Two Movies on One Screen: Conflicting Narratives of the Renee Good Shooting in Minnesota

Anyone following recent events in Minneapolis has likely noticed something strange. People watching the same videos, reading the same headlines, and reacting to the same street-level events often seem to be describing entirely different realities. Conversations quickly break down, not because people disagree about what should be done, but because they cannot even agree on what is happening. It’s as if people are watching two completely different movies on one screen.

The “two-movies-one-screen” concept was first coined by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert turned political commentator, to describe radically different interpretations of the same political events. People with access to the same set of facts come away with completely different understandings of what is happening. In some cases, each side seems genuinely unaware that the other interpretation even exists.

This is not merely disagreement, and it goes beyond ordinary bias. It is also not quite what psychologists usually mean by cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, first described by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, occurs when people experience psychological discomfort from holding conflicting beliefs or encountering information that contradicts their existing views, and then attempt to reduce that discomfort through rationalization or reinterpretation of the facts. In cases like the Renee Good shooting in Minnesota, however, something else seems to be happening. So, what is going on?

From a psychological standpoint, this resembles dissociation more than cognitive dissonance. Dissociation refers to a class of mental processes in which certain thoughts, perceptions, or experiences are kept out of conscious awareness. As clinical psychologists have long noted, dissociation functions as a defensive mechanism, shielding the individual from information that is experienced as overwhelming or intolerable. The mind does not reject the data after evaluating it. It fails to perceive it in the first place.

The following is an attempt to provide a neutral description of the events, followed by two very different interpretations.

On January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during an operation targeting undocumented immigrants for deportation. Good was a U.S. citizen and mother of three from previous relationships, and present on the scene with her wife, Rebecca (Becca) Good.

Multiple videos from bystanders, body cameras, and agent phones capture the event, showing a chaotic scene lasting about three minutes.

Renee Good was in her SUV, which was blocking or near the path of ICE vehicles during an arrest operation. Agents approached, giving conflicting commands: some ordered her to leave, while others demanded she exit the vehicle. One agent attempted to open her door and banged on the window.

Rebecca Good, Renee’s wife, was outside the vehicle filming and confronting agents.

At one point during the interaction, Renee’s wife urged her to “drive, baby, drive” as the situation escalated. Good maneuvered the vehicle forward and started to accelerate. The vehicle made contact with an ICE agent who was positioned in front; the agent fired through the windshield, striking her in the face and killing her.

According to official statements from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the shooting occurred after Good allegedly used her vehicle as a weapon, attempting to run over an agent who then fired in self-defense. Renee and Rebecca Good were part of “ICE Watch” groups monitoring, protesting, and interfering with ICE operations. The ICE agent who fatally shot Good was injured and hospitalized following a prior incident in June 2025, during which an undocumented immigrant with an open warrant for child sexual assault dragged him with his vehicle while attempting to flee arrest.

Progressive voices view Good’s killing as an example of ICE overreach, law enforcement brutality, and systemic abuse of power, especially against citizens exercising First Amendment rights. They emphasize Renee was a “legal observer” and had a constitutional right to protest. They further note that Good was an unarmed American citizen on a public road who was fatally shot in the face and head by a masked federal agent. They also interpret the footage as showing Good attempting to navigate away from the scene rather than intentionally trying to harm the agent. They further warn against normalizing state killings, such as in statements made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), who responded to Vice President JD Vance’s defense of the ICE agent by calling it a “regime willing to kill its own citizens.” This sentiment is tied to broader concerns about police/ICE militarization against undocumented immigrants, and observations such as that even if Good erred (e.g., by not complying with instructions of federal law enforcement officers), it wasn’t worth her life, and society needs a higher bar for lethal force.

Conservative commentators frame the shooting as justified self-defense against anti-ICE radicals who disrupted lawful operations. They emphasize Renee’s alleged aggression and Rebecca’s role in escalating the situation by shouting “You wanna come at us? Go get yourself lunch, big boy,” portraying the couple as part of a coordinated harassment campaign rather than passive observers or demonstrators. They also argue Good was an active participant and perpetrator obstructing enforcement of long-standing immigration law, and someone attempting to flee from the scene rather than simply a citizen attending a protest. They maintain that the shooting was tragic, nevertheless law enforcement (and citizens) can use lethal force if they reasonably believe they face imminent serious harm. Further, they make the following distinction: debating whether the officer should or should not have fired is rational, but refusing to acknowledge that being struck/pushed by a vehicle is basis for self-defense isn’t.

