F1 The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, hit theaters in late June, earning an unexpected $55 million domestically during its opening weekend and becoming an instant cultural phenomenon. Echoing the soaring spirit of Top Gun: Maverick, F1 taps into the psychological and spiritual longing for renewal emerging in American culture. The commercial and critical success of the film, as well as the viral nature of online discourse celebrating the movie, signal that something much deeper than mere entertainment is at the core of F1’s success.
Below the surface of roaring engines and Hans Zimmer’s pounding score, the film connects to something primal, aspirational, and even spiritual in us. Our decades-long obsession with cynicism and postmodern deconstruction is giving way to deeper, perennial human longings for sincerity, hopeful storytelling, and a positive vision for living a meaningful life.
Here are five reasons why F1 has become an unexpected cultural phenomenon and why it so deeply resonates with us on a psychological and spiritual level:
1. F1 is refreshingly sincere and speaks to audiences exhausted by postmodern cynicism.
In a culture long dominated by deconstruction, irony, and perpetual meta-commentary, F1 offers us unfiltered earnestness and sincerity instead. There is no winking at the camera like a Deadpool movie or Fleabag episode, no feigning intellectual superiority through irony and cynicism like Rick and Morty—just an unwavering commitment to time-tested values, character development, and the craft of cinema. The film brims with try-hard boldness and post-cynical emotional directness, qualities often dismissed as “cringe” and unfashionable.
Because of the influence of pop-culture postmodernism, which began to permeate our films and television in the ‘90s (as seen in the cultural impact of movies like Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and The Matrix), many viewers have been programmed to be suspicious of grand, overarching narratives, dismissing them as nothing more than propaganda for those in power.
My generation, shaped in that cultural story, became the unplug from The Matrix and Rage Against the Machine generation. Sincerity dies in that atmosphere because sincerity is a sign that you earnestly believe in the story you are living in. To be earnest and sincere was to be either naive or a willing participant in the propaganda of “the system.”
But as author David Foster Wallace lamented when this type of pop culture postmodernism was spreading in the ‘90s:
“As Hyde puts it, ‘Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage…
The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old, untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval.”
The roar of mighty engines in the full Dolby cinema experience of F1 might just be what the opening of those cage doors sounds like. Audiences are hungry for art that dares to believe in heroes without apology. That refreshing, post-ironic tone resonates in a way many Hollywood films have lacked for far too long.
2. F1 doesn’t give us political preachiness.
Many Americans believe that recent films and television have too frequently served as vehicles for little more than ideological and political messaging. In a 2024 Gallup study, Americans’ trust in mass media (including film and television) reached record lows. A Time Magazine survey done before the 2018 Oscars found that 70% of Americans do not believe that “the presence of a social or political message” makes for a more Oscar-worthy film. F1 resists the trend to turn the theater into a pulpit for progressive talking points, especially around issues of race and gender.
While the majority of Americans believe that education on how racism impacts American society is important, nearly 75% of Americans reject the way issues of race and diversity are taught through critical race theory. Many Americans have sat through corporate training seminars or college classes that taught people to view human relationships through the lens of a “Matrix of Oppression.”
This interpretive lens divides coworkers, classmates, and neighbors into categories of favored and lower-status groups based on issues related to their race, sexual identification, or gender. But research in 2024 at Rutgers found that students exposed to this kind of Matrix of Oppression training were more likely to wrongly interpret benign social interactions as motivated by hostile racist oppression. The recent progressive approach, which achieved popular acceptance in many centers of cultural influence, actually inflames and worsens tensions, not improves them.
The diverse characters in F1—American, British, Afro-British, Hispanic—are portrayed as authentic human characters, not as mere mouthpieces for a divisive ideological narrative. Each character in the film is flawed, dynamic, and driven by realistic human motivations that don’t fit the Matrix of Oppression framing.
The rocky relationship between Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt’s character) and the young Afro-British hotshot driver Joshua Pearce (portrayed by Damson Idris) is devoid of the typical trend to humiliate the “majority-group” character as a way of teaching them a lesson about their privilege. Sonny has much to learn, but not because he’s a middle-aged white male. Joshua has much to learn, but not because he’s a young black male. They have much to learn, because they are human.
The unique dynamic between the two characters isn’t written as a racial reckoning or a staged reversal of historical fortunes. Anyone who has competed in sports will recognize the dynamic between these two characters, not as a racial conflict, but as the typical competitive tensions between a veteran holding on to their ego and a rookie’s drive to prove themself.
