Cory's Reads #36: I Saw the Sun Glow
The search for what unites us.
Remember the solar eclipse? It feels like ages ago, I know.
It was last month, a fun albeit fleeting blip on the radar of 2024. Unequipped with the proper eyewear, I did not actually see the phenomenon. I watched the livestream, texted friends and family both locally and around the country. It was the kind of moment that restored my faith in humanity, however briefly. For just one day, all of us (in North America…parts of Europe and northern Africa will get their turn in 2026 and 2027) were united in our awe of this rare sight.
The solar eclipse was a reminder that mass culture can still exist, even in our ever-fragmented cultural landscape. We do not all watch the same movies or listen to the same music, but we do all live under the same sun, and we all shared in our experience of its unique glow on April 8th, 2024. If last month’s newsletter suggested that culture may be dangerously ineffective as an agent of change, perhaps community-building is the rare capability we will still afford it.
Cory's Reads #35: The Pop Culture Playground
Free Palestine.
I begin this month’s newsletter with those two words not as a provocation nor as a polemic. Rather, I write them out as a reminder to myself, a desperate attempt to free myself from this realm in which I am trapped. Still, my efforts may be in vain. Worse, they may prove counterproductive in the ongoing fight for freedom in Palestine, Ukraine…
I begin May’s newsletter with an April callback as part of a broader effort to determine where else mass culture may be waiting for us. 2023’s version of the total solar eclipse may have been Barbenheimer, the dual release of Barbie and Oppenheimer in July of last year. Barbenheimer was evidence that cinema can still provide a true cultural phenomenon, and with it a proper sense of community and belonging.
I sensed a similar excitement in the air after Dune: Part Two released in early March, and then again when Challengers released in late April. Neither film’s box office earnings — and therefore their mass appeal — come close to that of Barbie or Oppenheimer, but their cultural significance was still cemented via those most official of metrics: TikToks, Tweets, and memes.
Dune: Part Two is a thrilling sci-fi epic, and Challengers is the best movie of 2024 thus far. Their penetration of our individual cultural siloes — not to be confused with the broader silo in which culture writ large finds itself (still with me?) — is a fortunate indicator that quality still reigns supreme. Cream rises to the top, and good art generally maintains the ability to cut through the noise of everyday life.
Of course, the flipside of that supposition is that mediocre art will only add to our collective cultural clutter. And as summer ushers in a fresh batch of blockbusters, quality and mediocrity are sure to exist in equal measure.
May kicked things off with The Fall Guy, the meta-action comedy from director/former stuntman David Leitch. Of course, The Fall Guy is all about Ryan Gosling, who teams up with Emily Blunt to hold this hot mess of a movie together through sheer movie star charisma. The Fall Guy is very fun and very funny, almost begrudgingly so. Screenwriter Drew Pearce’s dialogue is clunky and aimless, but Gosling and Blunt manage to chew up every line until it is ready to be spit back out as something resembling a joke, or — if we’re really lucky — a coherent thought.
Beyond paying tribute to the unsung stuntmen behind our favorite action films, The Fall Guy’s primary preoccupation is with the contemporary box office landscape. I suppose David Leitch and I share in that obsession, although we certainly view that landscape very differently.
With the help of their film-within-a-film construction, Leitch and Pearce hope to position The Fall Guy as a kind of salve for our current moment, taking issue with the supposedly sophisticated status of modern moviemaking. Partway through the film, Gosling’s “dumb guy” stuntman Colt Seavers remarks to Blunt’s Jody — a first-time director — that her artistry and her knowledge far outweigh his own. As Jody explains potential motifs and themes she might incorporate into her film — Metalstorm, a silly combination of Cowboys & Aliens and Dune — Colt reassures her that the ideas do not really matter, and that average Joes like him just want to have fun with their movies. As Colt and Jody also acknowledge the inevitably incoherent third act of Metalstorm, it becomes clear that much of The Fall Guy is attempting to patch over its own shortcomings through these meta-conversations.
Leitch and Pearce are so convinced that they are giving us what we want, they are willing to elbow us in the ribs and remind us of their film’s superficiality over and over again. They may view their latest collaboration as a rejection of that pernicious pretentiousness pervading every corner of contemporary cinema, but The Fall Guy instead slips into the same kind of condescension that has made Adam Mckay’s work so insufferable in recent years. These are filmmakers who believe themselves to be inviting us into conversations with them. Alas, they are talking at us, not with us.
