Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-thirteen-raiders-of-the-lost-ark/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58671

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the greatest adventure films of all time — if not the greatest adventure film of all time, full stop — but here nearly 45 years after its release, it’s also a hugely interesting cultural artifact. When it was first made it was explicitly an act of nostalgia, a throwback to the serial adventures of the 30s and 40s, where every 20-minute installment ended on a cliffhanger to drag you back to the theater the next week to find out what happened. Filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg kept the 20-minute cliffhangers, they just strung them along into a two-hour movie. Into that movie they poured a hero who discovered ancient treasures, beat up Nazis, wooed pretty women who had spunk, and even had a few supernatural events occur, because of course they would, if you’re pilfering the storage locker of God, what do you expect would happen?

It was everything you could want in an old-timey adventure but more — “more” in this case being a decent budget ($20 million, not extravagant by 1980s standards but more than any Republic serial ever got), a rising star in Harrison Ford instead of whatever second-order actor could be cheaply assigned by the studio, and two of the hottest young filmmakers in Hollywood, Spielberg and Lucas (three if you counted Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the story with them). Spielberg had just flubbed with 1941, so there was some minor tarnish there, but only minor, and Lucas, well. When you have a calling card like Star Wars (followed up by The Empire Strikes Back, which went out to theaters almost exactly the same time as Raiders started principal photography), you have some credibility to burn.

Spielberg and Lucas did not burn their credibility. Raiders was the smash of 1981, the number one movie of the year by a considerable margin, and a massive cultural event that might have been even bigger than it was, had its filmmakers not wedged it between a Star Wars installment and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. We were not starved for absolutely ridiculously huge blockbuster entertainments in the early 1980s, I tell you what. Spielberg and Lucas were cottage industries in of themselves.

45 years on is actually a really good time to think about Raiders of the Lost Ark, because 45 years prior to its release, 1936, was the start of a golden age of movie serials: Universal’s Flash Gordon made its debut and was an instant serialized smash, becoming Universal’s second biggest hit of the year, while Republic Pictures jammed out Darkest Africa and Undersea Kingdom, both with “exotic” locales and/or wild fantasy elements.

By the time 1981 had rolled around, however, serials were very old news. Some were re-edited and repackaged as single films that lived a weird afterlife in local TV channel movie slots, but most were just gone. Flash Gordon had enough cultural cachet that in the wake of Star Wars, Universal decided to make a big budget movie with the character, but not enough cultural cachet to have that movie actually be a hit (Lucas, who had wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie before making Star Wars, may have dodged a bullet).

The serial, as a format, was long dead before Spielberg and Lucas mined its corpse in Raiders, killed by television, a wholesale change in film distribution and theater ownership, and the end of the studio system that give film studios actors under contract that they could plug into these mini-movies at will. Raiders brought back the vibe of serials, but it also upgraded everything about it on the technical and filmmaking side, from story to special effects. No serial was ever as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark. They didn’t have to be; they were mostly filler in a whole program that also included a newsreel, a cartoon, a b-movie and a feature film. Raiders was the main course. It was always meant to be the elevated form of the serial, and was.

And now, how does Raiders fit in to the modern landscape? Well, like the serials at the other end of this timeline, its moment has run its course. The most obvious sign of this was the 2023 installment of the series, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, being the lowest-grossing installment of the series even without factoring for inflation (when you do factor for inflation… ooooof). The film also cost $350 million to make, and was the first of the series not to make a profit at the box office. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which was that an octogenarian action hero strained credulity, no matter how much one may love Harrison Ford in the role.

But a lot of it is simply that the world is a different place than it was. An American archeologist grabbing artifacts from their native soil plays a lot differently in 2025 than in 1981, and “it belongs in a museum!” is not the rallying cry it once was. Not to mention that Dr. Jones’ method of procurement for many of these objects is, shall we say, highly unorthodox and possibly ethically suspect. These facts were famously lampooned in a classic McSweeney’s article from 2006, in which Dr. Jones has learned that he has been denied tenure, for the reasons above, and the fact that he has “has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction.” Even in our current new and regrettably stupid era of American Exceptionalism, Dr. Jones, his methods and his goals, are now relics.

