In the second installment of a quarterly series, Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman consider the cinema of the Biden years.<\/p>\n
This essay is the second entry in Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman\u2019s ongoing series, The Biden Years On-Screen. The first essay<\/a> was published in February.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n DURING THE 2020 CAMPAIGN, either through deceptive editing or in-camera glitching, a video of Joe Biden surfaced that appeared to show the candidate moving in short, jerky bursts as if buffering in real life. In an edit first circulated on Twitter, user @GarlicCorgi added a dialogue cue and the musical score<\/a> from the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, creating yet more surrealist iconography for a presidency that seemed to accumulate it like a Katamari ball. Unlike film critic J. Hoberman\u2019s \u201cSecret Agent of History,\u201d locked and loaded with the international consensus in his sights, or the cinematic commanders in chief before him, Biden shimmered through our hyperreality as a figure of ghostly asynchronicity, creating the impression of decisive action while lurching to catch up with his own projection of forward movement: perpetually out of step, even with himself.<\/p>\n Hoberman\u2019s thesis in the Found Illusions trilogy\u2014that popular movies transmit socially significant ideological content for the critic to excavate\u2014relied on a significant overlap in the pre-streaming era between the moviegoing public and the American people, with box office receipts as empirical links (or smoking guns with which to take aim at Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and other perceived industry power brokers). The new normal, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the temporary elimination of theatrical windowing, represented a decisive rupture of this correlation, with added analytical obstacles in the opaque new metrics of success imposed by streamers. Not burdened by the obligation to report their audience totals and heavily incentivized to skew them upward, industry leader Netflix began issuing weekly top 10 rankings straight to the platform\u2019s home feed in February 2020. Starting in November 2021, with the release of their $200 million caper clunker Red Notice directly to the service, these rankings were based on \u201ctotal hours viewed\u201d\u2014with no way to account for repeat viewings, autoplays, or whether or not anyone was in the room to watch it. (\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what you do, only matters what they think you\u2019ve done,\u201d explains Ryan Reynolds\u2019s art thief Nolan Booth). Still, the figures sent a powerful message about the company\u2019s global reach: that a distracted, inattentive subscriber base, wandering from room to room to tote laundry or clear dishes while glancing at a screen in the background, suited them better than butts in seats. To paraphrase Brecht: Having played their part to dissolve the moviegoing audience, the streamers began to construct another\u2014in other words, to build back \u201cbetter.\u201d<\/p>\n Beginning his presidency with 57 percent approval,<\/a> Biden centered his legislative agenda on his campaign\u2019s Build Back Better platform, which became an omnibus bill of the same name after some stimulus planks were passed under the initial 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The more ambitious BBB, funded partly with taxes on corporate profits and increased IRS enforcement, stalled in the Senate, failing to win the critical 50th vote from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Despite Biden\u2019s self-professed image as a proficient backslapper, the legislative balance of power in an agonizingly gridlocked Senate proved intractable, even for his particular set of skills. By September, the honeymoon was decidedly over: the images of chaos that erupted from Afghanistan as the US Armed Forces withdrew their troops, resulting in the swift return of the Taliban and the widely televised fall of Kabul, drove Biden\u2019s approval into the low 40s, a doldrums from which he would not recover (save for a telling window in the fall of 2024). While some progressives and anti-imperialists commended Biden for making the hard choice, it came at the seemingly permanent cost of his mandate, in the process breaking with the sacred, if fallacious, self-image of the United States as a global peacekeeper.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the film industry struggled to recapture the consensus cinema of the prepandemic years. In 2019, Hollywood\u2019s decade-long love affair with IP-based filmmaking reached an inflection point with the May release of Avengers: Endgame, the climax and apparent finale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe phenomenon, which had begun with 2008\u2019s Iron Man. What could replace it? Producer wunderkind and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige would need time to generate the same interest in a new superhero team, with the release of so many Avengers from their contracts and their places in the story. (The final scene of Endgame, with an artificially geriatric Chris Evans passing Steve Rogers\u2019s adamantium Captain America shield on to Anthony Mackie\u2019s Falcon, duly evoked Saving Private Ryan\u2019s greatest-generational challenge\u2014\u201cEarn this\u201d\u2014while also turning Cap, however inadvertently, into a wizened Biden effigy.) It would be a few years before enough of the warning signs mounted\u2014Eternals (2021), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), The Marvels (2023)\u2014and the industry belatedly realized that something essential, whether the untimely loss of Black Panther (2018) star Chadwick Boseman or the blockbuster era itself, was not coming back.