What I find so reassuring about The Fall Guy is audience’s rejection of it. The film has not been a box office failure, but its $27mil opening weekend was a relative disappointment considering its star power, not to mention its coveted first-weekend-of-May release. Leitch’s endeavor to relate to audiences and group us all together as simpletons was received tepidly at best. Instead, audiences are flocking to the theater for a film with no celebrities attached, and whose broader franchise has always been defined by its willingness to pair big ideas with big spectacle.
That’s right…the apes are back, baby! The primates have prevailed! The chimps have been chosen! The simian sensation is sweeping the nation!
Well, hopefully not that last one. That didn’t end well for James Franco and company.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has already amassed over $100M in the U.S. Trading in the epic scale and moral weight of its predecessors for something a bit more straightforward and formulaic, Kingdom director Wes Ball never quite captures the magic of Matt Reeves’ work on Dawn or War. Still, Kingdom is a solid film, leveraging Wētā FX’s mind-blowing visuals in service of some clever albeit empty world-building. Ball’s movie is too simplistic and tight to tease out some of the more complex ideas this franchise has interrogated since its debut in 1968, but he still delivers several thrilling set-pieces, ending the film with an especially intriguing set-up for future ape adventures. And like those other box-office smashes of 2024, the Apes franchise has seen its fair share of memes as well.
What I admire most about Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is that it takes itself seriously, as did Challengers and Dune: Part Two before it. It is no coincidence to me that the movies who take themselves seriously ultimately earn the meme treatment. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, to meme a film is not to diminish it, but rather cement its cultural status. A film like The Fall Guy, which attempts to do all the joking and moralizing for us, gets no such treatment. It leaves our collective consciousness as soon as we leave the theater. But when a movie is respectful of us and our time, we will return the favor by extending its lifecycle online.
The trouble is that more and more films are aspiring to be like The Fall Guy, opting for ironic detachment over sincere engagement. Somewhere in between those two poles sits a show like ‘The Pink Opaque,’ the fictional show-within-a-movie from Jane Schoenbrun’s incredible new film I Saw The TV Glow. The show is a riff on the soapy teen dramas of the late 90s and early aughts, a kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by way of Twin Peaks. Like its real-world influences, ‘The Pink Opaque’ maintains a campy quality that resonates with any young viewer who might feel “different” from those around them. The show becomes a relational touchstone for protagonists Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine), a language only they can speak. Maddy lovingly lectures Owen with her copy of the show’s episode guide, and even tapes and annotates episodes for them after Owen’s father (Fred Durst) forbids them from watching that “show for girls.”
Today, our shared consumption of Kingdom of the Planet of Apes, Challengers, or a solar eclipse is mediated across the internet. The communal bonds we forge are digital, more ethereal in nature. In some ways, the relationship between Owen and Maddy feels most similar to the kind that relative strangers enter via chat forums and subreddits, not unlike the central relationship in Schoenbrun’s previous project We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Even if the internet is absent from I Saw The TV Glow, its specter still looms. Both of Schoenbrun’s films have now given voice to that youthful feeling wherein the abstract or fictional can feel more real than reality itself.
Of course, as a non-binary filmmaker, Schoenbrun is tapping into a particularly powerful experience. The stakes of the relationships formed become higher, maybe even life-or-death.
How does a cheesy TV show about teenage girls with psychic powers provide Owen with a stronger sense of their gender identity? Does it matter how? Should it? Is Owen safer in the fiction of ‘The Pink Opaque’ than in the suburban malaise of New Jersey, circa 1996? The utter terror of I Saw The TV Glow’s finale would certainly indicate as such.
We may have some indication of what can become a shared sensation — a total solar eclipse, if you will — but we cannot always predict that which will provide meaning in our individual lives. For as much as I dedicate this newsletter to film and TV, those may not be the mediums fulfilling most of us these days. I was never much of a YouTube kid, and I somehow still do not have a TikTok. But, at least among a certain generation, these channels come closer to forming a unified sense of identity, often through their ability to help form an individual one.
I was struck by Netflix’s live show Everybody’s in LA with John Mulaney from earlier this month (never mind the efficacy of any live program amidst our ever-fractured media landscape.) The show was pure chaos — maybe even bad at times — yet consistently entertaining due in large part to its liveness. The show, like most live TV, welcomed viewers into a shared moment. The fact that the show felt like a fever dream only enhanced the excitement of that communal sensation.
But that show is over. ‘The Pink Opaque’ was canceled after five seasons. The next total solar eclipse won’t be visible in the U.S. until 2044. What is left to unite us? Does the answer rest at the cinema? On TikTok or YouTube or Twitch?
Because even as culture’s capabilities wane, that sense of community still matters. After all…
No Letterboxd Review this month. I yapped long enough for one newsletter. As always…
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