So unlike most years, this summer I’m reviewing the big summer titles, they seem t me unusually revealing of America’s problems, as well as Hollywood’s, unusually interested in history, in the past, & the increasing difficulty of presenting anything manly. These are all signs of the death of cinema, which some of us have been talking about for quite a while…
To begin with, there’s the new Indiana Jones movie, a summary of recent madness—geriatric Harrison Ford is brought back, as he prepares to meet his maker, since there’s nothing else to do with the movies, but only to be humiliated by a charmless woman in middle age, who acts as though she were still young, while also preparing digital ghosts of him to replace acting more broadly. It’s a catastrophe burning through $300 million in budget (probably another $100 million in publicity), it’s the past of COVID panics ruining the industry, but it’s also the future.
I wrote about it for L&L:
The goddess decides Indy’s fate. He wants to stay in the past, she pleads with him, orders him, cajoles him, & when he won’t listen, she coldcocks him, being both wiser & stronger, fate embodied. She makes the rules, she somehow knows what you’re supposed to do about history, she has her way. Back to the future, in 1969, she reassured the convalescing ex-hero: “You’re meant to be here, Indy.” She brings back the wife he was separated from, as well as other friends. She is, as a goddess, providential, to those who obey her. There’s a place for Indy in the world she rules, if he doesn’t step out of line. He’s old & tired anyway, so he obeys. This is meant to serve as a happy ending.
Of course, the story is odd. For the first 90 minutes or so, Helen’s portrayed as callous, conniving, & arrogant. These are all considered enviable characteristics among liberal elites. To seem transgressive, she says she only believes in cash, not in anything magical or spiritual, like Indy. The apotheosis only happens in the last hour. The difference between the two parts of the movie is easily understood—first she humiliates Indy & replaces him, then, once she’s in charge, she spares him. This makes it one of the most perfect images of elite feminism in our pop culture.
Next, also at L&L, the new, impossibly long of title Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I:
Hollywood is a strange business these days. Every entertainment corporation bet on streaming in the COVID era, which made it seem as though the change begun by Netflix would quickly lead to an entirely new America. Billions were spent on something many of us loathe, a vision where Americans are reduced to consuming content on screens, mostly alone & often distracted, chatting about it all on social media, chasing trends, isolated from a world they increasingly treat with despair, hysteria, or panic. This is the death of cinema, of anything memorable, & maybe the death of American freedom. Happily, it’s not happening just yet!
Theaters have returned and so has the American habit of spending time around each other, enjoying things together. For all its faults, the movie theater is much preferable to the lockdowns & the ideas people got in that unhappy situation. Streaming is collapsing as a business model, there simply isn’t money in it to compensate for the costs. With interest rates rising & investors returning to reality, every studio is cutting costs & looking to entertain people rather than transform them through a combination of technology & “imagineering,” as Disney calls it. Speaking of Disney, it’s in bad shape, even the parks are doing badly, apt punishment for its attempt to socially engineer Americans into Progressive prejudices, not to say, brainwash children.
The worst future imaginable—think of it generally as “Virtual Reality” (an odd, typically modern synthesis that gets rid of both virtue & reality)—has been averted for now. What beautiful visions, however, does cinema have to offer the audience, to have a better, more American, less corporate-oligarchic future instead? The only answer for what might inspire us these days is Tom Cruise. The hardest working man in showbiz is carrying two franchises on his back, Top Gun & Mission: Impossible, to astonishing success, & working hard to get people to see other people’s movies as well.
Also, over at Acton, I wrote about the big surprise summer hit, the very conservative, very Christian Sound of Freedom:
This year’s Fourth of July moviegoing experience was a surprise. The top draw at the box office was not a feel-good blockbuster, but a thriller about child sex trafficking. It’s called Sound of Freedom & stars Jim Caviezel, of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ fame & the Jonathan Nolan AI-&-vigilantes CBS series Person of Interest. Sound of Freedom cost only $14 million or so & has already grossed more than $40 million in its first week, attracting audiences to the story of Tim Ballard & his Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit anti-trafficking organization.
The major attraction of Sound of Freedom is that it’s said to be based on a true story about a sting operation in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2014, saving children & arresting those who enslave & molest them. The story offers the traditional relief of a happy ending but also introduces a subject the movies cautiously avoid, one of the last images of evil that people find disturbing—the abuse of children. Strangely, this has resulted in elite liberal or progressive outlets like Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and even the Washington Post trying to smear the movie as “adjacent” to conspiracy theories, which makes you wonder whether there are any moral questions on which we can stand together these days.
Two more essays to come soon, on Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, a story about movies & theater & TV in mid-century America, as well as about that America or sophisticated reading elites, mass production luxury, & the military-industrial complex. & finally one on Christopher Nolan’s upcoming three-hour work to end cinema, Oppenheimer, which is strangely enough connected…
Good catch on the "converting women" thing. Feels pretty fitting and standard in the film, though, so no-one should get their defenses up.
A slightly spoiler-ish comment: the funny thing about Dead Reck 1 is that its sketch of the AI Entity villain in the first half of the movie is fairly terrifying and all-disorienting, making the airport-chase scene genuinely chilling both for what it shows and implies, and the writers/directors attempt to extend this "disoriented-by-a-manipulated/hacked-digital-world" feel into the super-elite-party scene in Venice, but then, once we get on that (very "analog") train, everything reverts, to our relief, back to pretty-straightforward action movie plot.
I'm looking forward to your review of Oppenheimer! I wonder, based on this interview, how Nolan will portray the relation between the military-industrial complex (arguably born with the Manhattan Project) and our capacity for republican self-government, https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai-apocalypse/