All posts by Tom Bubul

Deliverance (1972)

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In Deliverance (1972), an asshole with a leather vest takes a guy who doesn’t know himself, a coward, and a good man on a bad canoe trip. The good man dies, the coward is raped, the guy who doesn’t know himself commits murder and is haunted for the rest of his life. The asshole breaks his leg.

This movie is famous for a beautiful scene where the good man and a local teen experience mutual recognition through music. When their song ends, their meeting does too, as the social dynamics of their respective groups rush back in. The teen is played by Billy Redden, whose short wiki page I’m gonna quote twice: 1. “Because Redden could not play a banjo, he wore a special shirt which allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him for the scene, which was shot with carefully chosen camera angles that would conceal the player, whose arms were slipped around Redden’s waist to play the tune.” 2. “In a 2012 documentary about Deliverance, Redden says, ‘I’d like to have all the money I thought I’d make from this movie. I wouldn’t be working at Walmart right now. And I’m struggling really hard to make ends meet.’” Redden saw five hundred bucks for his part. Burt Reynolds, who plays the asshole, died with a net worth of $5 million. All of this is one description of the movie for sure.

The other famous scene depicts a rape, but it’s harder to read. It’s clear that the hunters seek to humiliate the coward and the other guy, who exacerbate the situation, but it’s not clear what the hunters’ intentions are at the outset, or if the situation could have gone some other way. This inscrutability houses the movie’s core pessimism: it’s not a question of whether this bad vacation could have been improved by the friend group upping the decency levels. Violent social ordering between men is just something that exists, and as it plays out, it escalates, and when control is lost, intentions stop mattering. Deliverance is “about” this evil magnetism that’s allowed to drive certain masculine power dynamics, not “about” depraved hillbillies or whatever. If anything, the asshole is the clearest villain here, and of course he experiences the fewest consequences.

The friend group’s camping convos are oriented around a fake-deep proto-“men’s rights” argument, about how “society” functions to curb this inherent and constant impulse to violence, providing safety and material comfort at the cost of denying men the pleasure of “playing the game” of unfettered leather vest masculinity. I found this a little distracting since it’s extremely not how I perceive society’s functions, or how I experience leather vests.

One nice thing is that you can feel the movie’s loving eye for the river, played mainly in endless lush shots of the group paddling thru rapids and getting all wet. There’s a scene where the coward points out a snake swimming along, and plenty of shots of the woods, or of rocks. Everything else aside here, it’s a nice occasion to think abt how much I’d love to go camping with my friends.

Deliverance belongs to a subset of films that work with a concept I’ll refer to as “Dude Law.” A Dude Law movie is one where a fella or group of fellas are put into a situation where they decide societal rules have been put on hold, so now they have to get creative. A cluster of important Dude Law films were released around Deliverance (Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs; all 1971) and it continued for a while with movies generally having a more and more positive view of Dude Law, culminating in Die Hard(1988), possibly the most pro-Dude Law movie ever made. These films are generally made by men about men, and Deliverance is no exception – a pretty pure take on what goes on when you let guys be guys. (There are exceptions from this era, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!(1965) being a shining example.)

Deliverance comes down hard on the “Dude Law is bad” side of the fence. The plot in a nutshell is a group of friends go on a boat ride down the river, get attacked, are egged on by a member of their party to declare Dude Law, enter it, commit unnecessary violence, survive, then realize they’ll forever be marked by what they did. And it’s an unusually nuanced interrogation of this concept. It’s also beautifully shot, has great stunts (accomplished by not getting the film insured, then having the actors do the stunts themselves) and has some pretty good performances.

But the film also goes way out of its way to depict everyone who lives around the river (“outside of society”) as insane, rude, terrifying backwoods mutants. The movie lightly makes the point later that the two attackers were isolated bad actors, but it still heavily lumps all the folks around the river together visually and thematically throughout. This is the movie’s central contradiction: the main characters on the boat are punished for not viewing a group of people as human, but the movie doesn’t treat them as human itself. It creates something of a feedback loop for the audience, where the narrative presents a high-minded argument on humanity, but the images aggressively depict the locals as uncomplicatedly different monsters. Those images are much stronger than the movie’s themes of men negotiating their place in civilization, and in the end that’s what Deliverance leaves you with.

