Society- Please don't Break the Contract between us

There are two types of bad movies- those that are bad from the beginning, and thus you can laugh at them, and those that start good and then turn really crappy. This movie belongs to the second, much disappointing group.

In short, this is the story of a young man who thinks that he doesn't belong to his family. Slowly but surely he starts to find the truth, while it seems that the whole world is against him. At the end, when the truth is finally revealed, Yuzna tries to pass some social commentary. While the message gets to us, the execution is a bit… way too much over-the-top, and that's without mentioning the "fart-jokes" of the end. Too bad, it opened way too good to be campy, it is just a disappointment.

But, like always, there's something to learn from this movie. There's something that the movie does right, or otherwise I wouldn't have been this disappointed. And what the movie did right was to question my understanding of the situation- am I really seeing that something isn't right, or is it just the protagonist's imagination.

Throughout most of the film, Billy visits a psychiatrist. This gives us the possibility to ask ourselves: who really is the madman in this movie? Is Billy the madman, or is he the only sane person in the world. He himself questions what he sees, and time after time Yuzna disputes his protagonist's theories.

And it is so powerful. Because not only are we afraid for Billy, who might be sane and thus in real danger, we also fear that he really is mad and thus he might hurt all the other people in his disturbed world, people who only tried to help him. What Yuzna does at the end, though, is to throw all of these possibilities and fears out of the window, picking a lazy (even though much more social-stingy) solution. For an example made right, I'll have to point you to the great Buffy episode Normal Again (season 6 episode 17). But yeah, Society…

What can we learn from this failure? First of all, that sometimes we can't give both social commentary and a satisfying ending. And as we first of all game and only later try to say something, the game is more important (unless stated so from the beginning).

Bu secondly and far more importantly, if we have built something good, please don't let it fall. Because disappointment is a breaching of the contract between us people, players and GM(s). And this contract is far more important than shoving a message into our ears and brains.

With that out of the way, I wanna hear you. What have you thought about this movie? And what have you learned from it?