Unstable and the Problem of Normal
The moral case for trying to figure out what makes someone normal.
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What makes you think you're normal?
How do you even determine what normal is? For most people, the way in which you do that is by comparing yourself to other people. Checking your behavior against other people to find out what they think works. But how do you know if they are normal? You're just assuming that if other people are doing it, you should probably do it too. Or are okay because you are doing what other people do. At the very least, other people aren't going to look at you strangely for doing things. That's something you can do. The problem is that if you're in a room full of people who all think something is normal, you might go and find that the next room you enter would think it's strange. You might not look anything close to normal depending on who you're with and what you're doing.
This is only a problem though if you are constantly changing the people around you and interacting with different groups of people. If you stay in the same place where everyone is doing the same thing, you don't have to worry about what other people might think. It's only important that you don't make the people you're with feel you don't belong. So you can do all kinds of crazy things if you just surround yourself with other crazy people. You might even be able to call your insane ideas normal because to you, they are. Of course, no matter what you want, you can't just close yourself off from other people who might think you're strange or not normal.
Especially because having people who aren't normal when compared to who you spend all your time with around can lead to all kinds of fun ideas. Ways of thinking you wouldn't have thought of because everyone you know thinks and acts exactly the same. But the more you have people who aren't what you consider normal around, the less stable things become. They can cause problems and change you and the people around you. Finding a way to keep the world around you just stable enough to function without completely cutting yourself off is very difficult.
Unstable is about a group of people who think they are normal. Ellis Dragon, as played brilliantly by Rob Lowe, likes to think of himself as normal. He likes to see the world in a particular way. The reason he thinks he's normal though is because he's surrounded himself with people who are just as weird as he is. Who don't think that the way he does things is weird. At least so long as he manages to keep the company running and functional. That is until his son Jackson Dragon, played by John Owen Lowe, arrives and gives his father something to compare himself to. A contrast between the way he's acting and the way people perceive him. Jackson's arrival creates a mirror into Ellis' incredible instability and the bubble he's made his life into.
This forces Ellis to reexamine who he is and the way he's handling things and become a slightly better person.
It's a beautiful thing to watch and you should definitely explore the problem of normal by checking out Unstable as soon as you can.
Unstable is available on Netflix everywhere.