So does Deliverance deserve its place in the Dude Law pantheon? I don’t know. It’s a well-crafted but fundamentally dishonest film. And there are better movies made about a group of guys going down the river in a boat – Aguirre: The Wrath of God was made the same year. What it is though is an extremely pure example of a movie having an argument with itself and then losing. For that, I think it’s worth watching.

Vanity Fair (2004)

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In Vanity Fair (2004), Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, who seems to have trained her whole life to become an expert at all things classy and charming. In quick succession she gets out of her French teaching/culture-making job, marries a soldier, and sets to work climbing the social ladder.  Eventually she makes the grave mistake of performing a Bollywood number, driving Gabriel Byrne so wild with passion that he tries to rape her, which her husband witnesses. Then he initiates a divorce and dies offscreen in India. “The colonization of India” itself is a backdrop the film delicately comments on by inserting prodigious tabla playing whenever someone mentions “India.” (A comment on this below.) Some other stuff happens but I found it hard to pin down exactly what. Vanity Fair strikes me as a movie made by someone entirely too familiar with the source material, hitting all the big beats but missing the logistical portions needed to make it comprehensible.

Almost everyone in the film is part of an undifferentiated costumed blob, so I devised a visual shorthand to help distinguish characters, using sideburn style or “being Bob Hoskins” for the men, and age or “are they Reese Witherspoon” for the women. This imperfect system caused some issues, such as in a scene where a corpse was shown with sideburns obscured.  The corpse turned out to be an important character, which I found out because someone in the movie mentioned the death later. I felt that the film frequently either killed or married an important character offscreen, then later had a character talk about it. Too polite and well-mannered to show what actually happens in the story? Relaying important plot points through subtle social cues and gossip? These methods destroy Becky for twelve years, after which she’s whisked off to India (tabla sounds!), and they destroy the movie for probably forever.

Although overall Vanity Fair is confusing and bad, there are some nice things. There’s a good scene where some guy goes to India, gets dusty and hunky, and becomes a martial arts badass; this development is never referred to again. There’s also a long sequence where Becky refuses to sell someone a horse, then trades someone else the horse for a ride in a carriage, then refuses the carriage ride. Everyone talks in a pseudo accent (from my notes: “British Accent?”). There’s also a part where not-with-child Becky becomes eight-months-pregnant Becky right in the middle of a scene (possible causes of swift pregnancy: ballroom dancing; note she placed in bodice; war breaking out with the Dutch).     

With its commitments to razzle dazzle and fast and loose storytelling it can sometimes feel as though Vanity Fair was striving to become a Transformers for the powdered wig crowd.  Although it does have plenty of “robots with lips” moments, it lacks the wit, social graces, and Machiavellian maneuvering it takes to become a truly unstoppable Victorian franchise. Perhaps it’ll be worth watching once Hollywood is done with superheroes and moves on to a period pieces phase – if only to prepare for the sequel “BECKY SHARP V. MARIE ANTOINETTE.” Until then I would urge period piece fans and innocent bystanders alike to steer clear.

I wanted to watch this because it’s a Thackeray adaptation with a Julian Fellowes screenplay; Fellowes wrote Gosford Park (2001) & Downton Abbey (2010-2015), and other Thackeray adaptations I like include Barry Lyndon (1975), so I thought this might be a valid double feature with the new Yorgos Lanthimos period piece, The Favourite (2018). (I swear not every post is gonna be abt Barry Lyndon.) But compared to Gosford Park (which rules) or The Favourite (which I liked a lot), Vanity Fair feels small.

There’s no denying the architecture, but Reese Witherspoon’sstyling and much of the overall production design looks plastic, even kinda 90s. Except in brief establishing shots there’re hardly any expansive views of anything or moments without speech; most scenes are dialogue presented in cuts between talking heads, shot head-on above the waist. Crowd scenes focus on one character, while unleashed extras scamper in the background with “unintelligible crowd shouting” copiously overdubbed. Scenes with any blocking or any physicality to them at all are awkward; in one, James Purefoy even “lounges on a settee” in a way that manages to make it look like he hasn’t figured out what “sitting down” should properly consist of.

I realized the “period movies” journey Barry Lyndon sent me on has been the wrong pursuit; what I’m looking for is another movie world that’s at least that lush, not just another good movie set in the 19th century. Still, it’s confounding that the extraordinarily beautiful $11M budget 1975 movie could somehow set a standard for lushness in the “period movie” genre that a $23M budget 2004 movie could fall so miserably short of. Were the lessons on costume, cinematography, and especially lighting somehow not totally apparent? Are they that hard to follow? Okay maybe but isn’t it at all compelling to… try?

