Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a couple of write-ups of movies I recently watched. These, like the book ‘reviews’ on this Substack, are intended for people who have already seen the work discussed. Totally flagrant spoilers are avoided, but these may not make much sense if you haven’t seen the movies. At
, has an absorbing discussion of manhood, masculinity, et al.Best,
Sam
TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022)
Why was it such a strange experience watching Top Gun: Maverick?
For one thing, because I watched it after everyone else did. It was such a big deal in 2022 — Steven Spielberg argued that it single-handedly saved Hollywood — that I’d stored it in my head as a slicker, CGI-updated version of the original. Lots of stunts, lots of explosions. Super-cool.
What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be quite so….middle-aged. Kelly McGillis had apparently aged out of consideration for a role. Val Kilmer, battling with throat cancer, was reduced to a non-speaking (although important) part. But, more than that, it was fundamentally about very grown-up sort of stuff — how to navigate a mature relationship and get along with one’s partner’s children; how to think about stagnation at work; how to find the right moment to retire.
What it’s really ‘about’ though, surprisingly directly (and it’s a surprise that this didn’t get picked up on more) is PTSD. Maverick has never gotten over the death of Goose. He’s unable to move forward (“It’s time to let go,” types Val Kilmer, to which Maverick, movingly, says, “I don’t know how”) and he can’t advance in his career: everybody else he knows have become admirals; he’s still a test pilot, still returning over and over again, as it were, to the scene of Goose’s death. And in the way of PTSD veterans, certain skills (his instincts in the air) have held tight while the rest of him is disintegrating: his credit cards are getting declined; he’s become an old man standing outside the bar staring in.
It turns out — poignantly — that that’s the epitaph to a whole era. It was, in film history, the period of the ascendance of American air power — from Star Wars to Independence Day, with Top Gun right in the middle. There was nothing, nothing, that was more evocative of the mood of Morning in America than Tom Cruise on his motorcycle racing the fighter jets; than the efficacy of nimble, dogfight-ready fighter jets in handling any possible problem, whether it was a Death Star, an alien invasion, Soviet MiGs randomly in the Indian Ocean (and there was no better credentialing for the presidency than Bill Pullman’s still-fresh ability to handle a fighter plane).
That era, and mindset, ends with a whimper — Maverick suffering PTSD; mean Ed Harris trying to scrap the Navy’s fighter jets for a drone program.
But Top Gun: Maverick is — even more than most sequels — a love song to the original movie, an homage to its soundtrack, its iconic shots, and a way of saying goodbye to the mentality underlining it. We’re also pretty much right back to the movie tropes of the time. The Top Gun Fighter School has become impressively diverse, but in the end the tough-yet-friendly black men are waiting on the ground with hugs and smiles while the white guys fly around dealing with their daddy issues. But the movie often seems to be getting tired of its own tropes. In maybe the nadir of on-screen chemistry, Miles Teller at a dramatic moment tells Cruise, “I saved your life,” to which Cruise says, “I saved your life, that’s the whole point,” and then they sort of stand around with nothing else to say to each other — they’re supposed to be bonded by battle by now, but, instead, they both seem a bit weary of their own clichés. It’s a sad-yet-somehow-fitting end to that whole exercise — the Reagan Revolution, the Global War on Terror, air power invictus. Instead, it’s survivors’ guilt, awkward male bonding, budget cuts. And good riddance. Time for a new national myth.
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (2022)
Wow, this was not what I was expecting — as dark and ambitious a movie as I can remember.
For one thing, it’s really a testament to what craft can do — slow, patient scenes; a skilled ensemble cast; a way of letting the audience know even in the long stretches of time when nothing much is happening that they’re in good hands and should go wherever the film leads.
And, oh, the places the film gets to. The first real turn is the swimming scene — a passenger breaking the class barriers for a moment for everybody on the ship to swim off the slide. That’s a creepy, almost terrifying moment — the pretense of equality in a society where everything is unequal; the deep discomfort of all the members of the crew at the moment when they’re asked to break their roles.
