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This is Honestly. And today, in the spirit of Independence Day, a defiant case for fun from novelist and critic Walter Kern. So, a little late as always because I like my pop culture to ferment some before I swill it down, I saw the sequel to Top Gun. I attended the movie in a theater equipped with so-called 4DX technology.
I didn't know what this was when I chose my tickets on my phone. I learned it cost more to watch the film this way, and since I see so few movies and cinemas, and because inflation has made me lazy about trying to save money that's growing worthless, I thought I'd try it out. I assumed it involved a wider screen or something, maybe crisper sound. Not close. ♪
I learned when my wife and I sat down that 4DX is a suite of crude effects, which include simulated wind from fans, squirting water, and seats that rock and vibrate. The commotion is linked to the drama up on screen, but confusingly so at times. For example, in the flying scenes... Vibra one ready. Vibra to range control, stand by.
Vigorous gusts were directed at our faces despite there being no such turbulence inside the sealed cockpits of zooming fighter jets. The scenes, which featured water... Sir. What is this? It's dogfight football. Offense and defense at the same time. One set on a beach, another on a sailboat, seemed less than vital to the story and were maybe just there to exploit the squirting tech. You said to create a team. Sir.
There's your team. I feared my wife would hate all this. Amanda has nerves like needles. But when the seats went wild, she laughed. And when the water sprayed, she shrieked. It helped that the story wasn't hard to follow and easily absorbed these interruptions.
The theme of the movie also harmonized with the rattling, spraying, blowing mayhem. Don't think, do, Tom Cruise kept telling the kids. The kids being younger, less experienced pilots, and in their real lives, budding celebrities, which gave them good reason to heed his Zen-style wisdom in case it applied to becoming famous, too. You weren't ready. Ready for what? Huh? Ready to fly like you? No.
Ready to forget the book. Trust your instincts. Don't think, just do. Tom Cruise is a marvel of advanced self-care and seems to be aging in reverse. The end is inevitable, Maverick. You're kind as headed for extinction. Maybe so, sir, but not today.
Whatever his mantra is, one wants to know it. And when he repeats it several times, as though he's afraid you'll forget it, you try not to. Come on, kid, you can do it. Don't think. Just do. Don't think. Do. And then the water droplets hit your face, shocking you into enlightenment like the loud hand claps of a Buddhist monk.
Life is rich enough, even in short stretches, that you can apply to it any proverb you wish and find supporting evidence close at hand. Amanda was smiling as we left our seats and crossed the candy and Lysol-scented lobby, passing a poster of Cruz wearing a flight suit. His image stirred in me a sense of gratitude.
One reason I had to be thankful was that Amanda had been feeling sad about the world, yet here she was bouncing along on gummy carpet, her hair still mussed from artificial tempests. "'I think it was all about aging and masculinity,' she observed as we exited onto the sidewalk. I nodded but offered no theory of my own, which is rare for me after a show."
I happened to know the movie was controversial in certain thoughtful circles, derided as too patriotic and nostalgic. But I decided to take it as it was, perhaps as a way of snubbing these woke drones. My wife was no longer grim. That's all I cared about.
The shaking seats, fast jets, and grinning movie star had cleansed their system of a long winter, heralded by our downbeat president as a season of... We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death. Severe illness and death. After such prophecies, people can use some fun. ♪♪
Fun, when your rulers would rather you not have it, when the agents of social programming insist on stirring non-stop apprehension over the current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in suspense, is elementally subversive.
Fun is ideologically neutral, advancing and empowering no cause. Fun is self-serving and without ambition. It wishes only to be. It produces nothing for the collective and may represent a withdrawal from the collective, temporarily at least. Your fun belongs to you alone. But what do I mean by fun?
I'm not quite sure. I don't mean pleasure in the old sense, which usually is associated with eroticism or sensuality, and I don't mean play, which tends to refer to structured game. But fun, as such, is not competitive. No one wins at it. Nor is fun the leisure of the ancients, which one is supposed to spend in contemplation or civic engagement or other worthy pursuits.