My problem here isn’t that Reese Witherspoon’s never sweaty or that her dresses look like they were made in 2003 for the movie, but that her world fails to present as a living thing wriggling beyond the frame. The frame itself rarely shows more than a talking torso, and even some entire story locations – e.g. the best friend’s poverty farmhouse, or James Purefoy’s landing in “the tropics” – are visually left downright vague. The whole thing feels like looking at a painting with an overworked middle where the painter clearly didn’t bother considering the edges.

We saw the Delacroix show at the Met the other week; pretty cool that a productive person can keep busy enough to make a lush beguiling world of work that can survive ~200 years and the trip to NYC. Zoom in on the Faust drawings; sick at the from-the-hand drawing level. Zoom out on I dunno, “the Battle of Nancy”; sick at the room-swallowing macro level too. Pretty cool that art history continued its trek to present day NYC as well. Back in the studio, the feeling isn’t that Delacroix killed ultra-dynamic representational painting so completely that Instagram-era painters should chill and stick to making half-baked paintings of the Photoshop interface or whatever, because “that’s all that’s left.” It’s the opposite: The feeling is of the insane challenge to synthesize inspiring things, learning from and advancing them. When I see stuff that’s not interested in this challenge/conversation in whatever format, such as here, I briefly wonder what drove its authorship at all, right before I stop thinking abt it entirely.

Ready Player One (2018)

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Okay, “welcome back,” this was Davey’s pick so I’m up first here:

Ready Player One is a dark fantasy movie depicting a mid-21st century future where 20th century baby-boomer-authored mainstream American pop media fails to wane in relevance. Where this body of media once had a flame mainly tended by Gen X nerds, whose isolationist, elitist identity congealed at the meeting points of nostalgia, consumption, bitterness, and trivia in the 1990s, in RP1’s year ~2050, this media is now worshipped by all young people and ruthlessly referenced in words, gestures, winks, and callbacks. Furthermore, this nerd consumer elitist identity is now a kind of skillset.

In a 2005 Angels of Light song the Swans guy sings “let the wind wear away / the words cut in the stone” and boy do I identify with that. I love the idea that there’s gonna be a future generation that truly is just not going to give a fuck about Star Wars, and that sometime after that, that there’s gonna be a generation who has no idea who Harrison Ford is. That time keeps passing, that stuff has its time, and that stuff is doomed to shrink to infinitesimal size en route to eventually disappearing completely is, in my opinion, unequivocally good. This movie depicts a nightmare where this process somehow stops, frozen in time at Ferris Bueller references. Not that Star Wars or Ferris Bueller are “bad” (both are fine), but the notion that either represent “peaks” and not “starting points” is deeply cursed.

At the edges of this movie are threads about the global economic/daily life repercussions of everyone living in an always-online pleasure matrix, but the movie doesn’t get too far into it. When Scott Pilgrim or whoever takes over the matrix in the end, he turns it off for two days a week, because “everyone needs to spend a little more time offline,” and then it shows him kissing his girlfriend, like, welp, that’s all that follows from that decision. I’d watch a movie set in 2020 that explores just this: what if a single individual controlled every internet service provider on earth, and decided that it’d be better for the world if there was no internet for anyone on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

It’s funny to think abt Spielberg making a movie in 2018 that in a large way is a fantasy “about” how his era of classics are gonna just keep being relevant endlessly into the future, and within that, to include a part where they go inside The Shining (1980). That Spielberg’s weird ode to himself includes a lengthy side-ode to Kubrick felt strangely elegiac, giving the sense that Spielberg in his “I’m never going to disappear” movie is also acknowledging “and yet I was never the greatest.” It seems possible to read RP1 as being “about” the relationship between these two directors, where Simon Pegg is Spielberg and Mark Rylance is Kubrick, but tbh I don’t really care about this beyond kind of wanting to rewatch AI (2001). I also kept thinking abt how sick it would be if they went inside Barry Lyndon (1975) instead of The Shining, and stood like MST3K characters in front of that movie’s epilogue screen.

