‘75 / ‘25 is a bi-monthly series whose goal is to analyse some of 1975’s great films in the context of the world in which they were birthed, and seek to find analogues within the 2025 slate of films in an effort to compare and contrast our current moment to fifty years ago.
Warning: This article contains spoilers.
Despite the central conceit of this article series, using movies to read into the current socio-political moment can often be a fool’s errand. The movies of 1975 are, on the whole, chiefly concerned with the issues of the five to ten years previous, as has been the standard since filmmaking began. It is highly improbable that a piece of art can perfectly speak to its exact moment when it has taken years to complete. And yet, the movies of May and June 2025 are starting to feel startlingly and uncomfortably prescient to our time.
At time of writing, a little over thirty-six hours ago, the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, plunging the Middle East region into turmoil unseen since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. This comes just over one week after Israel conducted illegal pre-emptive strikes on Iran, claiming that it was a defensive measure against Iranian nuclear armament, and temporarily shifting focus away from the ongoing genocide in Gaza where nearly five hundred people have been murdered while seeking critical aid at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. In spite of this obviously dangerous escalation and warmongering by the United States and Israel, world leaders have been quick to defend the actions of both – UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and EU President Ursula von der Leyden have been among the cheerleaders of the attacks on Iran. For normal, everyday people who oppose war and indiscriminate slaughter, it is increasingly feeling that we are in a film whose third act is rushing to a conclusion.
Into this mix, we have seen films like Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which is concerned with nuclear annihilation, and 28 Years Later, which deals with a post-apocalyptic event driven by a ‘rage’ virus. Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme tracks the moral compass of a billionaire and his actions in a Middle East-adjacent nation, while F1: The Movie is an tale of good, old-fashioned exceptionalism where an American comes to a foreign country, dominates in a field he has no experience in and teaches everyone a valuable lesson. Movies, it would seem, have finally caught up with the culture, albeit in a rather unfortunate and unsettling way.
One of the films mentioned in the first article in this series, Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, was noted by some reviewers as being a little too ‘of-the-moment’ in its depiction of a demagogue colonising and waging war on the inhabitants of an alien planet when it was released in March. Reviewers argued that if it had come out in 2021 as it was originally intended, its premise would have been more effective on audiences in semi-accurately predicting the tone and aggression of Trump Term 2. By March, Trump and Elon Musk were already engaged in stoking hostilities in Gaza and Iran, causing worldwide trade wars and rolling back the rights and protections of every U.S. citizen who isn’t straight, cisgender, white and wealthy. Now, only three months after its release, I think most would say that Bong was far more tapped into American politics than we gave him credit for.
Thankfully, there is much more to dig into in these movies than their tentative links to the latest act of 21st century American imperialism.
Welcome to The Final Reckoning.
Mirror (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) / Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
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Art is a powerful tool in the pursuit of memorialising a person. From finger paintings on the walls of caves to AI-generated books, one of the primary functions of art has always been to distill the infinitude of choices, emotions and consequences of a life into a cohesive story that resonates with others. While early cinema focused mostly on the lives of well-known historical figures, creatives quickly discovered that the medium could be a vehicle to tell their own story. In cinema history, the autobiographical film has often produced mixed results, veering from hagiography to narcissism to some of the most celebrated films of all time.
There are perhaps no two more diametrically-opposed films that I will compare across this article series than Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Christopher McQuarrie’s (read: Tom Cruise’s) Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Mirror is a highly experimental and aggressively dense reflection of a man’s life told through dream sequences, multiple timelines, actors playing dual roles and a distinct sense of regret and malaise. Final Reckoning is the culmination of a highly successful action franchise that prioritises spectacle, is highly expository and (until recently) has been composed solely of plotting that is upbeat and fun even in the face of total annihilation. In a sense, the existence of movies like the Mission: Impossible films originates from a conscious rejection of the notion of films as art first and entertainment second. Unlike Mirror, which questions and prods at its audience’s conscience and worldview, the Mission: Impossible films are intended to activate more base emotions, and they do so very successfully. This is not a criticism of the franchise, but a recognition that, on the surface, both the form and function of these two films could not be more different.
