In "The Lost Bus," a plea to show up for other people's children even when your own are in the fire
The climate/economic/masculinity/political polycrisis as art
Some days ago, I got to see the thrilling, suffocating, wake-up-calling, galvanizing movie The Lost Bus, at the Toronto Film Festival. Today it began streaming on Apple, and I could not recommend it harder. Consider your Friday night set. You’re welcome.
The movie stars the brilliant America Ferrera, an Ink O.G., and Matthew McConaughey, who I believe is still considering a subscription. They achieve this rare thing of being hyper-specific, differently haunted characters who could also be anyone you know, living life one day, on the frontier of calamity the next.
I don’t usually write about films, so I don’t know the rules about spoilers, and I don’t want to accidentally reveal things, like how the planet is heading toward a breaking point. Oops. So let me just share a few notes that I began fervently typing in the theater itself — about the ideas that I thought the movie raised and explored.
1. This story of a school bus navigating the Paradise wildfires in California is a movie about what is sometimes called the “polycrisis.” In gripping narrative form, it shows that the climate crisis is not over here on its own. It is intricately bound up with, and complicated by, several others: a crisis of precarity, a crisis of health and mental health, a crisis of masculinity, a crisis of an economy that never gives a break.
2. The Lost Bus grabs you by the lapels and urges you to stop thinking of climate change as a tomorrow problem. You are living in it now. Or if you aren’t, somebody is. Right now. The problem with the climate cause is that is always felt one degree removed — we will get to it right after we deal with a few other things. No. This film will show a broad audience that this is not an option. The crisis is here, now. This is a film to text your MAGA uncle and neighbor about. It is, frankly, a stealthy, accessible way that people who don’t think a lot about climate can be made to think about it.
3. Here is one of my frameworks for thinking about politics. Pretty much everyone who has ever lived has loved their own children. What defines a society is how much people love other people’s children. That is what decides if you build institutions or don’t. If you weave a safety net or don’t. If you fight for equality or don’t. A society full of parent-child love but devoid of stranger love is a society where shared problems won’t be solved, where shared things will never be built. The measure of a society’s health, I would say, is how people balance their love for their own children with their love for everyone else’s. And The Lost Bus, in ways I cannot reveal, is a movie that dramatizes this idea as I’ve never seen done before. It is a movie, at the end of the day, about how the only way to try to save your children is to try to save everyone’s.
Watch The Lost Bus. Spread it. And let’s all “show up for other people’s children” even when, if only figuratively, we have our own in the fire, as America put it in Toronto.
I'd love to watch it but don't subscribe to AppleTV and just can't afford another subscription. Hopefully it will show up on Prime eventually. And I would go one step further. In the early days of the pandemic, the virus didn't appear to be affecting children as badly as elderly people. Because of this situation, which never should have been considered permanent and in fact turned out to be temporary, many people refused to do even the smallest things to protect others. Of course, as we now know (well any of us that have paid attention and are being honest about it), the virus did eventually start to affect children very badly and many have been lost or now suffer from Long Covid as a result. We must care about EVERYONE in our community. I am especially sensitive to this as I never got to have children but consider my life to be of value. In any case, the sentiment should be both at the societal and individual levels. As a society, the U.S. populace sadly demonstrated its total uninterest and care for its weakest members whether they be children, elderly, or disabled. That is the measure of a society.
I remember listening to something on a group of individuals attempting to be lead out of, I believe the camp fire, and ended up being trapped. They circled the emergency vehicles and tried to protect everyone but the they knew it was futile until helicopters arrived. Horrifying story, as is The Lost Bus. But the end gives hope.