How Netflix Is Schooling Us: The Streaming Syllabus

A core principle of regarder is attention as the fundamental fabric of reality. What we look at, what we linger with, quite literally shapes who we are. So when Netflix dropped a friendly reminder in my inbox this morning, nudging me to re-subscribe, I wasn’t just reading a marketing email. I was reading a syllabus. A soft-edged but highly effective curriculum beamed into millions of homes.

Here’s the “lesson plan”:

It’s tempting to laugh or shrug this off. But squint a little, and these titles begin to sketch a collective emotional atmosphere—a pattern not of plot, but of psychology. What is this list actually teaching us? What sensibilities is it cultivating, not through overt messages, but through repetition, mood, rhythm?

If I had to sum it up, I’d say the top 10 educates Americans in fear, isolation, self-indulgence, and escapism disguised as empowerment.

Fear and Paranoia

You don’t have to watch Den of Thieves 2 or Trap to know the formula: trust no one. Everyone is lying. The danger is already inside. The thriller genre doesn’t just scare us—it habituates us to a worldview in which fear is the most reasonable, most adult emotion. Add The Twister: Caught in the Storm—an anxiety-drenched disaster flick—and you’ve got another lesson: nature, too, is trying to kill you.

This is the cinema of the locked door, the private arsenal, the bunker mentality. It educates us not to be citizens, but survivors.

Isolation and Atomization

Even the “family-friendly” films subtly reinforce a sense of separation. The Secret Life of Pets, Plankton: The Movie, Despicable Me 4—each of these stories orbits characters who are cut off, misunderstood, or misfitted. The resolution may be “connection,” but only after a long solo journey filled with quirky, branded self-expression. There's rarely a sense of real community, of sustained dialogue, of shared life.

The deep curriculum here is: you are alone, and your inner quirks are both your prison and your salvation.

Self-Indulgence as Salvation

Sonic 2 and Kraven: The Hunter offer another layer—speed, power, vengeance, spectacle. What matters is not how we live with others, but how we win. The fantasy is total agency, stripped of history, accountability, or vulnerability. Electric State, set in a post-apocalyptic world, continues this theme: a lone girl and her robot moving through a collapsed civilization. Tender, yes—but once again, the only viable subject is the solitary wanderer.

The message? Feel deeply. Express yourself. But don’t expect repair. Don't bother with the collective. Just survive—and maybe look cool doing it.

The Good-Bad Binary

Across genres, there's a familiar scaffolding: the good guys and the bad guys. Kraven: The Hunter and Trap make it explicit, but even in comedies and family fare, the moral universe is drawn in sharp lines. Conflict is often externalized—problems arrive in the form of villains, storms, or shadowy threats. The solution is rarely conversation or understanding, but domination or escape.

This binary is seductive. It simplifies the world. It keeps us emotionally primed for conflict and righteousness, but rarely cooperation. The deeper lesson? If something’s wrong, someone must be defeated. If you’re suffering, someone else must be to blame. It’s an exhausting way to live—but a thrilling way to watch.

The Lure of the Sublime

Then there’s Everest—and I’ll admit, this is the one that tempts me. It’s the dramatization of a real-life expedition where experienced climbers are overwhelmed by the raw power of nature. There’s something honest in that. No superheroes, no talking animals, no clever tricks—just human beings up against the elements, and losing.

But even here, the framing still slips into a familiar rhythm: individuals braving impossible odds, pushing themselves to the edge. It’s a more grounded fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless—the myth that meaning lies at the summit, that suffering is justified if it’s dramatic enough. We don’t sit with nature; we scale it. We don’t accept our limits; we test them until they break.

It's beautiful, but it’s still part of the same emotional diet: spectacle, striving, survival. It stirs something deep, but it doesn’t necessarily help us learn how to live together, here, in the everyday weather of life.

The Hidden Curriculum

So what happens when these kinds of stories are what most people watch, most of the time? The result isn’t just distraction. It’s a quiet, pervasive education in helplessness. The world is dangerous. You are alone. The only thing you can really control is your taste, your curated feelings, your own reaction to the chaos.

Netflix isn’t evil. But it is effective. In the absence of a public sphere, it becomes the public sphere. In the absence of civic education, it becomes our educator. And while I don’t think watching Sonic 2 will turn anyone into a sociopath, I do think these movies add up. They accumulate in our nervous systems, in the kinds of conversations we can or can’t have, in what we think a future might look like.

So no, I won’t be renewing my subscription just yet. Not because I’m above any of these movies—I’ve watched plenty of them. But because I’m paying closer attention to what they’re watching me become.

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