Blame it on Rio

There was a time when summer was measured in movies.

Long before we carried every film ever made around in our pockets, summer meant standing in line outside a theater, studying the posters and negotiating with friends over what we were going to see. It meant popcorn sold in containers large enough to bathe a small child, Milk Duds permanently attached to your molars and the thrilling possibility that the person sitting behind you would spend two hours kicking your seat.

We didn’t call any of that an “experience.” We just called it going to the movies.

In the beginning, the great attraction was not necessarily what was on the screen. It was the air conditioning.

Movie theaters were among the first public buildings to offer ordinary Americans a few hours of manufactured winter in the middle of July. The Rivoli Theater in Times Square installed a modern air-conditioning system in 1925, and soon theaters across the country were advertising their refrigerated air almost as enthusiastically as the films themselves. People bought tickets to escape apartments that felt like brick pizza ovens and houses where opening another window only allowed additional heat to enter.

The movie was almost a bonus.

Eventually, Hollywood realized that summer offered more than a captive audience seeking relief from heatstroke. Children were out of school. Families took vacations. Days were longer. People had more leisure time and were in the mood to be entertained rather than instructed. Summer became a season of celebration, escape and communal pleasure.

Then, in 1975, a mechanical shark changed everything.

Jaws opened in June with a massive advertising campaign and a wide release that helped establish the modern summer blockbuster. Hollywood discovered that audiences would happily spend a beautiful afternoon sitting in the dark if what awaited them was large, loud and exciting enough. Two years later, Star Wars confirmed the formula. Summer movies became events: spectacles designed to be discussed in parking lots, reenacted on playgrounds and remembered decades later.

Technology has supposedly improved this arrangement.

We now have televisions the size of garage doors, sound systems powerful enough to loosen dental work and streaming services containing more movies than any human being could watch without abandoning employment, hygiene and most family obligations. We can pause a film, rewind it, turn on captions or ask Alexa what else the actor was in.

This is all very convenient.

I’m just not sure it is better.

Movies are better in theaters because movies are meant to be shared. Comedy is funnier when 200 people laugh at once. Suspense becomes almost physical when an entire room holds its breath. A great scene doesn’t merely appear on a screen. It moves through an audience.

You feel other people feeling it.

That may be one of technology’s quieter tragedies. It promised to connect us while giving us fewer reasons to leave home. We attend meetings alone, shop alone, eat alone and increasingly entertain ourselves alone. We sit in separate rooms watching separate screens while algorithms construct separate versions of reality for each of us.

No wonder we can no longer agree on anything. We rarely experience anything together.

That is why theaters still matter. Shared experiences still matter. We need more places where strangers laugh at the same joke, fear the same monster and cheer for the same hero. We need occasional proof that beneath all our political, cultural and algorithmically enhanced differences, we still respond to the same basic stories.

Because movies have always told us something about who we are.

Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes accidentally. The movies of a particular moment reflect its anxieties, aspirations and barely suppressed nervous breakdowns. During the Depression, audiences watched Fred Astaire glide effortlessly across marble floors. During World War II, heroes sacrificed themselves for causes larger than themselves. During the Cold War, aliens, radioactive insects and suspiciously well-organized pods arrived to destroy civilization.

The monsters change. The fear underneath them does not.

This summer’s blockbusters offer a surprisingly accurate portrait of the country we have become—and perhaps the country we are struggling to become next.

Consider Jackass: Best and Last.

As a description of our current president, “jackass” may be the mildest language still available in the English language. It is less an insult than an act of restraint.

The movie itself follows a group of men who injure and humiliate themselves for money while millions of people watch. That is also a reasonably concise description of the MAGA movement.

For nearly a decade, otherwise functioning adults have surrendered their judgment, dignity and occasionally their retirement savings to a man who would not allow them past the service entrance at Mar-a-Lago. They have defended tariffs that increase their costs, budget cuts that threaten their hospitals and policies that make their own communities poorer. They cheer as he runs toward the political equivalent of a brick wall, apparently believing that this time the wall will suffer.

Like the Jackass performers, they keep getting hurt. Unlike the Jackass performers, most of them are not being paid.

The rest of us are simply exhausted by the routine. We have seen the stunt. We know how it ends. The orange buffoon announces something absurd, his minions explain why it is secretly brilliant, courts intervene, markets wobble and everyone returns several days later for the next episode.

“Best and Last” sounds less like a movie title than a national prayer.

Then there is Minions & Monsters.

This one hardly requires interpretation. The title provides the entire political theory.

The Minions are MAGA: small, excitable creatures speaking a language that sounds vaguely familiar but collapses under close examination. They are happiest when following a villain, causing unnecessary destruction and laughing at things that would concern a more emotionally developed species.

The Monster is the man who will not be named, although he is named approximately 400 times each day on cable television and constantly naming things after himself. (Never flying to West Palm again.)