<\/p>\n A premature realization of this epochal change premiered in the United States on October 8, 2021, a year and a half delayed and not a moment too soon: No Time to Die, the final outing of Daniel Craig\u2019s James Bond, which took the unusual step of seemingly killing off its iteration of the character. This Bond had been conceived as a grounded, back-to-basics reboot in 2006\u2019s Casino Royale, climaxing with the death of his traitorous lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), a foundational trauma that provided emotional ballast for multiple sequels, including the direct continuation in 2008\u2019s Quantum of Solace. As directed by action journeyman and franchise veteran Martin Campbell (who previously oversaw the 1995 Pierce Brosnan 007 vehicle GoldenEye, as well as sci-fi action movies such as 1994\u2019s No Escape), Casino Royale assimilated the aesthetic preoccupations of signature post-9\/11 thriller The Bourne Identity (2002) and, even more so, the handheld shooting and fast cutting of its Paul Greengrass\u2013helmed sequel The Bourne Supremacy (2004), which film scholar David Bordwell termed \u201cintensified continuity.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Picking up new tricks as it went along, Eon Productions\u2014the family firm of IP caretakers co-captained by heirs Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson\u2014similarly borrowed the narrative midsection and political messaging of 2008\u2019s The Dark Knight in Skyfall (2012), a referendum of sorts on Bond\u2019s 21st-century relevance. As with Christopher Nolan\u2019s zeitgeist-defining War on Terror allegory, Skyfall wore its conservative politics proudly, with MI6 head M (Judi Dench) reciting the final lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson\u2019s \u201cUlysses\u201d<\/a> in a tribute to the superspy as nationalist icon, resolving in an epilogue that returns Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) from the field to M\u2019s office\u2014now manned by Ralph Fiennes, inverting the Craig era\u2019s gender balance and putting everything in its right place.<\/p>\n If these adjustments were regressive, the retcons of 2015\u2019s Spectre qualified as outright misjudgments, revising the villains of the previous three films into pawns of the title organization and of puppet master Ernst Stavro Blofeld, now played by Christoph Waltz in a spectacularly unimaginative casting: Colonel Hans Landa as dark-money Thanos, the shadowy architect of a Bond Cinematic Universe. The quippy dialogue and potboiler plotting suggested a smirking, cartoonish tone reminiscent of the Roger Moore era, a choice\u2014let\u2019s do a silly one\u2014that sat uncomfortably alongside the serialized stitching, let alone the deep shadows and gilded lighting of Hoyte van Hoytema\u2019s cinematography. In catering both to the Eon tradition of quality and to fan-flattering marketplace trends, the extravagantly freighted Spectre (budget estimates soared to $300 million) went over like a lead balloon.<\/p>\n One of the first films to move its release date from spring 2020 due to the worsening pandemic, No Time to Die suffered from an almost unprecedented level of prerelease hype, which eventually came to echo the sentiment of its leading man\u2019s dual promotional runs: let\u2019s get this over with already. Smarting from multiple on-set injuries and as many instances of continuity whiplash, Craig\u2019s actorly ego merged with Eon\u2019s prestige pretensions by securing an irrevocable finale for the character; the delayed return of the blockbuster turned out to be a long goodbye. With its opportunistic pilfering of various IP-driven trends, the Craig run concluded as the axiomatic film series of its era: expensive, derivative, increasingly sentimental, and unsustainably concerned with its own importance. By setting him up to make the ultimate sacrifice\u2014in an uncanny twist, saving humanity from a planned viral plague\u2014No Time to Die insisted not only that we view its weathered, exhausted Bond as the irreplaceable man we\u2019d be sorry to lose, but that we feel sorry for him as well. The nostalgic closing image of his true love (L\u00e9a Seydoux) and their child driving off into a tunnel resembling the films\u2019 iconic gun-barrel opening suggested a franchise model approaching its creative vanishing point.