Weekend Reads (Jul 8): Indiana Jones, Mid-2023 Recaps, Threads, Disney+
Recommended weekend reading material for July 8, 2023.
Note: If you’re a paying subscriber, then I hope you’re enjoying this month’s playlist, which I sent out last week: it’s a nice, nostalgic (for me, anyway) return to the cornfields of Bushnell, Illinois and the Cornerstone Festival.
Now, on to this week’s links…
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Steven D. Greydanus dives deep into the Indiana Jones franchise — and I mean deep — to compare and contrast their approaches to religion and the supernatural.
Long ago a friend noted that if you watch the 1980s trilogy in internal chronological order, Indy’s supernatural experiences go from polytheism to Judaism to Christianity. Someone else has observed (this insight is not original to me, but I haven’t been able to track down the source) that Indy’s “first,” pagan adventure is the most overtly religious and theologically explicit, while the third, Christian adventure is the fuzziest and most equivocal. Only Temple of Doom features religious rituals enacted by a company of true believers; Raiders features a kind of forensic, reconstructed reenactment of Jewish ritual presided by a curious Gentile in the company of Nazis, while Last Crusade contains no religious ritual at all. In Temple of Doom Indy drank the blood of Kali; the blood of Christ is scarcely mentioned and drunk by no one. Indy invokes Kali by name in Temple of Doom; in Raiders he only tells Marion not to look. In Last Crusade, the closest we get to a statement of faith from one of the good guys is when Indy’s father, Henry Jones Sr. (007 himself, Sean Connery), unexpectedly slaps Indy for profane misuse of the name of Jesus Christ: “That’s for blasphemy!”
Believe it or not, but we’re half-way through 2023. Which means it’s time for some mid-year coverage and reflection. ScreenAnarchy shares their list of the top 10 films of 2023, Decider picks 2023’s best TV shows, Christ and Pop Culture highlights their most popular posts of 2023, The Quietus staff shares their 100(!) favorite albums of 2023, and Polygon picks the year’s best sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Following Elon Musk’s latest actions on Twitter (e.g., rate limits and paywalls), David Pierce laments the impending doom of the social web.
An era of the internet is ending, and we’re watching it happen practically in real time. Twitter has been on a steep and seemingly inexorable decline for, well, years, but especially since Elon Musk bought the company last fall and made a mess of the place. Reddit has spent the last couple of months self-immolating in similar ways, alienating its developers and users and hoping it can survive by sticking its head in the sand until the battle’s over. (I thought for a while that Reddit would eventually be the last good place left, but… nope.) TikTok remains ascendent — and looks ever more likely to be banned in some meaningful way. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform; nobody’s on Facebook anymore.
You could argue, I suppose, that this is just the natural end of a specific part of the internet. We spent the last two decades answering a question — what would happen if you put everyone on the planet into a room and let them all talk to each other? — and now we’re moving onto the next one. It might be better this way. But the way it has all changed, and the speed with which it has happened, has left an everybody-sized hole in the internet. For all these years, we all hung out together on the internet. And now that’s just gone.
And speaking of Twitter, one more competitor entered the fray this week: Threads, from the same folks that brought you some tiny little sites called Facebook and Instagram. Casey Newton interviewed Instagram chief Adam Mosseri concerning Threads’ purpose and goals.
On one hand, the history of Facebook and Instagram offer plenty of reasons why the company might be poorly suited to run Twitter’s successor as well. There’s the litany of failures over the years related to content moderation, of course. And there’s the reality that, should Meta succeed here, it will have expanded into one of the last frontiers of social networking in which it was not already dominant. Generally I want Big Tech to be less consolidated, not more.
On the other, though, the past few months have shown Instagram to be vastly superior at content moderation than Twitter 2.0 is. And Meta ultimately decided to build its Twitter competitor in a decentralized way — setting it up to be interoperable with Mastodon and whatever else might get built in the future on Mastodon. Ultimately, Mosseri told me in an interview today, the company hopes to let you take your audience with you when you leave the new app. That’s a level of freedom the users of Facebook or Instagram — or really any other big social app — have never had.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has posted some random observations of Threads, from the lack of a native iPad app to the platform’s URL structure, and thinks that it has a real chance at long-term success.
Right now, Threads feels very much like a Twitter alpha, and is missing some important features (e.g., a non-algorithmic timeline of just those people you follow, hashtags). If the development team can roll those features out quickly, than Threads could be a viable competitor. But right now, it’s getting by on being the Hot New Thing, which won’t last forever.
Related: Twitter has threatened to sue Meta, claiming that they engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” in order to develop Threads.
AI-generated articles continue making inroads at various online publications. Most recently, io9 — one of the web’s biggest sci-fi/fantasy sites — published an embarrassingly bad Star Wars article, but none of the actual io9 staff are happy about it.
Whitbrook said he sent a statement to G/O Media along with “a lengthy list of corrections.” In part, his statement said, “The article published on io9 today rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters. It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors; in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.”
By all indications, The Flash is going to be a box office bomb. If only, writes Charlie Jane Anders, the filmmakers had learned a lesson from Deadpool.
To my mind, the real problem with The Flash is its reported $200 million budget, which some sources are saying might actually be higher than that. And because a movie needs to make a few times its production budget to break even at the box office (depending on marketing spend and other factors), every dollar you add to the budget raises the bar for a successful box office by a factor of three or four. A lot of movies are costing in the $200 million range lately, which is partly driven by COVID and other factors, but also by the need to have huge VFX sequences.
Which is why I always think about Deadpool, the ginormous hit film that cost a very parsimonious $58 million to make.
I have little interest in most superhero movies these days. After Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019, it felt like the genre had just come to a natural conclusion. Most subsequent MCU titles have done little to build up to anything new. Of course, The Flash is a DC movie, but DC’s movies have always lagged behind the MCU. I like James Gunn — his Guardians of the Galaxy movies are some of my favorite superhero movies — so I hope he can turn things around as the CEO of DC Studios, but I’m not holding my breath.
From the Blog
I wrote about Disney+’s decision to delete the movie Crater from its library less than two months after its release, and what that tells us about the new streaming landscape.
There’s not much we viewers can do in such a situation and filmmakers clearly have no power concerning their titles’ continued availability. Which unfortunately means that it’s up to the studios, and more precisely, their executives. But unless CEOs et al. start seeing themselves as cultural stewards, and not just business people at Wall Street’s beck and call, I doubt things will change any time soon. In the meantime, here’s a piece of advice: If a streaming title like Crater catches your eye, then you should probably watch it as soon as possible. These days, there’s really no telling how much longer it’ll be available before it gets axed for a tax write-off.
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