Politics & Power Quote by Neil Jordan

Jordan lands a director's insult with a diplomat's premise: American movies feel hollow, he suggests, not because Hollywood forgot how to tell stories, but because the country has mislaid the emotional grammar that stories require. "Lack of content" isn’t a complaint about plot; it’s a diagnosis of moral and psychological thinness. If you can’t name what you feel, you can’t dramatize it. You fill the screen with spectacle, brands, IP, and righteous quips because those are reliable substitutes for interior life.

The slyest move is the hinge he builds between private emotion and public power. "Deeply confused about their emotions" sounds like therapy-speak, but he immediately yokes it to foreign policy and the absence of regret. That’s the subtext: a culture that can’t metabolize guilt will also struggle to produce art that confronts consequence. Regret is narrative fuel; it creates arcs, reversals, reckoning. Without it, characters don’t transform, they just persist, invulnerable and validated. That’s not only an aesthetic problem, it’s an ideological one: cinema becomes a machine for maintaining innocence.

Coming from Jordan, an Irish filmmaker whose work often turns on identity, betrayal, and political violence, the critique has extra bite. He’s spent a career dramatizing how nations and individuals lie to themselves to survive. Here he’s implying that contemporary American film has institutionalized that self-deception, mistaking emotional noise for emotional truth, and calling the resulting emptiness "entertainment" rather than what it might be: avoidance with a budget.