<\/p>\n James Bond will return, of course, by the good graces of Jeff Bezos (recently seen blasting off into space, Hugo Drax\u2013style) and Amazon. When it was officially announced early in 2025 that Barbara Broccoli\u2014by some measure the longest-serving Bond Girl\u2014had divested herself of the family business along with Wilson, the reaction online and even in legacy media was as if 007 was now taking orders from Spectre. While not technically a hostile takeover, Amazon\u2019s enfolding of all things Bond\u2014not just as an extant and sprawling intellectual property but also including any number of potential new subdivisions\u2014under the proverbial big tent exemplified their ongoing role as pop-cultural slumlords. Of course, movies (or $500 million streaming series like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) don\u2019t really pay the rent for Amazon, whose filmmaking division is largely untethered from old and dusty notions of profit or return on investment. Hence the eccentricity of their in-house feature-filmmaking catalog, which kicked off in 2015 with Spike Lee\u2019s gangbanger Lysistrata riff Chi-Raq and constitutes perhaps the deepest and most eclectic grab bag of any 21st-century production house\u2014a testament less to a genuinely artist-friendly ideology than to a money spigot located on prime real estate in Silicon Beach.<\/p>\n In August 2021, two months before No Time to Die bowed on more than 4,000 American screens\u2014enervating a respectable if unspectacular $70 million opening weekend\u2014the strangest-ever Amazon Studios production snuck in through the stage doors of the nation\u2019s art houses, bearing laurels (though no awards) from the Cannes Film Festival and a couple of genuine movie stars. Written and directed by the congenitally eccentric French filmmaker Leos Carax, and top-lining Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard as tempestuously temperamental artist types who become parents to a sentient, anthropomorphic marionette, Annette was a sung-through, fairy-tale rock musical\/parental cautionary tale that wore its myriad weirdness on its sleeves, proudly, as a badge of honor. The film reportedly cost $15 million dollars, chump change for Amazon but by far the biggest budget of Carax\u2019s career. \u201cWhen you make an expensive film you sell your soul,\u201d the director told<\/a> IndieWire, as if anticipating accusations of a deal with the Devil.<\/p>\n The Faust legend hangs over Annette, which is about a wildly successful stand-up comedian who learns, too late, to be more careful about what he wishes for. The same need to be amplified that turns Driver\u2019s Henry McHenry into a motor-mouthpiece for vile, MRA-style rhetoric catalyzes a dangerous bout of jealousy when his eponymous daughter\u2014remanded to his custody after her mother dies tragically\u2014becomes an even bigger star than him, appearing in the \u201cHyperbowl\u201d halftime show by virtue of what seems to be divine intervention. (\u201cWe love Annette,\u201d coo the hoi polloi, to the staccato arias of the British avant-rock duo Sparks.) The absurdity of the film\u2019s storyline is total, but also deceptive, with significant beyond-the-frame connections to Carax\u2019s personal life (his wife, Yekaterina Golubeva, died several years earlier under mysterious circumstances); more generally\u2014and a bit pretentiously\u2014Annette is styled as an excoriation of toxic masculinity, laced with a potent drip of self-pity. Beyond his status as an auteurist surrogate\u2013cum\u2013dead ringer\u2014growing increasingly Caraxian in manner and bearing as the film goes on\u2014Henry suggested a kind of showbiz Mephisto, a Weinstein manqu\u00e9 variably denying, dissembling, and manipulating the people around him, including and especially Annette, who, in, a neo-Pinocchio twist, is humanized just in time to shrug off her father\u2019s apologies. \u201cCan\u2019t I love you?\u201d moans the incarcerated mogul, imploring a bit of sympathy for the Devil. \u201cNo, not really, Daddy,\u201d trills his offspring. \u201cIt\u2019s sad but it\u2019s true. Now you have nothing to love.\u201d<\/p>\n A case can be made that Driver\u2019s skill at inhabiting charismatic creeps\u2014and also creep-adjacent, mostly good guys, like the hulking, hooded-romantic Adam Sackler on Girls\u2014is what\u2019s made him such an in-demand millennial leading man, a pent-up antihero for compromised times. His movie star career began in hyperdrive, with his inclusion in the ensemble cast of Disney\u2019s relaunched Star Wars trilogy as its villain Kylo Ren\u2014a discount Darth Vader down to his own snouted helmet. Petulant and prodigious, sulking and smoldering, Driver surpassed expectations for Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), \u201cbring[ing] his A-game to a dress-up pageant,\u201d<\/a> as critic Eric Hynes wrote. As the Force-touched heir of legacy heroes Han Solo and Princess (now General) Leia, Ren\u2019s rejection of his birthright in favor of genocide and patricide spoke to cresting concerns about alienated young American men armed with AR-15s\u2014a moment of corporatized brand rejuvenation intersecting with a zeitgeist that was also hostile to the idea of Daisy Ridley\u2019s heroine Rey as an intergalactic Mary Sue.<\/p>\n Driver\u2019s star persona was further refined in writer-director Rian Johnson\u2019s 2017 continuation Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, which fleshed out\u2014and, in short order, bumped off\u2014Ren\u2019s overlord Snoke, a motion-capture creation inhabited by Andy Serkis as a Svengali with a seductive purr. Swaddled in a bedazzled golden robe, Snoke cut a Hugh Hefneresque figure, further casting Ren (and Driver) as a different generation of masculine menace: soft, sensitive, yet dangerously misguided. Johnson, whose sloganeering tendencies let fly in his up-to-the minute detective features Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022), smartly positioned Driver as a pop-cultural icon for a historical hinge point, a figure of raw potential who, counterposed with a generational peer in Rey, would have the opportunity in the trilogy\u2019s final installment to reject the sins of his elders\u2014to \u201clet the past die. Kill it if you have to.