How Cruel Summer Reveals the Nuances of Cruelty
The moral case for seeing cruelty in a less simplistic way.
No one likes cruelty.
There's no point at which someone says 'I wish you'd be more cruel to people'. Despite claims to the contrary, it's not even something that people imply through who they care about or what they prioritize. This idea that people do is built upon the belief that cruelty is easily identifiable. All you have to do is read something someone said or listen to a speech and conclude whether it's cruel based on if you agree with those ideas. However, in reality, cruelty is far from an obvious thing. It can come in subtle ways people don't necessarily notice, and even can look like compassion depending on how it's said and what the outcomes end up being.
Cruelty isn't simple. It doesn't come in a neat little package that you can throw out if you don't like it. When you're a kid, what your parents do can often appear to be cruel. They won't let you do something that you want, or talk to certain people you like. To you, it appears as though your parents don't have any compassion for you and maybe even don't love you. As you grow up, one of the things you learn is that isn't necessarily the case. That the things your parents did had perfectly valid reasons and were actually trying to help rather than harm you. It's hard to see that in the moment at the age of sixteen what the consequences will be.
So you think of them as cruel, but in reality they are not. Similarly, those people you wanted to spend time with when you were a teenager appear to understand you. They look like the people with compassion for you and your situation. These people care about you. Of course, when you grow up, it becomes clear that not all of them had your best interest at heart. In a lot of cases, they were only in it for themselves and didn't care about you as much as you thought, or at all. This makes recognizing what cruelty looks like extremely difficult.
Cruel Summer is very much about how complicated recognizing cruelty can be. Characters like Jeanette and Kate, as played by Chiara Aurelia and Olivia Holt, appear at various points to be either a victim of other people's cruelty or facing the consequences of what their own cruelty has brought upon them. It's never entirely clear who did what to who and whether they deserve your sympathy or your anger. They aren't simple cookie cutter ideas which are easily reduced to good or bad.
What they deserve is dependant on the situation they're in at the time and what the consequences are. And this broadens out to everyone they interact with. People who they were cruel to before and deserve your sympathy, over time prove to be incredibly cruel, and vice versa. Then just to make it more complicated, they'll end up switching back to either cruel or sympathetic. They're incredibly complex people and it's important to see them as well as the people in your life that way.
Explore the complicated nuances in the idea of cruelty by checking out Cruel Summer.
You can watch it on Freeform and Hulu in the United States, and Amazon elsewhere.
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