In an interview, Andrei Tarkovsky said of Alexei, the ostensible main character of Mirror, “[he] was a weak, selfish man incapable of loving even those dearest to him for their sake alone, looking for nothing in return—he is only justified by the torment of soul which assails him towards the end of his days as he realizes that he has no means of repaying the debt he owes to life.” The throughline narrative is obfuscated and intercut with newsreels and poetry, but we are given to understand that Alexei (a proxy for the director himself) is on his deathbed looking back on his life with regret, and feels wholly unequipped to atone for his failures before his imminent passing.
Final Reckoning deals with the concept of regret in an interesting manner. The film spends a large amount of its first hour in retrospective mode, with other characters casting a light on the past of Ethan Hunt, something that was largely ignored in the first six films and has been brought into sharp focus in the final two films of the series. Hunt’s allies and enemies alike chastise him for his choices, mainly his persistent recklessness and headstrong refusal to accept chains of command. As has happened in previous films of the franchise, they posit the idea that Hunt is imagining and even inventing the dangers he works so hard to extinguish in order to fulfill his need to be a hero. Only his inner circle provides him validation, with Luther saying things like, “Our lives are not defined by one action. Our lives are the sum of our choices,” before affirming that every choice Ethan has ever made has been for the good. Despite this group of friends being made up exclusively of his co-workers, their reassurance is enough for Ethan to bypass his regrets and grab hold of destiny with both hands.
We also, of course, cannot help but see this as a proxy for Cruise’s own life and choices. As the series has progressed, the line between lead actor and main character has blurred significantly and we can thus read validation of Ethan’s choices as quasi-validation of Cruise’s own life choices. It is clear that, like Tarkovsky, he holds a certain amount of regret that he only feels comfortable expressing through the lens of Ethan, but unlike Tarkovsky, he is not willing to allow the regret to hang over him or define him. Ethan is constantly being reassured, Alexei experiences almost no reassurance.
The relative outlook of the two characters speaks to their recollections of their lives also. Towards the end of Mirror, the dying Alexei sums up the appeal of nostalgia (“everything will still be possible”), which makes his inability to look back with anything but sadness all the more embittering. On the other hand, Ethan emerges from another fight for the fate of the world intact and safe in the knowledge that he has once again eliminated any need for regrets; he doesn’t need to live in the past when he is consistently achieving the impossible in the present. These outlooks become even more poignant when ascribed to the artists themselves. Tarkovsky died of cancer at the age of just fifty-four. In his final diary entry, he wrote, “But now I have no strength left—that is the problem”. Cruise, meanwhile, is approaching his sixty-third birthday, and is still making movies where he performs obscenely dangerous stunts, seemingly thumbing his nose at death.
Though they were born thirty years apart, and lived vastly different lives, both as men and as artists, legacy is at the heart of both men’s work in these movies. Alexei is terrified that his life has left behind a trail of destruction, perpetuating the harm he himself experienced in his early life, and consumed by the thought that he can never make it right. Tarkovsky, as can be seen in his earlier quote about the film, clearly thinks these regrets are justified. Ethan has sacrificed any modicum of concern for the personal or the familial. His true concern is bringing goodness and peace to the wider world, a concern so outsized and grandiose that Hunt is perhaps the only non-superhero film character who could get away with it seriously. Whether this can be viewed as Cruise’s own assessment of his legacy as an artist, we can only speculate. But I will say that there are few people in cinema history who could read the line “I need you to trust me. One. Last. Time.” and have it carry so much weight.
Tom Cruise has now played Ethan Hunt in more films than Andrei Tarkovsky ever made in his lifetime. Their singular vision of themselves as artists, both in positive and negative lights, defines them. Mirror led to Tarkovsky backing his prioritising of films centred around philosophical ideals over straightforward narrative; his next film Stalker is arguably even more nebulous and difficult to parse. Until 2015, one could argue that Cruise viewed Mission: Impossible films as reliable earners moreso than meaningful artistic pursuits. As he has aged into the death-defying President of Cinema, he has clearly channeled every ounce of his desire for acceptance into the Cinema Hall of Fame into this franchise. Tarkovsky’s fear of regret led to some of the most challenging intellectual films of the 20th century. Where Cruise’s will take him from here (with Ethan or without him) remains to be seen.
