Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [rewatch]

In a series that’s self-evidently obsessed with the past and all its associated rituals and relics, it’s notable that Temple of Doom is the only one with an interest in what a “modern”-day practice of religion as a way of life looks like. Not the Thuggee cult, a group of power-hungry individuals resurrecting something from a century prior, but the villagers, who already believe in the sacred power of the stone while everyone else with every other relic (even the Ark of the Covenant) has to be convinced of its divine provenance. In tandem, this is the only film that takes place completely outside of America, and indeed the West at large. The normal foundations of Indiana’s relatively comfortable university existence are totally absent, and he and Spielberg are left to fend for themselves in a foreign land with little to guide them.

Django Unchained [rewatch]
Ever since Tarantino borrowed from City on Fire, and thus the whole heroic bloodshed genre as a whole, to form the emotional throughline of Reservoir Dogs, his films have had an intriguing relationship to male homosociality, or more specifically its importance to the films’ central characters, though he largely abandoned it for his trio of women-led films (Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof). Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds appear to feature it as a central component, but Jackson’s character in the former is the sole focus of the final scene despite his and Travolta’s dynamic across the film’s fragmented timeline, and Pitt and Novak have far too little screentime together for the latter to have close to equal importance in Basterds‘s concluding image. In this respect, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood are mirror images of an apotheosis of this tendency in Tarantino’s filmography: one a portrait of two uneasy companions who find true, twisted equality at the end of existence, and one a fully lived-in and loving embodiment of a bond that, at the same time, carries a built-in inequality that’s impossible to be acknowledged.

That leaves Django Unchained, which in its own ungainly way carves out the closest central male-male relationship to Reservoir Dogs across a far longer diegetic timespan, and posed on the electric dynamic between Waltz—no mere kindly Hans Landa revamp but instead an immaculate picture of compromised Old World courtesy—and Foxx, who turns out the most purely iconic performance in any Tarantino film, all aloof cool and quiet fury that grounds the mess of genre and historical signifiers. Unlike the three other films where the clearly designated central duos survive roughly the same amount of time, Waltz exits the film far before the ending, but the importance of his own brand of tutelage—in stark contrast to the American evils swirling around every other character save Broomhilda—lingers far longer: the tenderness with which Django pauses over Schultz’s body during his storming of Candyland, the brief cutaway from his triumphal expression to Schultz praising Django’s skill, are even more key to the film’s ultimate emotional impact than his reunion with his beloved and ability to ride off into the night.