Yoshifan456

* well then.

* ain't nothing you can do about it.

* well how about that then.

* you brought that upon yourself dude.

* it is what it is.

* that was completely to be expected.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

Tom liked to say that it took one dish of homemade pelmeni to unravel and end the 235 years of implicit and explicit prohibitions against homosexuality in the US military.

Pete, on the other hand, thought he was exaggerating. DADT did not end because of them. (Or did it?)

By @lambourngb; IceMav; Explicit; 38K

DADT Repeal; Politics; Angst With a Happy Ending

I am once again dragging Mav into my self-indulgent bullshit uwu

Out in the Mojave, Mav, alone for long stretches of time, befriends a gopher snake. Or, they exist in each other's space and Mav gradually stops being creeped out.

We don’t see a lot of John Goodman in the Digger trailer, so I’m extrapolating from very narrow information, but he doesn’t appear to be doing a Trump impression. And Trump impressions have been an albatross around the neck of American media for a decade now. I expected that impression to be there so I’m just stewing in my own (pleasant) surprise about its absence. And I think part of the reason Goodman isn’t doing a Trump impression is that Trump-era American politics have progressed to such a point that you can actually just emulate its insanity generically now. You don’t need to reference Trump to do “a Trump impression” because the impression you’re doing is of US politics writ large. The symbolism of a president in American film isn’t just a depiction of the person but of the moment broadly. And the current moment, broadly, is unfettered fascistic mania. Amalgamating JD Vance/DeSantis/Cruz/Trump/Musk/McConnell/Biden/etc into a single insane decrepit president guy is a much more efficient and effective (and funny) impression of contemporary political leaders than a Trump impression ever could be.

And it’s such a stark contrast to Cruise’s last film, TFR, which does an American politics AU where Kamala Harris becomes president. And what’s never stated in that film, but must logically be true, is that part of the global insanity happening in the MI universe is because a black woman is president. Like, Jan 6th happened to protest Joe Biden. Can you imagine a version of Jan 6th with Harris winning lol. Both TFR and Digger (again, going off of a trailer, so take this with a grain of salt) have radically different visions of American politics and the problems produced as a result of those politics. I always liked McQuarrie’s position that the Entity is a stand-in for surveillance technology broadly. I roll my eyes whenever people say that Ethan is battling ChatGPT in that film. It’s such a hyper-literalist reading of Final Reckoning that misses its obvious political arguments. Both it and Dead Reckoning are grappling with private + state surveillance technologies and their active role in eroding a societally agreed upon truth. Like truth as a public good has been fractured to what feels like an irrevocable point. And MI is not a deep or complex political franchise. So the Entity is very clearly not a chatbot or even just a generic AI stand-in.

Anyway all of that is colliding in my brain and making me think like, do you think Ethan knew about January 6th prior to it happening. I mean like it was openly planned so it’s not that difficult to anticipate. But still. Actually god could you fucking imagine if TFR was about January 6th and Ethan stopping a domestic plot to destroy American democracy. I feel like that would actually be much more thematically appropriate as a bookend to MI given that the first film is about a mole in the US intelligentsia. Like MI has always been about America/Western allies fighting internal battles to maintain their own sanctity, so in a way, an MI film about Jan 6 would be a very obvious adaptive move if you want to transpose the political context of post-Cold War cynicism onto 2023 during a global pandemic and mass disinformation hysteria. And to be clear that version of TFR would have been extremely bad. Mr McQuarrie I respect you but I do not think you would be capable of saying something intelligent about that political moment. Most of Hollywood can’t do that either so it’s nothing personal. 

I hate when people joke about his age and appearance, like for example in the comments under the digger trailer people were like haha he finally looks his age- NO TF HE DOESNT. First of all, Digger is like 80, and second of all, people dont know how 60 year olds look like, like he looks perfectly normal for his age, there are actors who dont have a single WRINKLE at like 70 but sure lets target him who is just athletic and has a lot of muscle and probably good genes. Like i know people who are even older than him and other than the white hair you wouldnt guess their age, its just dependent on so many things and like he takes a lot of care of himself and eats good so of course thats gonna reflect on his appearance