I coincidentally watched Paul (2011) last week, a wooden movie that’s also about Gen X-flavor nerds as heroes, is also with Simon Pegg, and also explicitly addresses the continuing relevance/legacy of Spielberg, and the utility of pop culture references as a meta-language for producing further pop culture media. At best, some people use samples like this to create a black hole energy that collapses into a whole new thing; that’s postmodernism/hyperreality for ya. But at worst, as in these movies, the references are just like a dvd collection at some uncle’s house – stacks of recognizable things taking up space.

Ready Player One is about a multiplayer virtual reality game called the Oasis that’s so good and the world outside so shitty that everyone plays it constantly. After dying, the creator sets up a contest where the winner will get control of the Oasis and a bunch of bucks. The contest is played by doing deep dives into the creator’s favorite pop culture and looking for clues. A kid (Wade Watts, the kind of character whose name you need to look up the next day) solves the first clue after five years by “going left”, a game design idea that was groundbreaking when Metroid did it in 1986 but didn’t really strike me as something that would take the world’s collective gamers five years to figure out. This kicks off a race to win the contest, with Wade and his plucky crew on one side and a giant corporation run by an evil CEO on the other. The corporation plans to blanket the game world with ads if they win the contest. Wade wants to keep it exactly as it is, a monopoly on all entertainment that has been shown to be so addictive as to bankrupt people and drive them to suicide. The moral stakes of this situation struck me as more of a Spotify or Apple Music kind of problem than an end of the world kind of problem, but I thought it was best to just go with it.

The film’s world has a ton of pop culture references but no evidence of any new pop culture created after 2018, possibly because the advent of the game has completely arrested the adoption of any new characters or stories, since the game’s world is fixed on the pre-2018 tastes of a dead old white man. Maybe Ready Player 2 will be about the people creating the art that was being ignored while everyone else was hunting for pop culture clues? Could be good!

This seemed like a weird movie for Spielberg to make, though I have a theory as to why he did. He created the blockbuster, then spent decades making money, but he hasn’t had a genuine hit in a while. He’s a great filmmaker still doing great work (check out Bridge of Spies (2015) (also with Mark Rylance – TB) it rocks), but what people on the business side are convinced people want to see is recognizable IP. So Spielberg decides his next movie will be about a world where the only thing that matters is knowing your IP, and if you know it, you become rich and powerful.

There’s one part of the movie I thought was actually captivating – when the characters go into an interactive version of The Shining (1980). Great movie, box office bomb, and one that most of the extremely pop-savvy characters in the movie declare themselves to be unfamiliar with. The amount of craft and care put into replicating scenes from the movie is mind boggling, far surpassing any other part of the movie; the whiplash from these to the climactic VR war that follows is insane. Meticulous reproductions of shots in the Overlook followed closely by a dark messy looking CGI battle intercut with shots of people wearing VR goggles flailing in the streets, followed by an Iron Giant/Terminator 2 death scene mash up, followed by Mechagodzilla fighting a Gundam… all things that feel like the opposite of The Shining. So I thought, maybe RP1 is a self-contained critique of what passes for blockbusters in the modern age, all references and noise, made for the suits by someone who knows better but wanted to prove the point. That, or it’s just a normal bad vapid movie? It’s a mystery I fear may never be solved.

Okja (2017)

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This movie is about a girl, Mija, who loves a giant genetically-modified food-pig (named Okja). The super-pig gets taken to NYC (from Korea), and Mija goes there to bring it back. She keeps chasing the pig and getting hurt in extreme ways, but she never gives up. Eventually she buys the pig back and they go home; that’s the movie.

The movie’s evil-agribusiness-mega-corp antagonist, who made/own the pig, is a thin Monsanto parody, fronted by Tilda, again here in the role of competing twins. The twins (in one scene with matching colored cigarettes that they each take one drag of, then throw away) care to use the girl for company image purposes, and to kill the pig for meat, respectively. Paul Dano plays a mod ALF cell leader, with the conversational affect of a startup CEO ripping a TED talk; he wants the girl to know that it’s his noble mission to save the pig (en route to “exposing” the evils of agribusiness GMO meat murder). Jake Gyllenhaal plays the current ad man for Monsanto; he wants the girl to know he wants to keep his job.

