"Hopefully this movie will help people understand that if a child is never given the tools to know how to love others and love and respect themselves, this is what happens"
About this Quote
“Hopefully” does a lot of work here. Jami Gertz isn’t just promoting a film; she’s pre-loading it with a moral mandate, asking the audience to treat the story as a cautionary tale rather than mere entertainment. The line hinges on a quiet indictment: whatever “this” is in the movie, it didn’t come out of nowhere. It was built, slowly, by omission.
Her phrasing frames love as a learned skill set, not a magical trait you either have or don’t. “Tools” is deliberately practical language, the kind you associate with parenting guides, therapy, and school curricula - a signal that the problem is structural and teachable. That choice shifts blame away from individual badness and toward systems that fail kids early: family instability, neglect, under-resourced schools, untreated trauma. Even “love and respect themselves” lands as a psychological diagnosis in plain clothes, implying that harm toward others often starts as harm absorbed inward.
There’s also a cultural moment embedded in the sentence: audiences increasingly expect movies, especially ones about violence or social breakdown, to come with an explanation that doesn’t fetishize damage. Gertz is positioning the film on the “empathy with accountability” track - we can understand origins without excusing outcomes.
The subtext is a plea for prevention disguised as press: watch this, feel something, then connect the dots to real life. It’s advocacy that knows it has to travel through a story to be heard.
Her phrasing frames love as a learned skill set, not a magical trait you either have or don’t. “Tools” is deliberately practical language, the kind you associate with parenting guides, therapy, and school curricula - a signal that the problem is structural and teachable. That choice shifts blame away from individual badness and toward systems that fail kids early: family instability, neglect, under-resourced schools, untreated trauma. Even “love and respect themselves” lands as a psychological diagnosis in plain clothes, implying that harm toward others often starts as harm absorbed inward.
There’s also a cultural moment embedded in the sentence: audiences increasingly expect movies, especially ones about violence or social breakdown, to come with an explanation that doesn’t fetishize damage. Gertz is positioning the film on the “empathy with accountability” track - we can understand origins without excusing outcomes.
The subtext is a plea for prevention disguised as press: watch this, feel something, then connect the dots to real life. It’s advocacy that knows it has to travel through a story to be heard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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