Argyle (2024)

A fun mess of a movie from a couple years ago tried too hard to be clever with meta narratives and twists. Argyle was overreaching in its aims. Trying to be a spy romp, a romantic comedy, a smart plot, and an action adventure all at once led to it collapsing like a house of cards. However, it was fun to watch the attempt.

Even with its ultimate failure, it had a couple ideas worth exploring in our current cultural context. The first of these is the reminder that we are all ultimately story-tellers. Life doesn’t just happen to us, we shape it into narrative and find in those narratives meaning. Part of that is surely because we are created by a intelligent, creative, storyteller who uses story to help us see the meaning in our lives. We are reflective of our maker. We carry His fingerprints.

At the same time, Argyle holds a mirror up to our tendency to mistake ourselves as the protagonists in our story-lives. In the era of social media where people try to convince themselves there is an audience for every single mundane thing they do, we all might like to fool ourselves into thinking the world revolves around us. This is in many ways not a new phenomenon, but it hasn’t been around forever. Chris Wickham in his excellent book “Medieval Europe” says it is a mistake to assume that “the individual” was discovered in the Middle Ages, but he does write extensively about the emerging identity “protagonism” of women, peasants, and your common, everyday person.

For a better take on this experiment, consider watching “Romancing the Stone.” But do think about how much the culture is pushing you into imagining the world revolves around you.