What would we really lose without that kind of longevity, without meaningful movie stardom? Mirror? Lighthouse? road map? Gate? This is not a question of discovering who we want to be but of allowing movies to show us who we believe we are. Stars didn’t always have to play superheroes. They used this power to play us – people. Now, there could be some kind of justice in that force coming to an end. The misfortune of a regime that imported the worst principles and prejudices in this country into its dream factory. Capitalism rampage. An improbable whiteness, an indefensible blackness. Few of the Asian, Mexican, Arab, or Native American characters anyone has ever met, because, for starters, the actors who played those parts were often white. Our prolonged exposure allowed the stars to embed their glamor, style, and managed perfection within our psyche, to form the kind of distorted identification that invites, say, a curious black boy in Philadelphia to imagine himself an unbearably southern beauty on a wrecked Georgia plantation.
Which is to say, I can figure all this out and still think that a half century of Clint Eastwood films (dozens of them) is as good an interpretation of the United States as any piece of public policy. It is his own legislation. Of course, a young man watching Sudden Impact, Pink Cadillac, or A Perfect World wouldn’t have known any of that. I would find his mere quarry absurdly watchable. And if what we’re also talking about is absurd spectator energy, perhaps it migrates through time, from the silent era to the classic order of the 1930s and 40s, to the indulgent ruin of the 70s and 80s. Retro, ’90s revisionism. For now, it’s thriving elsewhere entirely. On TikTok, a galaxy of starlings. Social media stardom continues to wane. You need to be interested in movie stardom. We may have run out of patience with that.
I’d say bad timing, because for over a decade, we’ve been inundated with actors who could repay that attention, actors who, over the course of their heartfelt careers, could also serve as a good interpretation of this niche as Eastwood. Consider this drought in a moment that has never felt richer with hands lacking clubs: Teller, Alden Ehrenreich, Simo Liu, Issa Rae, Finn Wittrock, Hong Zhao, Dan DeHaan, Zoe Kravitz, Raoul Castillo, Jay Ellis, Kumail Nanjiani, Tye Sheridan, Dave Bautista, Reggie Jean Page, Alia Shawkat, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Max Minghella, Rachel Ziegler, Jake Lacey, Daisy Ridley, Kelvin Harrison Jr., O’Shea Jackson Jr., Tiffany Haddish, Quinzani Wallis, Marcie Martin, Jeremy Pope, John Boyega, Ariana DeBose, Teona Paris, Nicholas Hoult, Gina Rodriguez, Christopher Abbott, Jonathan Groff. Movies aren’t set to keep them stars in 30 years. For more than one of these names, the movie star ship has sailed.
This really amounts to a crisis. And the movies know that. In “Maverick,” the comedy is about no one being as qualified as Cruise. For two weeks in August, our first movie was “Express train“,” A sporadically funny, mostly boring, crime-thriller that requires Brad Pitt to battle young prospects – Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, bad bunny Most of them were killed accidentally. They want what he has: a briefcase full of money, but also his prestige. Pitt’s stress-free, uncompromising style took him 30 years and almost as many films to achieve a comfort with himself that could reconcile wisdom with a vacancy. All hand-to-hand fighting gets in the way of Pete’s self-preservation.
The star knows how to have a good time with a movie disposable, by making work feel like a vacation. Disposable films are the work of a star. It helps solidify their position in between actual rounds (sometimes a power round is something that can be thrown away). But they tend to hold up, anyway, because they’ve captured some of the sexy, charismatic, and ambitious aspects of the person at its center. Without any average, non-superhero films — Starships, they were called — we’re facing the annihilation of existence as an art form, the death of metaphors, tics and signatures; laughs, strutting, accents and phrase turns; Gallery of light bulbs hanging from the head of an actor.