\u201d<\/p>\n The retconning of Rey\u2019s own bloodline to connect her to franchise final boss Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) in Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) spoke to Disney\/Lucasfilm\u2019s critical failure of nerve; after suffering the fan backlash to Johnson\u2019s contributions, the powers that be literally silenced Driver for the trilogy\u2019s final showdown. In the process, the film indicated that Kylo Ren himself was an unworthy figure to bear the gravitas of a billion-dollar enterprise\u2019s endgame antagonist, and that a specter from beyond the veil had to return\u2014somehow<\/a>\u2014to retake the role. Driver, for his part, had long since moved on. Moving quickly to capitalize on his fame, he had lined up an impressive run of collaborations with critically adored filmmakers\u2014among them Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky, 2017), Noah Baumbach (The Meyerowitz Stories, 2017; Marriage Story, 2019), Jim Jarmusch (Paterson, 2016), Martin Scorsese (Silence, 2016), and Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman, 2018). By the time of Annette\u2019s release, Driver had already garnered a reputation as an auteur\u2019s actor: a versatile leading man with an active fanbase who could help secure financing for dream projects, commercial prospects somewhat aside\u2014of which Carax\u2019s sui generis streaming whatsit served as exhibit A.<\/p>\n Exhibit B: his bristling, unsentimental parody of medieval noblesse oblige in Ridley Scott\u2019s The Last Duel (2021). As Jacques le Gris, a squire elevated well above his station\u2014and his former fellow Caroline War veterans\u2014by a powerful royal patron, Driver draws a bead on entitlement and how it metastasizes into sexual aggression. From his point of view, Jacques\u2019s status gives him every right to seduce\u2014and overpower\u2014Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), the wife of his cash-strapped frenemy Sir Jean (Matt Damon). Point of view is everything in The Last Duel, which tells its story of rape and revenge from three different perspectives: his and his and then hers, melodrama under the sign of Rashomon. Given the project\u2019s development as an original screenplay by Damon and Ben Affleck, it was a fait accompli to read the film as a not-so-veiled allegory taking aim at Damon and Affleck\u2019s former employer Harvey Weinstein. Without protesting too much\u2014more like just enough\u2014the boys and their co-writer Nicole Holofcener insisted that their aim was simply<\/a> to \u201ccreate three dimensional people and tell [a] specific story.\u201d<\/p>\n Mission accomplished: By the standards of Late Ridley Scott, who likes to shoot first and ask questions later (if ever), The Last Duel is unusually measured and compelling, and, yes, three-dimensional in its juxtaposition of masculine power fantasies and stymied female agency. The rhetoric around its commercial underperformance, meanwhile, suggested that the public appetite for grim, heavy-spirited Me Too fables was limited. Driver had a second Scott collaboration in the bag: House of Gucci, released in November just weeks after The Last Duel\u2019s quick September entrance-and-exit from the box office charts. Its pop music soundtrack and camp qualities\u2014also featuring performances by an accented Lady Gaga alongside Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino\u2014only highlighted Scott\u2019s slovenly mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, with Driver once again on hand to provide credibility through his capable performance. The presence of alleged Hollywood creep Jared Leto,<\/a> mugging beneath layers of prosthetics as the balding, middle-aged Paolo Gucci, further solidified the impression that after the suggestion of bold steps forward in The Last Duel and Annette, both Scott and Driver had taken the proverbial step back: a pitfall and a by-product of Driver\u2019s idealistic, increasingly questionable loyalty to an earlier era of film titans.<\/p>\n The best performance in The Last Duel came courtesy of Affleck as Count Pierre d\u2019Alen\u00e7on\u2014a righteously goateed party monster who implores visitors at his invitation-only castle orgies to \u201ctake [their] fucking pants off.\u201d If Scott\u2019s vision of France\u2019s sybaritic, satyriastic elite meeting behind closed doors to get their freak on fell short of, say, Eyes Wide Shut, it nevertheless slotted the film alongside a vast cycle of millennial movies that, to varying degrees of intentionality and artistic achievement, channeled anxieties around the activities of one Jeffrey Epstein, the New York financier (as per his good friend Jim Downey) whose predations made him into something like the public face of clandestine one-percenter depravity\u2014even more so than Harvey Weinstein, with whom he had many friends in common. No man is an island, but Epstein\u2019s 71-acre property served as a metonym for both its owner and his celebrity clientele\u2014a remote stretch of beach beyond prying eyes or impunity, the site for a perfect getaway.