Barry Lyndon (dir. Stanley Kubrick) / The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson)
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Swedish pop group ABBA released their hit single “Money, Money, Money” in October 1976. The song is a lament by a hard-working woman, trying desperately to keep her head above water financially, while decrying how much nicer it is in a “rich man’s world.” Its timelessness goes beyond the catchy dance-hall piano hook; the situation in which the singer finds herself, barely scraping by and imagining a life shielded by the comfort of wealth, was no less unusual in 1976 than it was the year previous in 1975, or fifty years previous in 1925, or, indeed, fifty years later in 2025. Poverty is a defining feature of the last three centuries. The divide between rich and poor (or ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ if one prefers) long predates ABBA’s chart-topping banger.
Attitudes towards the rich have hardened since then. In 1975, the world was still a decade removed from deregulation, Thatcherism, Reaganomics and the widening poverty gap. There were so few billionaires that the concept was almost beyond comprehension for many, and the majority of the super-rich shunned public life. Today, there are nearly 4,000 billionaires worldwide and it seems that they are constantly being shoved into our faces by the media (most of the apparatus of which they themselves own). This reality, combined with the ever-increasing gap between the richest and poorest – $79 trillion in wealth has transferred from the bottom 90% of earners to the top 1% since 1975 – has led to growing anti-rich sentiment (‘Eat the Rich’) among the general populace in 2025, something that was usually confined to hardline leftist groups fifty years ago.
The richest man in the world in 1975 was J. Paul Getty, founder of the Getty Oil Company who, in 1973, famously refused to pay the ransom for the safe return of his kidnapped grandson. The richest man in the world in 2025 is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who, as I write, is in hour twenty-nine of a social media war with his former ally, the President of the United States Donald Trump (who is also a billionaire) ostensibly based Trump’s refusal to kowtow to Musk’s economic demands, and presumably paying little attention to issues of fatherhood. Greed and a desire to dominate and subjugate is central to both men’s stories. A major part of Getty and Musk’s legacies relates to their treatment of their children or grandchildren, which connects them interestingly to both Redmond Barry and Zsa Zsa Korda, two men who learn the hard way that family is ultimately a more powerful force in the world than wealth.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), protagonist of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece epic Barry Lyndon – screening this July for its 50th anniversary – begins acquiring wealth by simply making valuable friends and inserting himself into the right circles. Like Kubrick himself, Barry is procedural and patient, working his way up the ladder for years until finally he sees an opportunity, in the form of the recently widowed Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), to secure the status and fortune he desires. In 2025, we can applaud and admire Barry’s ability to play the game of the rich, placating them until they give him what he wants, but the way in which we see him alter his unfortunate circumstances and ‘achieve’ wealth feels very much tied to 1975. Though Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is set in the 1950s, Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro)’s billionaire status feels more recognisable to modern audiences. An industrialist and arms dealer, Korda is also a colonialist, a slaver, a suspected wife-murderer, a weird ‘collector’ of offspring and obsessed with his image. Sound like anyone?
Though they exist two hundred years apart, the two men operate in very similar spheres. Kubrick’s vision of the eighteenth century European aristocracy that Redmond Barry burrows his way into is a world maintained by confidence tricks, petty jealousy, evasion of debts and intermarriage. Anderson’s vision of the post-war billionaire industrialist world that Zsa Zsa Korda inhabits is also one composed of confidence tricks, petty jealousy, evasion of debts and, upon the introduction of Scarlett Johansson and her marvellously strange accent, a bit of intermarriage.
