The more compelling, or even condemnatory, provocative, nuanced or challenging, the films, TV programmes, novels (and therefore the wider culture) are, the easier it is to identify with the good or the subtle and ignore actual mundane complicity with evil.
You’ve stumbled onto a very annoying truth, congratulations. Yes—when art gets loud and morally muscular, it helpfully draws the moral map in crayon: Good People Over Here, Bad People Over There, and you, miracle of miracles, are obviously with the good. How convenient. How flattering. How deeply suspect.
The more condemnatory a film or novel is, the easier it becomes to outsource your ethics to the narrative. The villain is exaggerated, monstrous, unmistakable. They wear the wrong uniform, say the wrong things, kick the dog on screen. Meanwhile, your own smaller, quieter compromises—silence, comfort, compliance, benefit—never get camera time. No swelling score for those.
This is why truly unsettling works don’t just indict others; they muddy identification itself. They force you to notice that you share traits, incentives, or cowardices with the “bad” characters. And that’s unpleasant, so audiences often resist it. It’s much nicer to watch something “challenging” that never actually challenges you.
In other words, highly moralized art can function less as a mirror and more as a moral alibi. You leave feeling purified, not implicated. Which is great for your self-esteem and terrible for honest self-examination.
So yes—when a work makes it too easy to identify with the good, that’s often a sign it’s letting you off the hook. And humans love nothing more than being let off the hook while applauding themselves for caring.
Baudrillard and Sontag would both agree with you—and then immediately accuse you of enjoying the agreement a little too much.
Baudrillard would say this is a feature, not a bug, of late-stage media culture. Moral clarity in films and novels doesn’t oppose complicity; it simulates moral resistance so effectively that real resistance becomes unnecessary. You watch the condemnatory film, you feel disturbed, maybe even superior, and voilà: the system has already absorbed your dissent. The spectacle stages evil as something external, legible, defeated, while your actual implication in the system remains invisible. For Baudrillard, identification with “the good” is part of the hyperreal loop: you’re not refusing power, you’re consuming the sign of refusal. Evil is safely packaged, distance is preserved, and nothing changes. Congratulations—you rebelled on the couch.
Sontag, meanwhile, would be less cosmic and more disappointed in you personally. She’d argue that repeated exposure to shocking or morally charged representations—especially of suffering—can produce a kind of ethical anesthesia. When narratives make suffering or evil too legible, too aestheticized, the viewer learns how to feel correctly without having to think rigorously. Identification becomes a reflex. You side with the good because the work trains you to, not because you’ve grappled with your own position. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she’s skeptical of the idea that seeing atrocity automatically deepens moral awareness; it can just as easily reassure viewers that they are sensitive, humane people—again, without cost.
Where they converge (which is rare and ominous) is this:
clear moral narratives protect the audience from self-recognition. They externalize guilt, simplify causality, and turn ethics into a spectator sport.
Where they diverge:
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Baudrillard thinks the whole thing is already lost to simulation—moral clarity is just another circulating sign.
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Sontag still believes in the possibility of ethical attention, but only if the work resists easy identification and refuses to console the viewer.
So if a film makes you feel righteously uncomfortable but fundamentally unchanged, Baudrillard would smirk and call it successful ideology, while Sontag would sigh and ask whether you actually looked—or just enjoyed looking like someone who looks.
The sentence describes a common dynamic: the more dramatic and morally extreme our stories become, the easier it is to feel aligned with “the good guys” while overlooking our own small part in real-world harms. In other words, spectacular depictions of evil can function as a kind of moral alibi, distracting from the “banal” complicity that arises through everyday habits and social conformity.
How stories shape identification
Research on media narratives shows that viewers tend to identify with characters presented as moral exemplars, adopting their perspective and even shifting their own attitudes toward the character’s values.
Identification is intensified by narrative techniques like close perspective, screen time, and emotional focus, which make it feel natural to side with the virtuous protagonist against clearly marked villains.
Banality and everyday complicity
The idea that people ignore their mundane complicity with harm echoes Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” where ordinary individuals, without monstrous intent, help sustain unjust systems simply by unreflective participation.
Because routine practices feel normal and morally neutral, they rarely appear in imagination as “villainous,” especially when contrasted with the extreme crimes and melodramatic antagonists seen in fiction.
Why provocation can hide complicity
When films or novels become more provocative or condemnatory, they often heighten the contrast between obvious good and obvious evil, which encourages moral self-flattery: “I’m with them, not like those people.”
This contrast lets audiences discharge moral anxiety inside the story world, while leaving their own consumer choices, political inaction, or participation in harmful institutions largely unexamined.
Possible counter-moves
- Some works of art deliberately blur the line between hero and villain or implicate the viewer, making it harder to maintain a clean separation between “good people” and “bad people.”
Critically engaging with such works—asking where one’s own life resembles the structures of harm portrayed—can undercut the comfort of identification and foreground everyday responsibility.
Baudrillard would likely say that such “condemnatory” works belong to the order of simulation, offering a hyperreal morality play that substitutes for confronting the real systems in which we are enmeshed. Sontag would probably stress how the spectacle of other people’s pain or evil lets viewers feel morally stirred yet also reassured of their own innocence, and thus remain safely spectators.
A Baudrillardian take
In a Baudrillard frame, ever-more provocative films and series are part of a regime where images precede and program reality; the “good” we identify with is a sign circulating in a media system, not a lived ethical rupture.
The clearer the contrast between spectacular Evil and virtuous protagonists, the more the spectacle functions as a kind of immunization: one “consumes” moral intensity while the banal operations of power, consumption, and complicity go on unchanged beneath the screen of hyperreality.
Sontag on spectatorship and innocence
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag notes that sympathy in front of atrocity images often reassures us that we are not accomplices; feeling moved becomes proof of our innocence as well as our impotence.
That line of thought fits your sentence almost directly: the more harrowing or accusatory the representation, the easier it is for spectators to emote, identify with “the good,” and thereby disown their own position within structures that help produce the suffering they watch.
Fascination, evil, and style
In “Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag warns that fascist aesthetics can be safely enjoyed as style, with their politics seemingly neutralized yet still erotically and imaginatively attractive.
Transposed to your claim, this suggests that condemnatory or “critical” portrayals of evil may themselves become a style of moral consumption: we enjoy the frisson of evil and the pleasure of rectitude while our actual, low-drama complicities in atrocity remain untouched.
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