<\/p>\n It has been said\u2014in a book of bawdy letters\u2014that enigmas never age, but one reason that Epstein has endured beyond the grave is his status as a bipartisan bogeyman: both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are easily glimpsed in photos with Epstein and his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell. In 2023, an Instagram video surfaced<\/a> that bore an ominous bit of text: \u201cWhen you find out who owns the island next to Epsteins,\u201d it read. The video then cut to a man saying, \u201cSpoiler alert: It\u2019s Joe Biden.\u201d There was no basis to the story, Biden having chosen to vacation pretty much everywhere else except Little Saint James, but in a moment when guilt by association was becoming an increasingly powerful rhetorical tool for pundits, shitposters, and professional conspiracy-slingers alike, Epstein\u2019s flight logs held real potential for political weaponization. Trump\u2019s vow in fall 2024 to unredact their contents\u2014a campaign-season promise that has since boomeranged back on his administration and MAGA as whole\u2014energized the Pizzagate brigade even as it called to mind the I Think You Should Leave sketch<\/a> in which Tim Robinson, clad in a hot dog suit, starts ranting to perpetual onlookers about the need to find the guy who just crashed a hot dog\u2013shaped truck through a department store window. \u201cWe\u2019re all trying to find the guy who did this,\u201d he insists, staggering out of the vehicle, eyes darting nervously, a lucid\u2014and hugely memeable\u2014distillation of projection, evasion, and transparent bad faith.<\/p>\n Speaking of bad faith: The most self-consciously provocative American horror movie of 2021\u2014and also the most willful entry into the dubious but sociologically potent subgenre characterized by film critic Nick Newman as \u201cEpsteincore\u201d<\/a>\u2014was surely Red Scare co-host Dasha Nekrasova\u2019s The Scary of Sixty-First, which wrought its own perverse variation on Me Too themes. Here, the heroines\u2014played by the director as well as Betsey Brown and Madeline Quinn\u2014come to seek out, and get off on, full-body demonic possession by the spirits of Epstein\u2019s victims; they\u2019re pick-me girls in thrall to pinup photos of Prince Andrew. Set in a contemporary New York where the vibes are clearly off\u2014and shot to look an awful lot like the swinging Manhattan of Rosemary\u2019s Baby (1968)\u2014the film\u2019s sleaze-coated textures suited the ideological slipperiness associated with its director. An authentically striking camera subject with a knack for throwing poses (in all senses of the word), Nekrasova was enough of a cinephile (and a wit) to cite the noted \u201cfemale edgelord filmmaker\u201d Claire Denis<\/a> as an influence on Scary, diversifying her artistic allegiances beyond the bad-boys club of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and Polish Svengali Andrzej \u017bu\u0142awski while holding her own work to the highest possible standard.<\/p>\n Cinematically speaking, The Scary of Sixty-First is not at the level of Trouble Every Day (2001), or Bastards, Denis\u2019s scabrous 2013 thriller, whose pale, incestuous patriarch (Michel Subor) is a Gallic monster under the sign of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It\u2019s more like an unofficial adaptation of sad-girl poet laureate Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s buzzy, BookTok-ratified 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose self-anesthetizing protagonist sleeps through 9\/11. With its paranoid tone and sexualized violence, the book is Epsteincore without an Epstein. In interviews, Nekrasova talked about<\/a> \u201cthe hauntology of contemporary life\u201d and a desire to \u201chelp people make sense of an emotional truth of the world\u201d\u2014one an entreaty to the academic set, the other a dog whistle to conspiracy theorists (and a public hug-it-out photo op with Alex Jones was on the horizon). But despite its trollish tone, including a fleeting cameo by Red Scare co-host Anna Khachiyan as a \u201cGhislaine Maxwell doppelg\u00e4nger\u201d (or is she supposed to be Anna Wintour?), Scary\u2019s ketamine-fueled, all-of-them-witches shtick penetrated the progressive wing of film-festival culture, bowing at Berlin alongside the likes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hong Sang-soo, and C\u00e9line Sciamma, who had famously stormed out of a French awards ceremony to protest a citation for Polanski. As genre filmmaking, Scary may not have been, well, scary, but it was suggestive, consolidating the seductive, compulsory solipsism of the small, weirdly influential (and easily influenced) New York media cohort that, depending on who you asked, positioned itself\u2014or was inserted by an unlikely coalition of cautionary, pearl-clutching bloggers and deep-pocketed tech bros\u2014as a viable site of subcultural resistance to the reigning neoliberal establishment. (The question of the filmmaker\u2019s conviction remains open; in a recent post on X, Nekrasova said that, in retrospect, her Epstein fixation was \u201cfruitless\u201d and had caused her \u201ca lot of anguish.