Both Zsa Zsa and Barry have a well-earned parasitic reputation among their friends. Barry’s stepson, Lord Bullingdon, decries him as “lowborn” and “uncouth”, draining all wealth from Bullingdon’s mother, Lady Lyndon. Zsa Zsa – nicknamed “Mr. Five Per Cent” for his ability to predatorily insert himself into business deals – literally receives a blood transfusion from a co-investor in his Phoenician scheme, and his greatest rivals (the U.S. government and his equally vindictive brother) seemingly only hate him because he is so good at hoarding money. With little love from any corner, both Barry and Zsa Zsa live in the knowledge that their position is precarious. Barry’s mother reminds him that young Lord Bullingdon would inherit everything if his wife were to die, while Zsa Zsa is constantly having to evade assassination attempts (particularly relevant in a post-Luigi Mangione world).
Absent personal security, both men look to the next generation to ensure their legacies. Barry dotes upon his biological son, Bryan, and indulges his every want and desire. He brings the boy up with the belief that he belongs with the upper crust, and hopes to make this reality by securing a title for himself through further advantageous alliances and charming of high society. Zsa Zsa extends an olive branch to his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and offers her the position of his successor. He hopes his development scheme in Phoenicia will provide the financial security for Liesl to live in wealth in perpetuity.
Both Bryan and Liesl, however, have different fates in store. Bryan, with the avarice of a child born into wealth, requests a horse for his ninth birthday, which his father dutifully purchases with money the family can ill-afford, the early signs of Barry’s downfall. Demonstrating his father’s headstrong nature, Bryan rides the horse unaccompanied, is thrown off, and dies from his wounds. Meanwhile, Korda’s growing relationship with novitiate Liesl (whose primary motive is helping her father see the error of his ways) leads him to sacrifice his fortune and move to a simpler life running a small bistro with her.
Kubrick’s protagonist loses his wealth in a self-destructive spiral in the aftermath of his son’s death, while Anderson’s willingly offers up his wealth in the belief that family is more important. Zsa Zsa, after all, has been plagued by visions of a Council of the Afterlife throughout the film, while Barry has lived with abandon according to the dying words of his friend and surrogate father figure, Captain Grogan: “Kiss me, my boy, for we shall not meet again.” A 2025 audience would likely see Barry’s ignominious final days as more realistic than Korda’s happy ending, but both directors’ are clear that family is the one obstacle with which wealth cannot assist either man in overcoming.
J. Paul Getty’s public legacy is now wholly encompassed by the kidnapping ransom of his grandson. Musk’s public image may ostensibly have little to do with his family, but some commentators believe that Musk’s current trajectory is strongly informed by his daughter Vivian coming out as trans in 2020, leading to his crusade against so-called “woke” politics, primarily through his acquisition of Twitter (which Musk viewed as overrun with “woke” viewpoints) and making it a forum wholly intolerant to anything right-wing users deemed “woke”. He then doubled down on his anti-woke crusade by establishing the Department of Government Efficiency to gut the U.S. Federal Government of any jobs, departments and legislation deemed to promote “woke” viewpoints. Throughout it all, Musk has given interviews where he continues to deadname his daughter, who has spoken candidly about her estrangement from her father, and his refusal to accept her identity. Getty is remembered as a miser, Musk will be remembered as much worse.
Barry is undone by the loss of his child, ending his days as a poor and crippled swindler. It’s perhaps telling that Kubrick, whose films frequently follow men living and dying by the weighty consequences of their actions, ends the film with Barry hobbling away on crutches to live out his days far from the shining sun of power and wealth. Korda’s abandonment of his fortune for a future with his daughter is a much more optimistic outlook from Anderson, one that may strike 2025 viewers as saccharine, but effective within its narrative. It’s clear that Anderson is hopeful that at some point, these wealthy individuals will want to be remembered for more than the fortunes they amassed. Real-life examples are thin on the ground (as demonstrated by Getty’s final years and every action and statement made by Musk), but in an era where the wealthy seem intent on stepping on the necks of all of those beneath them, it’s nice that someone has not given up hope that humanity can still be found.