I mean something bouncier, simpler, more mundane, a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness. Often there is risk involved in fun, manageable, perhaps simulated risk. You round a tight curve in a sports car which can handle it. You careen down a snowy hill in a red saucer sled. Sometimes you take a tumble or scrape a knee.
Sometimes you scream. A laughing sort of scream. One thing I learned early about fun is that having it on command is hard. Fun is a child of accident and chaos, resistant to authority's guiding hand. In grade school one day, in gym class, an eager teacher directed us to unfold a giant blue parachute obtained through some foundation or organization that wished to shape our childhood development.
These high-minded programs were easy to detect and often involved free movies with corporate sponsors. After the parachute was all spread out, we stood in a circle and grasped its silky hem. Our teacher said, let's have fun cooperating. On her order, we lifted our little arms in unison and the parachute bellied upward toward the ceiling like some sort of puffed-up monster of the deep.
then we were asked to step backwards and stretch atop a series of such exercises ensued each of them supposedly remarkable and meant to prove the virtue of group effort the teacher kept laughing as though in celebration inviting us to join in her delight but only the fearful ones among us obliged her i felt bored coerced and isolated
But that's not how I felt another time at school when a classroom hamster escaped its cage and scurried here and there under our desks as we scrambled and sprawled and tried to grab it, afraid it might nip us if we did. Now that was fun. For the hamster too, I hope.
We live in a rule-bound era of high vigilance. It's a time of emergency measures and vast decrees, of curbs on expression, behavior, and even movement. They are portrayed as serving the common good, and some people obey them in this spirit, others so they can be seen obeying them. Fun with its little anarchies is suspect. It's regarded as selfish, wasteful,
perhaps unsanitary. To some degree, it has always been this way here, at least since the frowning pilgrims came ashore. Puritanism, the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy, wrote the cigar-sucking cynic H.L. Mencken. How else to explain the mentality of leaders who thought to combat a respiratory virus by dumping tons of sand from front-end loaders into a seaside California skate park?
I asked a philosopher and critic, my friend Ivan Keneally, what the sages have said about fun as I've defined it. And he said, classically, talk of the smiling embrace of danger is martial, nothing like thrill-seeking for its own sake. A deficit of martial adventure combined with a loss of transcendent purpose means a need to willfully induce a feeling of being alive, to yank oneself from a numb slumber.
Numb slumber is an apt description of the reigning mood of recent times. Much of this slumber was induced by policies which fostered inactivity and solitude using much the same patriotic rhetoric applied to physical fitness and group play during my Cold War childhood. Let's have fun cooperating, separately.
The key to this war on thrills and spontaneity was shutting down or subjecting to tight controls the spaces where fun was free to happen. Playgrounds, theaters, even the open ocean from which surfers were called back to the beach and scenes caught on video and widely shared by uniformed anti-joy patrols. Have fun, get sick, get others sick.
Fun, the other communicable illness. What else was the anxious hive mind to conclude? And while the worst of these strictures have been relaxed, tense and inhibiting memories remain. Fun is abandonment. Don't think, do. It's a form of forgetting, of looseness and imbalance, which is why it can't be planned and why it threatens those who plan things for us.
Fun is minor chaos enjoyed in safety, and most genuine when it comes as a surprise, when water from hidden nozzles hits your face, or when the class hamster, that poor, imprisoned creature, has finally had enough and flees its cage. ♪
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. If the name Walter Kern sounds familiar, it might be because you saw the movie Up in the Air with George Clooney.
Walter wrote the book that that movie was based on. And in addition to his novels, he writes some of our favorite political and cultural essays. And we urge you to look up his work. As always, we love hearing from you. Some of our best ideas for topics and guests have come from you. So please keep them coming. Write to tips at honestlypod.com. And if you want to support our work, become a subscriber today at commonsense.news.
Happy 4th of July.