In Memoria, Tilda Swinton searches for origins and ends. She wanders Bogota cityscapes and finds herself in encounters where she has not quite congealed as a human being—like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, half-cold, grasping at doorknobs. (Memoria is a cleverer ghost story but features, as central character, mood, and theme, a similar dissociative void.) In one early scene, set in a hospital, a forensic archaeologist moves a row of chairs to allow Swinton’s character, Jessica, to enter through a door that was mysteriously blocked. Behind the door, ancient bones. Welcome to the inner sanctum, Dr. Strange. Jessica is dead, or becoming dead, a fact most reviewers seemed too chicken or confused to postulate. (Instead, many tripped over themselves looking for less iffy synonyms for “inscrutable”: “Saying exactly what [Memoria] is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.”) Hmm. The film is straightforward, or at least straightforwardly strange. Melissa Anderson’s essay was on the mark for me. Jessica is Juan in Pedro Páramo, surrounded by specters and slightly unstuck in time, able to commune with dead and even alien ancestors. The supporting cast flickers in and out of existence: a dying sister is rewound to well again. A recording engineer helps Jessica reconstitute a strange sound; later, colleagues claim he never worked at the studio. The clichés of haunting are satisfyingly transformed by Weerasethakul, although nothing touches, for me, the experience of viewing Syndromes and a Century for the first time on a college library DVD. So many encounters with art are attempts to see the ghosts of former encounters. Last week, on an airplane, I half-watched Death Becomes Her and realized Bruce Willis became, in the The Sixth Sense, the ghost of Death’s preening plastic surgeon, the only character in the film to refuse the elixir of immortality, the only one to live to die.
Top Gun: Maverick is a cemetery of splendor, too — Cruise finds hauntings and reincarnations at high altitudes. His beloved Goose is back in the form of a son, played by Miles Teller, who must perform the spirit of Cruise’s 80s cockiness together with the morose resentment of the orphan. Repressed psychodrama has become the monocrop of Hollywood harvests: dead wife, dead son, dead friend, locker walls papered over with sepia backstory. In its other, better mode, the film is stripped of military trappings and framed as one giant team exercise, Mighty Ducks with Sidewinders, a nuclear volleyball game. (The sequel’s update to Top Gun’s erotic beach volleyball is a desexed, gender-neutral romp played with not one but two American footballs—“offense and defense at the same time,” Maverick explains—the right game for a multipolar and sexless world, the right number of balls for both heaven and earth.) The enemy fighters are black shrouds in cockpits; we never see a face, never hear an affected foreign accent. Fears of a uranium enrichment site suggest Iran, rather than China or Russia, although it is an Iran with exaggerated military prowess. It doesn’t really matter—we are dreaming, or Cruise is. He died in the film’s opening sequence, my friend Matt explained to me, in a testosterone-drenched test flight where Cruise rocketed an experimental Lockheed jet to Mach 10.2—whereupon it disintegrated. Survival is impossible. Life and death are relegated to the smash cut. All that lies beyond, Matt says, is an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: Maverick’s last sparking neurons invent a heroic tale for all good filmgoers, one that absolves us of our primal guilt, unwriting the first Top Gun’s central trauma and assuring us that no foreign civilians were harmed in the making of this empire. Watch and live. Save the Goose, spoil the gander.