Around him stands an administration that increasingly resembles a casting call for a particularly unusual reality show. Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Todd Blanche and the collection of loyalists, television personalities, conspiracy enthusiasts and professional flatterers placed in positions of power are not there because they possess independent judgment. Independent judgment is precisely what disqualifies a person from membership in the club.

A minion’s job is not to question the villain. It is to admire it, slobber over him and insist that the village looks much better on fire.

Toy Story 5 offers a different warning.

The toys now find themselves competing with technology, including a frog-shaped smart tablet that threatens traditional play. It is a perfect metaphor for what many parents—and grandparents—have watched happen in real time.

A toy requires imagination. A cardboard box can become a castle, a spaceship or a submarine. Two children playing together must negotiate rules, assign roles, resolve disagreements and create a world that does not exist until they agree to imagine it.

A screen requires considerably less.

It supplies the world, the characters, the rules and the rewards. The child does not have to invent the adventure or recruit another child to join it. The device asks only for attention and, eventually, a credit card number.

Our fear of technology is not simply that machines will replace workers. It is that they will replace parts of being human. Imagination. Patience. Conversation. Boredom. The awkward but necessary work of building relationships with people who do not always do exactly what we want.

Then comes Animal Farm.

This one writes itself.

George Orwell’s animals overthrow their human master in the name of equality, only to discover that revolutions can be stolen by those most skilled at manipulating language, rewriting history and convincing frightened citizens that obedience is freedom.

The commandments change. The pigs move into the farmhouse. Yesterday’s enemy becomes today’s ally. Citizens are told not to trust their memories because the leadership has always been correct.

Sound familiar?

We live in an age when recorded statements are dismissed as fake, obvious failures are declared historic victories and people who once warned that a man was dangerous now compete for the privilege of carrying his lunch tray. The central lesson of Animal Farm was never simply that power corrupts. It was that corruption succeeds when language loses its meaning.

All animals are equal. Some are simply invited to a reception at Mar-A-Lago or a UFC on the White House Lawn.

Yet the summer is not entirely populated by jackasses, minions and pigs.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day suggests something more hopeful. Peter Parker begins alone in a New York City that no longer remembers him, forced to confront an evolution that may threaten the person he has been.

That is the nature of transformation. We like to imagine change as a clean upward progression, but it rarely works that way. We drag our old fears, failures and resentments with us. Sometimes we must confront the evil outside us. Sometimes we must confront what has been hiding within us.

Nations evolve the same way.

America has always contained competing versions of itself. We are the country of the Declaration of Independence and slavery, Ellis Island and internment camps, the Marshall Plan and Watergate. We are capable of extraordinary generosity and breathtaking cruelty, often before lunch and in the same breath.

Perhaps this is the struggle we are going through now. Perhaps the ugliness being exposed is not evidence that the country is beyond redemption, but evidence of what must finally be faced before we can become something better.

With luck—and a sufficient number of voters beginning this November—this painful chapter this too long national nightmare will become the beginning of our own brand-new day.

Finally, there is The Odyssey.

There is a reason Homer’s story has survived for nearly 3,000 years. It is not merely an adventure. It is one of the essential stories human beings tell about endurance, temptation, identity and home.

Odysseus is not perfect. No worthwhile hero is. He is proud, cunning and frequently responsible for making his own journey more difficult. But he is also a man of honor and conscience who is willing to endure almost anything to return to the home and family he left behind.

He faces monsters, false gods, seductive illusions and voices promising easier paths. He survives not because he is the strongest man in the story, but because he remembers who he is and where he belongs.

That is the person we aspire to be.

Christopher Nolan’s decision to bring The Odyssey back to the largest possible screen feels especially appropriate. Nolan has made a film meant to be experienced in a theater, surrounded by people collectively confronting an ancient question: What do we hold onto when the world attempts to make us forget ourselves?

America is on its own odyssey now.

We are navigating monsters, false gods and illusionary temptations. We are being told that cruelty is strength, ignorance is authenticity and corruption is acceptable when practiced by our side. We have encountered political sirens offering simple answers to complicated problems and discovered that many of them host podcasts.

The test is whether we can remember who we are—or at least who we once aspired to be.

That is what the summer blockbuster can still give us. Not merely explosions, superheroes and buckets of popcorn priced like municipal bonds, but stories large enough to temporarily bring us together. Stories that show us our fears, mock our foolishness and remind us that monsters can be defeated.

The movies will carry us through the summer and into the fall.

Then it will be our turn.

Perhaps we will emerge from the theater, blink in the sunlight and remember that citizenship, like moviegoing, is a shared experience. Perhaps we will decide that democracy cannot be streamed privately, paused when inconvenient or left for someone else to finish.

And perhaps, beginning in November, we will start the long journey home—to a country where decency is not considered weakness, honor is not dismissed as naïveté and kindness once again has a place in our politics.

It would make a hell of an ending. A blockbuster.

Better yet, it might be a beginning.