Grey Gardens (dir. Albert Maysles and David Maysles) / 28 Years Later (dir. Danny Boyle)
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In the preamble for the first article of the series, I noted that 1975 and 2025, fifty years apart, are united by a widespread culture of fear and the looming threat of global instability and hostility. It is no surprise then that a film from each year deals with the idea of fear driving a group of people to shut themselves off from the world behind high walls, only to find that they can be just as easily torn to pieces in a place that is supposed to be safe.
In a room laden with the decomposing trappings of rapidly declining “old money” American wealth, Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale becomes introspective at the conclusion of one of her many ear-splitting rants. After having mourned a lost love and her mother (also named Edith Bouvier Beale)’s role in it, she muses, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present…Do you know what I mean?” It’s not a surprising question for her to ask. The women of Grey Gardens are so concerned with their pasts that it has almost completely encompassed their present circumstances.
The documentary, which is screening at Light House Cinema for its 50th anniversary from July 4th, is a fascinating portrait of two women, a mother in her 80s and her fifty-six year old daughter, who dropped out of New York high-society for a life of seclusion in their home on Long Island, an estate surrounded by high trees, which they have let fall into disrepair and squalor. From our first glimpse into Grey Gardens, we are brought into a modern-day (in 1975) Fall of the Roman Empire, the decaying wallpaper and beloved possessions lined up to be sold while the ‘survivors’ fight bitterly among themselves.
Both women speak to the filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, in glowing terms of their lives before their self-imposed isolation. Edith discusses her unrealised dream of being a professional singer, while her daughter Edie laments the men she never married, the trips she never took, and the career in fashion she never pursued. When not filled with melancholy over their lost youth, each woman (but particularly the mother) turns a spiteful gaze on the musings of the other. Edie recollects her mother’s cruel treatment of her suitors, and her refusal to allow Edie the same independence as her brothers because of her neediness. Edith castigates her daughter’s insistence on choosing unsuitable men and rejecting better (read: richer) candidates, and accusing her of doing things to intentionally hurt or upset her mother.
Despite their yearnings for a time before they were stuck in the house and the vitriolic hellscape they have created for each other, neither seem particularly invested in the outside world. Edie, who spends most of the film stating that she intends to leave the house and never return, constantly lambasts the inhabitants of the outside world, such as the residents of the nearby town of East Hampton, their relatives in the Bouvier family, and the infrequent visitors to the estate at different times throughout the film, most notably the young handyman Jerry Torre, whom she nicknames ‘The Marble Faun’.
Neither woman seems to particularly recommend their current state of living. Edith seems the more content, though she is clearly terrified of Edie leaving her to endure such an existence alone, and thus, for example, discourages her from travelling to New York by claiming it will be far too hot. Edie complains of her fear of their immediate surroundings (“I’m scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes”), but never follows through on any of her declarations of leaving. The only true harm either encounters in the film comes from each other, as they torment and rip each other to pieces with every word.
In 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle showed us the heartbreak and pain of a world descending into rage and fear. The more tender emotional moments of his official sequel, 28 Years Later, are unsurprising when we remember Cillian Murphy’s Jim discovering the note left by his parents before they took their own lives, or the deep tragedy of Brendan Gleeson’s Frank’s final look at his daughter before the rage virus overcomes him. Death in the 2002 film has suddenly become a preferable option to the possibility of living either as a monster consumed by rage, or a human consumed by fear. As the graffiti on the church wall says, “The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh.”
The sequel introduces us to a village on the island of Lindisfarne (a pointed choice of location given it is the original landing point of the Viking invasion of Britain) off the Northumberland coast where a community has established itself outside of the reach of the ‘infected’, similarly to how the Bouvier Beales have sequestered themselves behind the high trees of Grey Gardens. As our writer Olivia Ní Riada noted in her excellent review of the film, the villagers don’t just fear the infected, but the survivors of the virus on the mainland, as demonstrated by Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) warning his son Spike (Alfie Williams) away from any attempts to seek out the mysterious Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Only those in the community are to be relied upon, except of course if they leave and do not return, as one of the village elders reminds Spike prior to his first trip to the mainland. If he does not return, no one will be permitted to seek him out. You’re either with us, or you’re with ‘them’.