None of these other characters, their henchmen, or their plots matter or even intersect much. The feeling to me was that Tilda, Gyllenhaal, and Dano were grafted onto this movie from three other entirely different movies; incredibly, this also seemed intentional, and I found it effective. This side stuff gives the movie an irl feeling I rarely feel in movies: That big forces are moving around visibly and contiguously to what you’re working on, and they all have their own plots, main characters, and aesthetics, and they ultimately have nothing to do with and don’t care about you. I’m comfortable giving Bong (writer/director) the props and credit here: This quality of “the personal” (“give me back my pig”) occurring within the broader frame of the “monumental” (“evil agribusiness food nightmare”) feels characteristic of his writing, and I think it’s part of what makes his good movies good.

The ethical issues (and what the movie calls “paranoia”) around GMO foods and global food justice/sustainability are less in the movie’s focus than the somewhat more direct problems around killing and eating an animal, but they’re here. Is Monsanto providing a Nobel Prize-level service by creating a sustainable meat source? Or are they perpetrating an atrocity, by executing what the movie shows to be intelligent beings for food? This Q is unresolved – it’s a movie about a girl who wants her pig back, and that’s it.

I don’t really like hero-narratives where a determined child shows up to smash an “evil corporate”-form primarily via their individual tactical wiliness and athleticism (cf. The Hunger Games, Star Wars kinda except Rogue One (2016), etc.), and though Mija is wily and athletic, I love that that’s not what this movie is. Those kinds of stories aren’t useful for understanding (or even visualizing) modern individual powerlessness, or individual complicity within the “evil corporate”-forms of our time – they’re always abt people responsibly destroying those forms from outside of them. That option doesn’t really exist irl, where change is rarely cataclysmically realized, and individual contributions are typically anonymous.

I loved seeing individual irl-like powerlessness and smallness presented in a non-ironic and non-frustrated way here. Mija gets her pig back, literally just by interacting directly with the terms of its capture (i.e., by buying it for a fair price): Great. The girl can’t do anything (and maybe doesn’t even care) about the corporate meat farm’s hellscape slaughter yard, but anyway she gets what she wants, so she’s free to move on: Hmm, that’s sorta like me.

I eat meat, and while I understand the vectors on which that’s fucked, I don’t believe the responsibility for what I eat can reasonably be said to lie with me, or that to the extent to which it may, that my share of that responsibility “matters”; whatever chicken is already dead and it’s Tuesday and I have to eat. (But conversely, I feel that individual shares of responsibility do matter within supply chains when there are valid alternatives, and spending itself is the important act, rather than directly consuming; not using Amazon is the obvious instance.) Anyway, similarly here, it’s not Mija’s job to end the execution of intelligent super-pigs generally (and as the movie makes clear, it’s not Paul Dano’s job either): It’s Monsanto’s. I like that the movie is unblinking about the fact that Monsanto doesn’t care about this ethical problem at all, and is basically impervious to the ALF’s attacks.

(“So what does that mean?” you might ask, “Are you saying that if I vote, and call my senators, it’s still nowhere near enough, and that I would need to radically give over my life to some cause, or like run for office or something, in order to individually make a real impact, OR I’d have to somehow come to terms with my own individual powerlessness, and fundamental interchangeability with other people, as a person who basically lives a comfortable life, buttressed by complicity with the multifarious self-serving violences of capitalism?”

I’ll leave that one open! But I will say that googling, I saw at least one inevitable article like “my partner is vegan after watching okja,” which I def didn’t read, but to which I’d suggest that the partner not only missed the point, but (willy wonka meme vox) tell me again about how your inconsistent reactionary uncoordinated-private-individual-opting-out matters? Further riff here about Amazon buying Whole Foods in another movie review maybe, but uhhh, where was I here? …) (I feel that I’m making the point in this aside very poorly, but I’m gonna leave this original text and the paragraph above intact. What I think I was trying to say is that that 1. consumer lifestyle decisions shouldn’t be confused with activism, 2. that individual low-power acts (e.g. calling senators) are fundamentally impersonal and interchangeable, with a value that’s truly present only in the aggregate, not in the individual contribution, and 3. that self-righteousness is corny. – TB 12/2018)

From my view Tilda is wrong to say that people don’t care abt GMOs if the food is cheap & convenient enough; the food being cheap & convenient might just matter more in her consumer case. It seems important to try to establish for oneself where this rationale breaks down, and to try to push back in cases where it seems like common understanding or behavior could actually be shifted. (Sorry but) Imagine a “what a cast” Netflix movie that like, critiques the ethics of a vampiric convenience service like Seamless, or the community-resources-waste of something like Kickstarter.

