Every piece of art is embedded in a cultural and social context. The more extreme versions of postmodernist attempt to sever art completely from this context only serves to heighten the need for that context by embedding it in a moment and time so completely that outside of that moment and that known context, it cannot be understood at all. In other words, both the contemporaneity and the novelty are the point — the object or artefact is an afterthought. Thus, I’d argue that all postmodern art should be destroyed like a mandala soon after its creation, not because it is meaningless or loathsome as some would argue, but because its animus evaporates outside of the occasion of its immediate context and comprehension.

It wasn’t the one I was looking for, but the scene in True Lies where Schwarzenegger arrives in a Harrier and then uses the plane’s 30mm cannon to pan across the floor of the skyscraper is really well-done, especially considering how clunky a lot of the other setups in the movie are.

If you ignore the terrible 90s cinema score, it’s a short, tight bit that realistically shows how absolutely devastating a 30mm cannon is (that is a totally different beast than a rifle or even a “normal” machine gun), and is also dramatic and effective.

In reality, though, a Harrier can only hover for about 90 seconds before its reserve of cooling water is depleted and then the engine basically melts down. In the movie, it hovers for multiple minutes. So not very realistic in that sense, if you know a lot about Harriers.

I could not find a definitive answer, but I am not sure the Harrier can actually fire that big fucking gun while hovering. The 30mm cannon produces so much thrust (more than the engine, I think) that I suspect it’d destabilize the plane while hovering or at least push it back quite a lot.

But still, the scene really works and watching parts of True Lies, you can see where the Wachowskis picked up ideas for a little movie that came out five years later called The Matrix.

But, about the below movie, I’d forgotten how great Jamie Lee Curtis was in the film. She’s underrated, and she makes the film far better than it should’ve been.

Her monologue in the interrogation room, all alone, disheveled and bewildered, could not be more perfect.

I was watching part of the movie True Lies earlier, looking for a scene that I liked. Found the scene, but what was striking about the movie is how different its tone felt and how distant its cultural cues were from our own assumptions and certitudes.

The most noticeable difference was the constant and casual blatant misogyny. That’s rarely seen nowadays and that absence is a huge improvement. I mean, a main character actually says in the movie, “Women: can’t live with ’em. Can’t kill ’em” as a laugh line. Not only is that idiotic, it was clichéd even in 1994 — it was thus bad writing and misogynistic.

However, on the brighter side, it was taken as an absolute given that the fourteen-year-old female character (Eliza Dushku, I’d forgotten she was even in the film) in the movie should have a life of her own and not be helicopter-parented into mute obedience — that she should be able to go places and do things without adult supervision or even adult knowledge. That is extremely different than now. Also, sex is discussed more openly and obviously without the pervasive sense of shame and vague judgemental disgust that even modern liberals now seem to coat any discussion of this topic in.

Also, people had more normal relationships as portrayed in the workplace, without constant worry about offense and surveillance (thus, no self-surveillance).

True Lies was released in 1994, right in the transition period from the more freewheeling times of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and though you can see the signs of this approaching prudishness and cloistered closed-mindedness, because it was made by people mostly of the earlier era it doesn’t really impinge that much.

But oh lord, the misogyny. It makes a lot of the film nearly unwatchable.

“The danger was to the single enterprise—industrial, agricultural, or commercial insofar as it was affected by changes in the price level. For under a market system, if prices fell, business was impaired; unless all elements of cost fell proportionately, ‘going concerns’ were forced to liquidate, while the fall in prices might have been due not to a general fall in costs, but merely to the manner in which the monetary system was organized. Actually, as we shall see, such was often the case under a self-regulating market.”

-Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, on the danger of the financialization of society and the fiction of market self-regulation