Within the walls of the village, the survivors attempt to live in their own version of the past. Jamie is the encapsulation of this, drinking heavily, telling exaggerated stories to maintain a grand myth of himself and his family, having extramarital affairs rather than seeking to venture out to find the root cause of his wife Isla (Jodie Comer)’s illness. The consistent messaging is that within the walls of the village is Life, while on the mainland is Death. Though it is a mantra born of fear and nativism, it’s not unwholly correct. When Spike and Isla reach Dr. Kelson so that he can examine Isla, they walk through towers of skulls in whose shadow Kelson diagnoses Isla with cancer, and tells them that she doesn’t have long to live. Kelson, in explaining his ongoing purpose with the skulls and simultaneously attempting to comfort Isla and Spike, taps into an element of humanity that the villagers have forgotten in their dogma and headstrong determination to survive: Memento mori, ‘Remember, you must die.’
Within the walls is Life, outside is Death, but Life without Death quickly devolves into meaningless replaying of the past in an endless loop. Edith listens to recordings of herself, while looking at old photos, admiring her pre-marital portraits and castigating the ones involving her children. Edie, similarly examines her old fashion photos, and tells stories of the men who asked for her hand in marriage, including a relative of the Obolensky family (a branch of Russian aristocracy) whom her mother chased off fifteen minutes after she brought him home. The film ends with Edie practicing a dance routine which she worked on for years, and after her mother’s death in 1977, she would in fact go on to perform the dance on Broadway in a one-woman show, finally breaking out of the insular hold of Grey Gardens. It’s ironic that Edie is freed to escape by her mother’s death, while Spike in 28 Years Later escapes the community with his mother in the (ultimately vain) hope that he can save her.
Many reviewers and commentators have remarked upon Boyle and Garland’s themes and messaging in 28 Years Later, with current events like Brexit and widespread anti-immigrant rhetoric referenced, but on a much simpler level, Garland’s script is a refutation of the small-minded, navel-gazing, “ours-and-ours-alone” approach to the world. Hiding behind our walls will not save us from fear or rage. We may be torn to pieces and consumed by rage when we cross the causeway, but equally we may tear ourselves to pieces through fear while we hide away. When Kelson intones, “Remember, we must die”, he is also reminding us that we must live, regardless of the consequences. A life lived endlessly trying to recapture the past is really no life at all.
Rooster Cogburn (dir. Stuart Miller) / F1: The Movie (dir. Joseph Kosinski)
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‘Manifest destiny’ is a term originally coined in 1845 by American newspaper columnist and top of my list of ‘embarrassing Irish-Americans’, John L. O’Sullivan, who used the phrase to encourage white colonial settlers to strike out into the great “unexplored and untamed” American West and take it by force from its First Nations inhabitants. The term is considered a core tenet of American exceptionalism: the belief in a god-given ability in the heart of white Americans that renders their will and judgment second to none other on Earth. Such a belief has led to events including, but not limited to, plantation slavery, the American Civil War, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the militarisation of American police forces and, most recently, the policies of Donald Trump’s administration.
In film, American exceptionalism has appeared most often in the Western genre, but rarely in the sort of bombastic, self-aggrandising way in which it manifests itself in real life. It is more commonly seen as the malice of lawless gangs or the ‘barbarism’ of ‘Indians’ being remedied by the arrival or intervention of a stoic, principled, fearless hero whose wisdom is of a greater calibre than even those in the highest positions of power, and who will circumvent institutions to bring his interpretation of ‘right’ into being. Though the idea behind exceptionalism should mean that its proponents would feel no need to hide behind a caricature of rationality and even-temperedness (as demonstrated by the Trump mentality of “I am right and everyone else is wrong”), filmmakers have always known that audiences want to root for a lead character whose righteousness is only matched by their unexcited manner in exacting it.
