Can decline be reversed? Can decadence be resisted? These questions hang over Joe Biden's America, land of US$5 a gallon gas, looming recession, impending electrical grid failures, 1970s-style urban crisis — not to mention a summer movie slate led by the umpteenth Jurassic Park sequel and Lightyear, a pathetic Disney cash grab based on fictional pop culture from inside a 1995 Pixar movie.
But for once I come to praise contemporary Hollywood, not to bury it. It's been almost three months since a dispiriting Oscar season seemed to distil the collapse of The Movies, capital T, capital M, as the essential American art form. And in that span, as depressing as it's been for American society in almost every respect, we have been graced with two glimpses of the movies as they once were, and might one day be again — two visions of pop cultural renaissance, for our age of gilt and rust and CGI.
The two movies are in certain ways quite different. One is an auteur's vision, alienating and challenging, ruthless and distinctive and intensely weird. The other looks, from a distance, like its own version of blockbuster decadence, pillaging one of the last unplundered properties of boomerdom.
But in fact they are spiritually and artistically akin: two dramas of masculinity and heroism, shot through with powerful — and different — moral and metaphysical worldviews. And each is a technical spectacle, a visual and aural immersion, that justifies the big screen and communal moviegoing experience against its privatised and miniaturised successor.
The movies are The Northman and Top Gun: Maverick. The first is the work of Robert Eggers, a filmmaker dedicated to portraying the past as people in the past might have imagined it. In this case, he has tried to make the kind of Viking movie that an actual Viking might have made.