These conflicting media narratives matter because most people do not build their understanding of the world through direct experience. Our personal encounters are limited. The rest of our mental model is assembled from stories. Indeed, research in cognitive psychology and media studies consistently shows that humans rely heavily on narrative to organize information and assign meaning. In other words, we are not natural statisticians. As psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Daniel Kahneman have shown, people reason intuitively through stories, examples, and emotionally salient cases, often treating mediated experience as a stand-in for reality itself. This is why propaganda is most effective when it does not look like propaganda.

Many people assume propaganda is something obvious that you notice and argue with. In reality, the most powerful propaganda works through repetition rather than persuasion. Social psychologists have documented what is known as the “illusory truth effect,” in which repeated statements are more likely to be judged as true, regardless of their accuracy. When a moral narrative is replayed often enough, it stops feeling like a claim and starts feeling like memory.

Consider the recurring portrayal of tech executives in films and television. A wealthy founder speaks in vague abstractions, dismisses ethical concerns, and pursues profit at the expense of ordinary people. The specifics vary, but the moral structure remains the same. Whether any individual depiction reflects the reality of modern technology firms is almost beside the point. After repeated exposure, viewers absorb not just a critique of corporate excess, but an intuitive framework for interpreting innovation, wealth, and motive. Repetition trains audiences to assign intent instantly and to stop questioning it.

This works because fiction bypasses our analytical defenses. Experimental research on narrative persuasion shows that people are less likely to counterargue when they are emotionally absorbed in a story. Psychologists refer to this as “transportation,” a state in which attention and emotion are captured by a narrative, making viewers more receptive to its implicit assumptions. We do not fact-check television dramas. We empathize with them. Their moral premises are absorbed quietly as background knowledge.

For most of us, the names Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Peter Thiel evoke an immediate moral impression. But how did that impression evolve? Have you, for example, ever heard them speak at length or know how they run their companies? Do you understand what motivates them? Do they have a good sense of humor?

There is also a structural problem with storytelling itself. Everyday reality, especially everyday crime, is usually chaotic, senseless, and narratively unsatisfying. Criminologists have long observed that much violent crime lacks coherent motives or moral meaning. Writers, understandably, select stories that feel legible, purposeful, and emotionally engaging. But those selections shape our expectations of reality and thus our perception, and make us see otherwise messy events as morally clearer than they actually are.

The result is a moral universe in which certain kinds of harm are treated as profound moral ruptures, while other kinds are treated as routine or unfortunate facts of life. Violence committed by some characters is framed as a social crisis demanding urgent moral response. Similar violence committed by others is portrayed as tragic but unremarkable, something to be managed rather than interrogated.

A clear example appears in the pilot of The Pitt. A dramatic subway assault is immediately interpreted through a moral lens before basic facts are known. The graphic depiction gives viewers the feeling that they are seeing something raw and unfiltered. At the same time, the narrative structure carefully guides inference and sympathy. In the same episode, a different shooting is treated as mundane and procedural. It carries little moral weight and prompts no larger reflection.

The show is not depicting reality. It is presenting a moral map.

This does not require a conspiracy, and it does not require malicious intent. Many writers openly acknowledge that fiction shapes social norms and expectations. Cultural theorists from Walter Lippmann to contemporary media scholars have noted that narratives function as “pictures in our heads,” guiding perception long before conscious judgment enters the picture. What is new is the growing cultural distance between those producing these narratives and the audiences consuming them, combined with a strong confidence that the moral direction of society is already settled.

When this kind of storytelling dominates, it does more than persuade. It trains perception itself. Viewers learn what to notice, what to ignore, and which conclusions should feel obvious. Over time, alternative interpretations stop feeling like interpretations at all. They begin to look irrational or delusional.

This is how “the other movie” disappears.

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A functioning society does not require agreement on every issue. It does require a shared reality. When large groups of people cannot even see what others are responding to, debate becomes impossible. You cannot resolve disagreements if one side experiences the other as hallucinating.

The answer is not counter-propaganda, and it is not simply more facts. Research on motivated reasoning shows that facts alone rarely change minds when perceptions themselves are structured by narrative. What is required instead is closer attention to how stories shape perception. What they highlight. What they omit. And how repetition turns fiction into intuition.

Was Renee Good heroically intervening in an unlawful abduction and a victim of reckless police violence? Or was she someone who interfered with a lawful enforcement action and nearly ran over an officer? Each interpretation feels obvious to those who hold it, and nearly invisible to those who do not. If you analyze both long enough, you might start to see the narratives and the chain of events that lead one to interpret this particular incident in a particular way after watching the exact same three minutes of video.

Skepticism, properly understood, is not just about questioning explicit claims. It is about examining why certain narratives feel natural, why others feel unthinkable, and why some movies seem to be playing on the screen while others are never seen at all.