The next turn is the seasickness scene — the moment when the society (having just had a crack in its edifice with the swimming) now turns into a nightmare. Each exquisitely prepared dish — viewed with the ship and camera tilting — becomes disgusting. The seasickness scene is an extension of the Captain’s moral ambivalence — the psychic fissure that makes him an alcoholic, that makes him perversely insist on holding the Captain’s Dinner in the middle of a storm. The fundamental absurdity of the whole society is ultimately only expressive through a breakdown — through everyone getting sick, the Captain and Dimitri getting roaring drunk and taking over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Here we are a Russian capitalist and an American Communist,” says Dimitry. “Yes, on a $250 million yacht,” says the Captain — an exquisite set of paradoxes that finally resolves itself in mayhem.
The turns in the island scene are so sharp and (to me, at least, unexpected), but they are of a theme — that the power dynamics are completely ineluctable. Within hours of her landing, Abigail has become a potentate with a strict hierarchical structure that is obeyed by everyone — and with Paula in the exact same role as stewart and subaltern. The sexual marketplace is exactly the same — only a bit more explicit. “I said, I love you, you give me fish,” Carl says. “And do you know why that’s so beautiful — just like you —because it’s the truth,” Abigail tells him. The pretense that Abigail is creating a matriarchy is of course completely threadbare — Abigail is able to convince Yaya of this exactly at the moment that Abigail is most ruthlessly manipulating her.
Part of the reason Triangle of Sadness is so unexpected is that it belongs to a genre completely its own. There’s something very undisciplined in the structure — the way characters and plot points are summarily dropped, the way that the focus shifts quietly away from Carl and he turns out to be a more a symbol than a protagonist —and that’s part of the point. No one really acts as themselves. Everybody acts in their sort of archetypal class role — Dimitri picking the jewelry off of his drowned wife; Carl once again in the gray area of prostitution; Abigail so determined to never again be a toilet manager that she’ll do anything to preserve her newfound status. What it really is is a return of the sort of vanished genre of the allegory — like Pilgrim’s Progress or something.
We haven’t taken the allegory seriously as high art for a long time, in part because we believe that it is too crude an instrument to take in the psychological nuances of a modern society. The implicit argument of Triangle of Sadness is that there is no psychological nuance whatsoever: everybody is their class position. That makes the allegory a very effective tool of revolutionary art, and if The Revolution does one day break out Triangle of Sadness may be remembered as having the same sort of relationship to our era as, say, The Marriage of Figaro did to the ancien regime.
It participates in a trope has worked its way into popular art — in The Maids, The White Tiger, Parasite, etc — in which the sole, overpowering desire of a subservient class (far more even than their own self-interest) is to kill their masters. And it adds a new contribution to the discourse, which is that our current Gilded Age is a terrible condition; that inequality is really the only fact of the contemporary world (Succession makes a similar argument); and so even the wonderfully egalitarian opportunities of the desert island lead to a reification of the class structure, with some temporary disturbances in status but with the castaways making their alliances pretty much exactly as they would have on the yacht. The only possibility — and this seems to be what Abigail has in mind in the closing shot on her; this seems to be what the perplexing, very final shot signifies — is a complete breakdown, a genuine revolutionary circus.
I’m not entirely sure how much the filmmakers believe this themselves (they certainly believe it to some extent) and there are moments when it feels like the film is pushing, is in love with itself and its sense of carnival. This is the case in the jewelry-stripping scene, in the ‘head in the clouds’ trope, in the final shot. But it seems ungrateful or something to criticize a movie like this: it’s so dark, so brave, so innovative. It really does seem to create a whole new genre and does so with complete confidence. It’s a reminder that films don’t just mirror the tastes of their era but create them.
This was the oddest bit of synchronicity in a while. I just finished watching Triangle of Sadness less than 5 minutes ago and opened up substack app to see this review hahah. Great review btw. I agree, it was a masterfully shot film (the sea sickness scene in particular), and there was a lot of interesting inversions-- the land mine magnates being destroyed by a land mine, Dimitri going from quoting Reagan on the ship to Marx quoting on the island, etc.
I loved Triangle of Sadness for its reckless abandon. But there is an underlying cynicism that I can’t abide: The supposition that the exploited would be just as vicious as their oppressors if given the chance. There’s no room for the possibility of a kinder society than the one we have. There is only power and merciless irony masquerading as justice.
But I loved the film nonetheless. Is masterful, and your description of it made me like it even more.
It’s been an amazing year for film: Afire, Aftersun, Passages, and Past Lives. Please watch them and share your thoughts, I love the way you pull out the best aspects of a film.