F1 treats each of its characters as real human beings, both gifted and flawed, and lets their relationship unfold in the crucible of their shared vocational mission, not in political ideology. This collaborative, non-zero-sum portrayal feels especially refreshing against the backdrop of social discourse steeped in tribalism and oppressor-oppressed narratives. F1 champions character development, shared contribution from our unique cultural inputs towards common goals, and the mutual benefit of authentic diversity that comes from specialization in distinct fields of expertise on a shared team. These themes are powerfully resonant with most Americans exhausted by failed ideological messaging from Hollywood and maps much more closely to the common experiences of life for average people—even if they aren’t driving million-dollar cars.
3. F1 celebrates masculinity and femininity working in cooperation, not in a contest for power.
Brad Pitt’s character “Sonny Hayes” is cocky, intense, and driven. It’s classic masculine energy in the same archetypal mold as Indiana Jones, Michael Jordan, and Tom Cruise’s “Maverick.” Kerry Condon’s “Kate McKenna” is intelligent, poised, and emotionally grounded—a perfect counterbalance. Importantly, neither needs to mimic the other or compete in a zero-sum battle of the sexes. Similar to the dynamic between the leads in Twisters (another unexpected box office success back in 2024), these gendered tensions gave way to healthy, synergistic cooperation.
Sonny truly grows alongside his female co-star Kate McKenna (the APXGP team’s technical director and Sonny’s love interest). He doesn’t need to be tamed by her; he complements her. She’s not reducible to being an object for him; she complements him. Their relationship isn’t a gendered moral lesson. It’s a human partnership of equals, each bringing unique strengths and challenging the other toward character growth.
Watching Hayes and McKenna succeed together speaks to a timeless truth we see throughout the great stories of the past: masculine and feminine archetypes, when balanced, amplify each other. Far from outdated, this interplay connects with viewers who crave a healthy relational harmony, a partnership where strength and empathy, ambition and listening, can functionally coexist and increase the virtues of each person’s character development in a mutually beneficial way.
4. F1 highlights the need for a positive vision and “flow” to find meaning in life.
The dominant themes of postmodern culture often center on cynicism and perpetual outrage against perceptions of unjust power. While understanding that there are malevolent, exploitative forces worthy of resistance, our innate psychological drive for meaning cannot be satisfied through an oppositional, anti-vision. We must move towards a positive vision for life if we are to find lasting meaning and fulfillment. Our new cultural shift is moving us from merely deconstructing what we are against to positively reconstructing a vision of what we are for.
F1 offers an antidote to the anti-vision: a classic merit-based, aspirational story about the shared pursuit of human flourishing and what it takes for us to all thrive. Sonny’s character arc leads him to an epiphany about why he races. He is searching behind the wheel, not for fame and status, but for flow.
Flow—the state of deep engagement described by famed psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi—depends on clearly defined goals, immediate feedback, and a lofty but achievable challenge. Frequent flow states in life are linked to increased happiness, reduced burnout, enhanced job performance, and well-being. Our ability to enter into the flow state is predicated on having clearly defined goals to pursue, and when we are fully immersed in pursuit of those aims, we experience a loss of self-consciousness and an increase in openness.
Anger and oppositional contempt, however, are high-arousal emotions that narrow cognitive bandwidth and redirect attentional resources to perceived threats, grievances, or moral violations. If you are interested in having more flow state experiences and the accompanying increase in existential satisfaction and meaning, being constantly outraged about the things you are against cannot be a substitute for the earnest pursuit of a positive vision.
The film’s climax captures this beautifully. Sonny, in the final race, isn’t chasing the trophy as much as the feeling of being in flow, or what he describes as “flying.” This resonates with us, because each of us has had that feeling at one point in our life, even if it isn’t in the driver’s seat of a Formula One car.
5. F1 affirms traditional religious insights into the nature of life.
Sonny and Joshua both realize, over the course of their character arcs, that meaning in life isn’t attached to individual achievement, but to the shared flourishing of the group. Human communities are not, at their core, about a struggle for dominance, but a shared venture of sacrifice that increases the well-being of all.
As Kate exhorts them both in the final race, in order to win, “Someone has to sacrifice!” These headstrong racers, along with each member of their team, learns that their own good is inextricably linked to the good of their fellow teammate. To win, each must be willing to yield self-centered concerns and sacrifice in love for the good of each other.
The team’s lack of success early on was a reflection of their inability to properly sacrifice in love for each other. Through the pains associated with their failures, the shortcomings in their character are exposed, affording them an opportunity to course correct. The term for this type of internal correction in the Christian tradition is “repentance”—or in the original Greek of the New Testament, metanoia, which means a “change of mind.”
Nestled within the compelling cinematography, heart-pounding race scenes, and pulsating soundtrack, F1 contains a time-tested religious insight: our aspirational desire to move ever-upward toward the Good and our innate longing to live in a meaningful story come about through the path of metanoia and loving sacrifice. The good life is about becoming the kind of person who knows what is worth sacrificing for, having the courage to do so, and repenting when you realize you’ve missed the mark.
