a big settlement (it was the largest in U.S. history at that point), but Erin Brockovich gets a $2 million check for helping them, her kindhearted boss gets a bigger law firm, and we get to revel in seeing the prissy corporate lawyers lose their shit.
But there are some less obvious reasons I find it so comforting: for one, it represents perhaps the last era in the United States in which this kind of movie made sense. It came out in 2000. I don’t need to tell you what happened in 2001. And then things got worse from there. The 90s were an era in which, yes, of course, bad things happened, but one in which we believed as long as there were good people fighting against those things, it’d all kinda even out.