Both Rooster Cogburn and F1: The Movie find their stoic, fearless hero in need of redemption. In the former, the title character, played for the second and final time by John Wayne, has been stripped of his U.S. Marshals badge for his habit of extrajudicially murdering outlaws whom he has been tasked with apprehending. This conceit is a perfect introduction to the character’s representation of exceptionalism – he upholds the law in so far as his own morals will permit, and if he meets a criminal whom he believes can have no second chance, he will kill them. In F1: The Movie, Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes lives a life similar to heroes of the Old West like Rooster Cogburn. A former hot prospect in Formula 1 whose career was ended after a horrific crash, Hayes now flits between driving jobs to win major events like the Daytona 500 before disappearing into the mist again in his campervan. Hayes’ combination of supernatural prowess and lack of self-regard exist in spite of the fact that his backstory suggests that his recklessness and headstrong attitude behind the wheel is what caused his accident.
Far from the film taking time to examine the functionality of Rooster Cogburn’s moral compass (as the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit does in Jeff Bridges’ portrayal of the character), the original’s sequel instead offers him a redemption arc that validates his questionable decision-making. After a group of bank robbers steal a U.S. Army shipment of nitroglycerin and murder the inhabitants of a nearby town, Cogburn allies with the Reverend’s spinster daughter (Katharine Hepburn) and a teenage Native American named Wolf. Cogburn shows greater ability with firearms, horse riding and strategy than bandit leader Hawk, the judge who stripped him of his badge, and the entire U.S. Cavalry, despite the fact that he (like Wayne) is of advancing age, has an obvious drinking problem, and is completely outgunned. Hayes, meanwhile, arrives at his former teammate (now F1 team owner) Javier Bardem’s invitation because his aggressive, win-at-all-costs driving style is perceived to be what is lacking in the team’s other drivers, and Hayes quickly shows an otherworldly understanding of car mechanics and driving strategy for a sport in which he has not participated for thirty years. It will shock no one to learn that despite both characters having the odds (and good sense) stacked against them, they both emerge victorious, American exceptionalism once again triumphing over the evils of amoral criminality, or just simply ‘losing’.
The exceptionalism goes beyond Cogburn and Hayes and into the men portraying them. Both of these films could be seen as attempts to recapture their popularity after a post-Oscar slump – Wayne by returning to the character which won him the award, Pitt by starring in a big budget sports movie (though it seems that Pitt too will soon be returning to the character that won him an Oscar). They also both have to contend with a precarious position in the culture. Wayne had infamously lost a chunk of his respectability in the aftermath of a 1971 interview with Playboy Magazine in which he was directly quoted as saying “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility”, one of the more overt and full-throated declarations of racist beliefs of any major figure in Hollywood history. The plot of Rooster Cogburn, with the character allying with Native Americans and showing deference to a woman while still occupying the place of the hero, almost feels tailored to rehabilitate Wayne’s personal image while reinforcing his status in the hero role.
Pitt, in his post-Oscar phase, has seen his public image marred by the resurfacing of an investigation into domestic abuse by the actor towards his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, and one of his children on board a plane in 2016. This was bolstered by his son Pax posting an Instagram story on Father’s Day 2020 saying the actor made his four youngest children live in fear and calling him a “world-class asshole”. This was followed by Pitt being named as a producer on the films She Said and Women Talking, two 2022 female-written, female-directed films which dealt with violence towards women. Even F1 makes vague, unexamined allusions to Pitt’s character having had a “string of ex-wives”, with Kerrie Condon’s character telling Sonny Hayes that Bardem, his friend and her boss, has warned her away from him. This is of course to no avail as Hayes’ good looks, old-fashioned charm and respect for Condon’s character’s position as the only female team engineer in Formula 1 leads to them becoming romantically involved. If box office returns are a judge of whether these attempts at cinematic image rehabilitation are successful, Pitt seems likely to be the winner between the two.
It’s hard to imagine avatars of American exceptionalism like Rooster Cogburn or Sonny Hayes ever disappearing from film. But in the aftermath of America’s illegal bombing of Iran and wave after wave of vicious and discriminatory arrests/kidnappings by I.C.E. agents, I’m thankful that the exceptionalist hero we are currently being presented with is the race car driver, not the trigger-happy lawman.