I guess it’s time to catch up. How are you? Yes, I love weather too.
Now that the small talk is out of the way, let’s dig into big talk.
Our summer was defined by the movies. Not in the sense that movies outperformed television or music in craft and storytelling heft, Game of Thrones and Mr. Robot are the victors there. Going to the movies are the last thing we really do together. They’re the last piece of pop culture we consume in general unison—in the theater and every Friday or Saturday.
Netflix just dropped Narcos—an expansive epic on Pablo Escobar and the Latin American drug trade. No one blinked. Albums are now casually released on Fridays. No one stirs. Movies … movies are where we come together to watch Chris Pratt tame raptors (you’re my boy Blue), dancing a capella spectacles, and Tom Hardy grunt and gesture his way through dystopia.
The movies I really liked this summer (Mad Max: Fury Road, Inside Out, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The End of the Tour, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Ant-Man, Jurassic World) were the simplest. And simple isn’t even really the right word. The movies I really liked this summer (mentioned above) all have a central journey that at its core is pretty simple. It’d take 20 minutes to explain the plot of Age of Ultron. Fury Road? They ride out and ride back in. Director George Millar takes us from point A to point B. You can write the plot to Fury Road in the margins of your notebook in Globalization I. Max (Tom Hardy), Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Immortal’s Joe’s harem, and a friendly war boy (Nicholas Hoult) ride out into the desert, away from the tyrannical rule of Immortal Joe, then realize there’s no where to go but right back, but back on their own terms. It’s a road trip movie, just one with war boys and a lot of mind-bending action. It’s simple and awesome in its simplicity.
I think there are things to learn at the movies, and I think because of the nature of pop culture, the things we learn them together. The best movies to illustrate this still vague analogy are Fury Road and The End of the Tour.
In The End of the Tour, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) and Rolling Stone profiler David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) spend about a week together, driving to Wallace’s last stop on his book tour for Infinite Jest, probably the most famous and infamously quoted post-modern novel. The plot is again, effortlessly simple.
Wallace and Lipsky aren’t beset by war boys on their way to Milwaukee. They just talk about a lot of interesting stuff. They don’t do the sort of primal, engaging action of Fury Road. They do a different, conversational dance. Wallace is ever aware of Lipsky as he tries to coddle some representation of Wallace–the person, figure, and writer that will make sense on the pages of Rolling Stone. Everytime they strike up an interesting conversation, every time I thought we were close to digging into the real Wallace (or the Wallace that Jason Segel portrays). Lipsky starts holding his recorder out like a high schooler interviewing the football coach after the big game.
Lipsky asks Wallace why he wears a bandanna, and he shrugs something along the lines of “I don’t know I just sort of started doing it.” Lipsky isn’t satisfied. And that’s sort of how their conversations go, two intellectual writers dancing around each other. Wallace mumbles these soft explanations that are insightful in their simplicity and humility that give the movie’s literal journey depth and truth. Going from A to B in The End of the Road is equally about securing freedom and water as the journey in Fury Road is. It’s about securing a sort of intellectual freedom and water for the mind and soul.
I think what I learned this summer (and maybe what we all learned) is that in the best stories—in the best things—there’s both truth and complexity in simplicity, that simply going from A to B can be fraught with earned and worthwhile complexity.
Featured Image Courtesy of Kilburn Media
