Daily Inspiration Quote by Eriq La Salle

La Salle’s jab lands because it’s framed as a basic courtesy, not a manifesto: respect the audience’s intelligence. That word, “treated,” is doing a lot of work. He’s not just critiquing scripts; he’s calling out an industry posture that assumes viewers are customers to be managed rather than participants to be challenged. It’s a moral claim disguised as a practical one: if you flatten people’s thinking for profit, you’re also flattening their role in the culture.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke of Hollywood’s risk calculus. Studio filmmaking often optimizes for clarity, familiarity, and global legibility, which can mean over-explaining, sanding off ambiguity, and telegraphing emotion like it’s a safety feature. La Salle isn’t arguing against entertainment; he’s arguing against condescension as a business model. When movies insist on spelling everything out, they’re not being “accessible” so much as anxious - terrified that a moment of uncertainty will be mistaken for boredom and trigger disengagement.

Coming from an actor, the critique hits a second target: performance itself. If the film doesn’t trust the viewer to read subtext, it won’t trust the actor to convey it either. That’s how you end up with dialogue that narrates what faces and silence could have carried. La Salle’s intent is less elitist than it sounds; it’s almost pro-populist. He’s betting that audiences are sharper than the system assumes, and he’s asking for movies that stop apologizing for complexity.