30 Movies That Teach Terrible Lessons, As Pointed Out By People In This Online Group

Micu herself gave some opposite examples—the good lessons. "I recently watched ‘Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop’ which was about loving yourself as well as all your flaws and accepting love from other people. Also, ‘Dead Poet Society’ teaches you to seize the day."

If Micu was making a movie with an unusual moral, she would want to communicate that good isn't always rewarded with good: sometimes the good goes to bad people instead, to give spectators expectations of "just how the world works."

Talking about sending messages, movies are treated as a powerful tool for propaganda. While today's Hollywood is more influenced by the audience, award shows, and other countries' censorship, from 1934 to 1968, the industry was self-regulated by the strict Hays Code. 

The Hays Code was influenced by moral panic from spectators and politicians as well, but many of the rules wouldn't fly in todays US. It prohibited things like interracial dating, French kisses, evoking empathy towards criminals, etc. In fact, in one of the movies mentioned in this list, Cinema Paradiso, a filmmaker shares memories of stealing cutout frames of kissing from a small-town cinema in Italy, where they were censored by a local priest.

In 1934-1941, as divorce rates grew, Hollywood's screwball comedies, like His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, and Adam's Rib started incorporating the theme of remarriage, which later was recognized as a subgenre by philosopher Stanley Cavell, who dedicated a whole book to it in 1979 called Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. It's important to note that female characters in these films were independent and still chose to come back to their husbands, even though these screwball comedies show marriage as a miserable situation.

On the other side of the world, the first Commissar for Education in the Soviet Union remembered Lenin saying "that of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema." He recognized the capabilities of cinema as a thought-shaping tool in a country with a large percentage of illiterate people. The Commisar stressed the importance of showing films in remote villages where people hadn't seen any, thus propaganda there would be even more effective.

What have you learned from movies? Have you learned the Heimlich maneuver to save a choking person? Threw a similar party to Project X? Became concerned about the fabric of reality and privacy after The Matrix and The Truman Show?