\u201d)<\/p>\n Much film discourse that autumn took a back seat to a favorite spectacle of the bourgeois critic class: the third season of Succession, which premiered on HBO (and Warner\u2019s then-new HBO Max service) in October as a post-Trump narrative with deep ambivalence about the potential for disruption. Plucking Nekrasova out of the zeitgeist for inclusion in the show\u2019s rapidly expanding ensemble as a PR lackey, creator Jesse Armstrong and his writers examined the feud between failson Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) and his media mogul dad (Brian Cox) as a nexus of multiple avenues for resistance to the gathering consolidation of all media, put in stark, apocalyptic terms by Kendall as a \u201c323 BC\u201d opportunity for cultural reset. Tasked mainly with reading tweets out loud, Nekrasova\u2019s derisively named Comfrey Pellits was on hand not only to underline Kendall\u2019s addled Christ complex but also to subtextually suggest his dubious moral righteousness. This personal thread climaxed with a gaudy, ghastly birthday celebration at Hudson Yards\u2014America\u2019s own<\/a> glass-and-steel Suicide Forest<\/a>\u2014where Kendall\u2019s breakdown and public spat with his siblings marked another of Armstrong & Co.\u2019s spiraling plots, in which each movement toward a possible reunion and alliance against their father pushed the siblings further down toward oblivion. If, as in Armstrong\u2019s favored Emerson quotation, every institution is the shadow of a single man, the Roy family comprised yet one more system unable to reform itself.<\/p>\n On the big screen, the season\u2019s prestige offerings showed further warning signs of a movie culture withdrawing into niches. After notching his first (but not last) Academy nomination for Willem Dafoe\u2019s performance in The Florida Project (2017), indie tyro Sean Baker returned with Red Rocket, the blackhearted tale of a grifter (Simon Rex) retreating to his Texas hometown and finding no shortage of new marks for the taking. Recalling the Satanic antiheroes of pulp novelist Charles Willeford, Rex\u2019s Mikey \u201cSaber\u201d Davies was a deliciously contemptible protagonist for an indie cinema less preoccupied with the current administration\u2019s new normal than with the specter of an exiled con artist in chief. Baker, whose deceptively youthful looks and rangy Twitter \u201clikes\u201d tab belied his age, was a seasoned yet still lesser-known filmmaker growing into his place among the upper tier of American auteurs. The holidays also saw the return of Steven Spielberg\u2014a certified Genius of the System many times over\u2014with a remake of West Side Story (1961), his first foray into the musical genre. The set-bound production, filmed between New Jersey exteriors and New York\u2019s Steiner Studios, paid dutiful homage to the Robert Wise\u2013Jerome Robbins original even as Tony Kushner\u2019s screenplay\u2014revising the book by Arthur Laurents\u2014carefully excavated the historical subtext beneath the original musical. Placing this Romeo and Juliet fable in the shadow of the Lincoln Center development may have pleased devotees of Robert Caro, but it tended to dull the musical\u2019s chromatic heights. As Richard Brody wrote,<\/a> the pathologizing quality of Spielberg\u2019s adaptation \u201cKrupkifies the film. [\u2026] He leaves no loose ends, no ambiguities, no extravagances, no extremes.\u201d Whatever musical audience existed either failed to show up or couldn\u2019t make the movie a hit, and it topped out at $38 million in domestic grosses.<\/p>\n Conversely, no one would accuse writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson of being a box office juggernaut. His Licorice Pizza, released that November\u2014continuing a similar streak of detours out of the past since 2002\u2019s Punch-Drunk Love\u2014made its diagnosis of 1970s malaise entirely out of shaggy-dog stories and irrational impulses. Based partly on the tall tales of Hollywood producer Gary Goetzman (co-founder of Playtone with Tom Hanks) and on Anderson\u2019s own San Fernando Valley childhood, its bottom-up view of show business\u2014from a variety show starring Lucille Ball to an audition for Breezy (1973) and an encounter with future superproducer Jon Peters, then the hairdresser paramour of Barbra Streisand\u2014betrayed less a sense of nostalgia than an interest in the rough draft of history. The succession of small business schemes by Cooper Hoffman\u2019s Gary Valentine could have belonged to one of the late novels by Inherent Vice author and 20th-century sage Thomas Pynchon, culminating in the young entrepreneur running his pinball-machine empire in an ice-cream suit, a tableau that suggestively summarized a nation\u2019s arrested development segueing neatly into the Jimmy Carter years, with Gary as an actual son of the sixties ready to put away childish things\u2014or put them up for sale.