Issue 30 - Hollywood Stories

Hello and welcome to my weekly email newsletter, Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five, where I share five things I’m enjoying, thinking about, and find interesting. I hope you enjoy issue 30 and feel free to share your own reflections.

Here’s my Friday Five this week.

1. What I’m Reading

The Last Action Heroes. By Nick de Semlyen.

The 1980s and 90s were the golden age of the action movie and the action star. This was my era and I loved these films and their almost superhuman stars, who created mayhem with their muscle, martial arts, and maverick ways. In The Last Action Heroes, Nick de Semlyen takes us back to this zenith of action cinema, focusing on eight of the major players: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Steven Seagal, Jackie Chan, Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris. De Semlyen gives us tales of sweat and cigar smoke, of chiseled bodies and blistering martial arts, and of colossal egos and explosive feuds—all set against the backdrop of a very Hollywood style of action that intoxicated global audiences.

The 1970s laid the foundation for these action icons. People needed new heroes, America especially. The U.S. was struggling with the Vietnam War’s aftermath, Watergate, economic upheavals, and the rise of cinematic anti-heroes like Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) and Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry). Stallone answered this call with Rocky and Schwarzenegger would follow with The Terminator. As these rivalries ignited, they resonated powerfully in Reagan’s America and the Cold War. Reflecting on these films now, they belong to a certain time and culture, often depicting a very simplistic—and xenophobic—view of the world: good guys and bad guys. Yet, ironically, half of these action stars originated from Europe and Asia (Schwarzenegger, Lundgren, Van Damme, and Chan).

By the mid-90s, however, the glory days of the macho man were fading, outmuscled by a new star—special effects. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 changed modern cinema with its groundbreaking special effects. While previously, the likes of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme were the “special effects”—simply by the way they looked and the impossible things they did—Jurassic Park heralded the digital age of cinema and gave us dinosaurs like we’d never seen them before.

Yet, the legacy of these action icons endures. This week, I watched a video of Sylvester Stallone being mobbed by fans in Rome nearly half a century after Rocky. In our world, where many battles and villains remain, perhaps we still need our action heroes.

2. What I’m Watching

Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch.

Staying in Hollywood, last weekend, I watched Mulholland Drive, a dreamlike film that was both captivating and bewildering. Even a week after viewing, I’m still reflecting on it. Written and directed by the brilliant, non-conformist director David Lynch, the film narrates the story of two women trying to unravel a mystery in the heart of Los Angeles. We meet Betty, a wide-eyed aspiring actress newly arrived in Hollywood, and Rita, a mysterious woman with amnesia following a car accident on the winding Mulholland Drive in the hills above the city. However, this premise only scratches the surface. Without revealing too much, Lynch leads us on a surreal odyssey that makes us question everything we are seeing. It’s ingenious filmmaking and earned him an Academy Award nomination.

If you're the kind of viewer who prefers straightforward narratives, where everything makes sense at the end, Mulholland Drive might challenge your patience. But for those who enjoy unravelling intricate puzzles and appreciate multilayered storytelling, this film is a compelling two and a half hour experience. The brilliant lead performances by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring further enhance the experience and they are electric together on screen. To understand the film better, I found an extensive essay online by Adam Shaw, who proposed a fantastic interpretation of Lynch's vision—Lynch himself has said that the movie can be “solved” and trusts his audience to decipher it.

One of Lynch’s prominent narrative devices is color symbolism. (I also touched upon the use of colour in last week’s Reflections on artist Mark Rothko). Lynch strategically uses hues like pink and red to mirror the personalities of Betty and Rita. However, it’s blue that emerges as the film's most important shade (blue is an important colour for Lynch, also prominent in his film, Blue Velvet). Representing a transitional realm between reality and illusion, blue mirrors Hollywood's essence, representing the duality of dream-making fantasy and dream-crushing reality. Lynch perceives blue as the twilight zone between day and night, and this is where the film operates, between fantasy and reality.

Mulholland Drive is a love story, a tragic one. It’s an ode to Hollywood's fallen angels, young women like Betty. Lynch’s message seems to be: if you decide to fall in love with the Hollywood dream, make sure you have even more love for the person you are and the relationships you have outside of that spotlight, or the dream becomes a nightmare. The allure is tempting, but tread carefully.

3. What I’m Contemplating

This week, Time featured an interview with Martin Scorsese, the iconic director behind some of my favourite films—Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull. Even at eighty, Scorsese exudes a kinetic energy, speaking passionately on multiple subjects, but most notably, cinema. His love for films is unmistakable: “We just went to the movies—we were curious about the world,” he says. These early questions sparked his own journey into filmmaking.

Scorsese voiced concerns echoing those of many film purists: that the blockbuster culture of today may mean the end of intimate, personal filmmaking—the kind where auteurs like David Lynch excel. Time aptly captured the present sentiment, stating, “content is king, and entertainment billionaires want to keep shoveling it our way, at the lowest possible cost to themselves. In 2023 [we are] consumers of content, and the consumers have spoken.”

This sentiment was paralleled in an article from the Washington Post, which was critical of the behaviour and etiquette of some modern cinema-goers. It highlighted the recent cinematic phenomenon, “Barbenheimer” (a fusion of this summer’s two huge cinematic releases, Barbie and Oppenheimer). The article documented examples of viewers engrossed in TikTok videos, filming the screen, scrolling aimlessly on their phones—anything but giving the movie their undivided attention. This distracted state, exacerbated by rapid, bite-sized content we're now accustomed to, is a topic I've written about previously.

Reflecting on these two reads, and drawing on my own recent cinema experiences, I contemplated the future of cinema. Will our growing appetite for succinct, visually arresting content shape and redefine the films of the future? Hollywood, like any entity, will evolve, of course. But I hope that cinema (and Hollywood) will continue to pull on the threads of our innate curiosity about the world and we will always have a new generation of filmmakers ready to probe, question, and explore.

And throw in some action too.

4. A Quote to note

“The cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

- Alfred Hitchcock

5. A Question for you

Has a film ever profoundly influenced your perspective or shaped who you are today?

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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

James