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– Here’s a video I like of an automated lamb deboning room in a slaughterhouse (it’s “graphic” but imo no more so than preparing a chicken); see especially the robot arm at like 1:30. Not sure why the slaughterhouse in the movie looked like something outta like, Saw.

– Okja contains a reminder of the scene in Permanent Midnight (1998) where Zoolander smokes crack (to Prodigy) and jumps against the plate glass window

– Other pig movies that spring to mind are Babe/Babe Pig In City, Charlotte’s Weeb, Gordy, Willow (see feature image; “You’re……. pigs!“), Beast of Southern Wild

– I watched this movie because The Host (2006) rules, and because Jeff told me to check it out. Thanks Jeff!

– Bela sent me a snippet from the Evgenia Markon Yaroslavskaya memoir she’s translating from the Russian… this contextless snippet feels relevant: “even in self-sacrifice, a person is still doing it for themselves, and feels satisfied with the knowledge of their own heroism”

The Martian (2015)

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In The Martian, Matt Damon gets stuck on Mars and says, “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

His mission’s captain is a white woman. Also on the ship are a Mexican-American man, a German man (played by a Nordic man), and a white man and white woman (who are in love). A white man runs NASA, but is afraid to take risks. A Chinese-American man runs the tech (and is hooked up with the Chinese guys running the tech in China), while an African-American man runs the mission. Another young genius African-American man figures out the math. Kristen Wiig is present and at one point sorta tells a joke.

This movie was upbeat but serious (dealing with loneliness and difficulty without really going off the deep end into being a “brutal” or “difficult” movie), deeply procedural and easy to follow but still dramatic (because plenty of things go wrong), clear in its very simple stakes (Matt Damon might die), properly epic about interplanetary travel (it takes a super long time to get anywhere, and if you spend that time, you’re not on earth with your aging family; space logistics are mindboggling; Mars is empty but being a human not-on-Earth is mega dangerous), was filled with great images (dir. Ridley Scott), and never got too stressful (cf. Gravity (2013)).

A couple things though: Cameras in Matt Damon’s space station are recording his mission. He speaks to them throughout the movie, though the fate of the recordings is never known, so it’s pretty much just a trick to allow for direct-address. Well, okay, that’s narrative convenience, but compare with the mostly silent, way-more-lonely Robert Redford boat-survival movie, All is Lost (2013). Imagine Redford looking you in the eye in the beginning of the movie and saying, “I’m gonna have to boatsman the shit out of this.” Damon’s situation, despite being bleak, is still basically cozy.

And second, for a big budget movie so apparently sensitive to diversity in casting, it’s funny that The Martian still winds up with an imperious white dude who, as the movie’s lead, gets to tell the camera that it was he who “colonized” Mars by being the first to grow food in its native soil, was the first human to be alone on a planet, and who is, technically, also a space pirate. He also repeatedly complains that the only music available on the Mars outpost’s iPod is disco.

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when I showed these thoughts abt the martian to davey he replied:

Nice, ya I think you get to what my main problem with what this movie was as well, the kind of twin factors of “who do we want to be saved” (a thing I think about a lot in the context of these movies was, in casting Apollo 13, Ron Howard said that they cast Tom Hanks not based on his believability as an astronaut, but because he was the person that culture most wanted to get back to earth) and the implicit idea that, again, we want Damon saved (I guess I’m tired of having feelings on the matter being taken for granted)… plus his transformation into colonist is also troubling, like that’s what we want saved? Seems regressive.

And there’s something about the measured reasonable engineer-like approach to seemingly unsurmountable problems that strikes me as kind of un-American. Like in the Martian he figures out what his needs are, the amount of time he has to meet them, and then sets out on a schedule (which put this way makes the Martian seem like a movie about working at an office)

In juxtaposition, in Die Hard, John McClane is faced with unsurmountable odds, and spends the next two hours climbing around in places he shouldn’t, dropping explosives willy-nilly down elevator chutes, and running across broken glass. Although theres a part of me that’s happy that Martian is trying to point us in this way, the fact that all-out insanity is not deemed “a way out” anymore [in fiction] is troubling to me on another level.