<\/p>\n Unafraid either of bad taste or of plunging boldly into the now, comedy mogul Adam McKay, meanwhile, made his Netflix debut with Don\u2019t Look Up, an end-times parable that substituted an impending, world-destroying meteor for the climate catastrophe unfolding off-screen. Released onto the platform on Christmas Eve 2021\u2014as the COVID-19 Omicron variant surged through the country<\/a>\u2014McKay\u2019s satire put appealing A-listers Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio (a longtime spokesperson for climate issues) in the roles of scientists pleading with a variety of vulgar comic types in the White House, tech industry, and media to unite humanity and take immediate, coordinated action. As messaging, the movie had an extremely contemporary problem: like sobering packages on the daily news, Netflix movies seemed to come and go without much staying power. The face of a distressed\u2014and middle-aged\u2014DiCaprio addressing the TV cameras directly felt like an honest transmission of its director\u2019s state of mind, earnestly trying to make use of the mass platform granted to him while knowing full well its intended use was to placate, not to galvanize.<\/p>\n Those going out to the movies may have hoped for some escapism from the persistent pandemic doldrums in the form of The Matrix Resurrections, the Warner Bros. reboot helmed by franchise co-creator Lana Wachowski. Her sister Lilly had declined the invitation to return, though as Lana\u2019s script made clear, it had not been extended in a welcoming spirit. The first act presented Keanu Reeves\u2019s Thomas Anderson (alias Neo) as the visionary designer behind a video game franchise patterned on the Matrix films, now contemplating a reboot at the mandatory request of his company\u2019s new owners\u2014Warner Bros. This winking, thumb-in-the-eye critique went only so far; Wachowski\u2019s repudiation of the original trilogy\u2019s balletic, Yuen Woo-ping choreographed action in favor of jittery handheld and chaotic gunplay represented a more striking rejection of the corporate mandate.<\/p>\n As pop-cultural savants whose conversance in critical theory exceeded even the density of generational peer Quentin Tarantino\u2019s cinematic syntheses, the Wachowskis were well positioned to puncture the crushing fatigue of reboot culture. Lana Wachowski\u2019s treatment, presenting Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) as pawns of a malicious program (in the smirking, hateful guise of Neil Patrick Harris) that uses their romantic drive to fuel a self-refreshing panopticon, reformulated the original film\u2019s critique of end-of-history office spaces into a more cutting articulation of late capitalism\u2019s emotional logic: a machine that runs on both the denial of escape and endless, thwarted longing. The most bravura set piece saw the Matrix pursue Trinity and Neo in the form of activated drones hurling themselves out of skyscrapers, a haunting elaboration upon Adam Curtis\u2019s Suicide-soundtracked montage<\/a> in Hypernormalisation (2016), illustrating the death drive at the heart of the blockbuster. Some critics, such as Sam Bodrojan in Reverse Shot,<\/a> praised Wachowski\u2019s carefully thought-out themes and cathartic trans allegory. Writing for The Baffler, on the other hand, John Semley lamented<\/a> that \u201cThe Matrix felt like it was speaking to its time. Now, movies seem to chatter only among themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n If the movies were speaking not directly to their audiences but to each other, what were they saying? Mostly, they were acknowledging a desire for escape\u2014and a liberation from illusory, unsatisfactory choices. Trinity and Neo had defeated the Matrix only to find themselves exploited by new masters. In preparation for a new era of IP management, the MCU had embraced multiversal storytelling with December\u2019s Spider-Man: No Way Home, uniting Tom Holland\u2019s Peter Parker with the heroes and villains of the earlier Sam Raimi and Marc Webb Spider-Man films. In May 2022, Raimi himself would join the MCU for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which reintroduced Disney\u2019s recently acquired Fox IP in the form of X-Men and Fantastic Four characters. Recalling both the alternate lives and multiversal storytelling of The Matrix Resurrections and of the struggling MCU, March 2022\u2019s Everything Everywhere All at Once celebrated the legacy of Marvel\u2019s dominance by connecting it to a longer lineage of pop storytelling, including the honorable Hong Kong action cinema of its star Michelle Yeoh and the handmade surrealism of breakout indie underdogs Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, except more aggressively ingratiating: the film\u2019s signature image is Yeoh in a kung fu stance that makes it look like she\u2019s going in for a hug. Co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had created a genuine phenomenon, yet the troubling question remained whether their model of comic-inflected indie storytelling could rejuvenate the ailing industry, or if its decidedly profitable run\u2014then the highest-grossing A24 release, making back its small budget several times over\u2014represented a new, diminished ceiling for consensus cinema: quirked-up, goated with the sauce, and produced by the goddamned Russo brothers.