Here is one of my favorite shots in Booksmart. It sums up one of the big messages of the movie: If other people have to lose to make you feel like a winner, something is broken — in you, and in the system in which you participate.
I mean, how many teenage comedies have made me think about Ursula Franklin? Here is one of my favorite passages from The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map (juxtaposed with a clipping from an article about the president):
…many people are hypnotized by the mentality of zero-sum games. In this mentality, if you want to win, someone else has to lose. If you want to gain, someone else must give something up. It is not difficult to point out the many instances in which this scheme falls down.
Franklin said that if we want to change our ways of operating, we have to pay close attention to our language and to the metaphors that we use. “We should consciously avoid representing all events as conflicts, and in an either-or framework,” she wrote. “There is a great need for us to avoid either-or presentations and images of confrontation, of teams, of winning.”
Related reading: Further notes on Scenius.