<\/p>\n Bursting through the ceiling that summer was Top Gun: Maverick, a long-delayed \u201clegacyquel\u201d to the 1986 original, a dream of Morning in America deferred. The sanitized plot had Tom Cruise\u2019s perennially underpromoted flying ace Pete \u201cMaverick\u201d Mitchell tasked with an aerial raid on an unnamed foreign enemy\u2019s nuclear facility, a bowdlerized variant of war games with Iran sanded down to suggest the faceless Imperial pilots in Star Wars. The screenplay, credited in part to Cruise\u2019s favored director and script doctor Christopher McQuarrie, had to stretch to find an appropriately depoliticized scenario in which to assert the US military\u2019s dominance in the 21st century. In the process, Maverick stretched to accommodate decades of Cruise\u2019s tumultuous public image, as a troublesome asset (in his time) with a checkered romantic history (no kidding!) fighting the good fight for human craft and artistry against the dominance of bean-counting bureaucrats. The real miracle was that Joseph Kosinski\u2019s direction and the young cast\u2014led by Miles Teller as the son of Maverick\u2019s fallen wingman Goose (played in the original by Anthony Edwards)\u2014managed to wring some pathos from the preposterous dramaturgy. As Canada\u2019s Will Sloan wrote,<\/a> \u201cTom Cruise is the only decaying American institution that still works, and I trust him.\u201d<\/p>\n The training class at Top Gun was filled out by ingenues in search of stardom; co-star Glen Powell, who had broken out in Richard Linklater\u2019s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), was a former child actor who had been sniffing at the A-list for years, now acting alongside Monica Barbaro, a future Oscar nominee, and Lewis Pullman, soon to be of the New Avengers. The subtext was a finishing school for movie magic, with Cruise as lecturer, headmaster, bankrolling trustee, and prize alumnus all in one. They were making this one not just the way they used to make them\u2014with Kosinski doing his best impression of original director Tony Scott\u2019s sun-drenched montages\u2014but also the way they ought to be made. McQuarrie\u2019s presence on set clinched the sequel as un film de Tom Cruise, whose producing career had begun with a director-driven franchise in Mission: Impossible (1996). Since 2015, that series had been in the hands of McQuarrie\u2014now helping to finesse Maverick to his meal ticket\u2019s desired specifications. The underlying conflict wasn\u2019t an aging pilot confronted with his impending obsolescence, but rather the tension between Cruise\u2019s showcasing of his chosen recruits and his pathological inability to cede center stage.<\/p>\n For now, the box office numbers certified that Cruise Enterprises had landed the plane, the right decisions had been made, and the professionals were still in charge. But like No Time to Die\u2019s gun-barrel ellipsis, Maverick\u2019s closing image (soundtracked by Lady Gaga) had more a sense of displacement than triumph to it. Several critics reached for the comparison between the sadder-but-wiser Pete Mitchell and the aging Joe Biden, another man out of time who had returned when his country needed him most. Preoccupied with youth and experience, the picture was death-tinged, haunted by the specters of Goose as well as Maverick\u2019s onetime rival Iceman, reprised by the ailing Val Kilmer in a curtain call performance preceding his character\u2019s on-screen funeral. It was also meaningfully anachronistic: the film was at once a relic of the 1980s and a Trump-era asset kept in cold storage, having begun shooting in pre-COVID 2018. Cruise, who had masked up for a 2020 screening of Christopher Nolan\u2019s Tenet, reportedly insisted on holding the movie until the world was ready for a traditional wide release. This decision\u2014as well as keeping it off streaming until Christmas\u2014helped cement Maverick\u2019s status as a modern classic, but its unusually long gestation period and self-reflexive qualities indicated an acteur-style passion project, not the return of mass movie culture. Meanwhile, Cruise and McQuarrie were still prepping the first half of a two-part Mission: Impossible installment, itself greenlit in 2019: To Be Continued.<\/p>\n What connected Cruise and Biden most of all was an uneasy relationship with their own historical moment, chosen or not. Cruise\u2019s skill as both star and superproducer had won him back control of his public perception, but his films were increasingly haloed afterimages, untethered from the realities of the business he sought to resurrect, let alone the balance of world power. The choice of Maverick\u2019s final shot, a corkscrewed flight into the sunset, might have played very differently only a couple of years before: either a collective dream of release from the anxious Trump reign or a less palatable affirmation of peace through military prowess. Premiering well into the Biden administration, in a decimated theatrical environment and after the last flight out of Kabul, Maverick spoke more to the psychology of the man in the cockpit than to conditions on the ground.<\/p>\n LARB Contributors<\/p>\n Brendan Boyle is a writer and editor living in Chicago. His criticism on film, television, and literature has been published in Cinema Scope, The Ringer, Downtime Magazine, and Fran Magazine.<\/p>\n Adam Nayman is a critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto. He has written books on Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, and the Coen brothers.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n Paul Thompson reviews Nathan Fielder\u2019s \u201cThe Rehearsal.\u201d <\/p>\n Paul Thompson<\/a>Jul 2<\/p>\n In the first installment of a quarterly series, Brendan Boyle and Adam Nayman use two films as a lens on the Biden years.<\/p>\n