(Plus, Raiders a little and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, rather a lot, trade in the casual racism of the era, in a way that ranges from mildly annoying to outright ugly. The 80s! What a time to be alive!)

If anything saves Raiders from this latter-day change in the opinions regarding respectable archaeology (and there will be differing opinions about this), it’s the fact that in this movie, and in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, easily the best of the sequels, his actions are at least keeping important and supernaturally-charged ancient objects out of the hands of the damn Nazis, who want them to get a mystical buff to their world-conquering plans. There has never been a bad time to punch a Nazi at any point in the last century, and, alas, this is true even and especially now. Say what you will about his methods and modes of science, but when it comes to punching Nazis, Indiana Jones has no peer.

Time may have passed on Indiana Jones for various reasons, but Raiders of the Lost Ark remains a masterclass in adventure film making. You can follow the action, for one thing — the Michael Bay style of rapid-fire cutting to give action a cocaine-snort boost is still a decade and a half in the future, and very few directors are or have been as good at coherent action and fighting than Spielberg. His battles are physical! And followable! And that makes them enjoyable to watch, rather than exhausting or disorienting, or both. Are there better action directors than Spielberg? I mean, allow me to pull John Woo, for one, from behind the arras. But if you have to deploy John Woo in this sort of argument, you’re already at an exceptionally top-tier level of action competence.

Even then, Raiders, I have to say, outclasses nearly every other action film across all sorts of levels of filmmaking. It’s not just Spielberg working here. It’s Spielberg and Lucas and John Williams and Philip Kaufmann and Lawrence Kasdan and Ben Burtt and Richard Edlund and so on. Raiders is a murderer’s row of filmmakers, all at the top of their game. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars, won four, and was given another for special achievement in sound effects editing. I would argue that you might have to wait for The Lord of the Rings for another film (taking them all as a single film, as they were shot at the same time and shared most of their cast and crew) to get at that level. And The Lord of the Rings was a very very very different sort of adventure film.

One final thing to love about Raiders: Indiana Jones is our square-jawed hero, who is (by the standards of the time the movies are set, and the time the movies are filmed) upright and outstanding… but he also gets the shit kicked out of him a whole bunch. In Raiders and the rest of the series, he bruises, he bleeds, he aches and he limps. He punches the Nazis, yes, but the Nazis sure as hell punch back (he just ends up punching them more). There’s a limit to this because Indiana Jones has to survive every adventure, sure. But in Raiders and in the other films, Spielberg and other folks crafting the stories aren’t afraid to take him right up to the line. If Indiana Jones were real, he would have a massive case of PTSD, and by the time of the final film in the series, he probably wouldn’t be able to walk.

I am a relic of the 80s as much as Raiders of the Lost Ark, and while I acknowledge how storytelling has changed between now and then, as a storytelling vehicle, in many ways it is still peerless and endlessly watchable. It’s distilled the best parts of movie serials from the past, and still has lessons to teach the moviemakers of today in terms of pacing and plot and technique.

I don’t want today’s filmmakers to make another Raiders of the Lost Ark. I want them to look at it and do what Lucas and Spielberg did when they looked at the serials that inspired it: Take all the things are amazing about it, and use today’s tech and techniques to make something that blows the minds of the audience of today.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-thirteen-raiders-of-the-lost-ark/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58671

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/12/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twelve-ferris-buellers-day-off/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58638

About a decade ago there was some noise made about trying to figure out what day on the calendar Ferris Bueller’s Day Off took place. The day that was decided on by the nerds who think too much about this sort of thing was June 5, 1985. This was decided largely by the fact that the Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were seen attending happened on that day, and apparently you can’t argue with the baseball schedule.

I can argue with the baseball schedule, and I will tell you that June 5, 1985 is not Ferris Bueller’s day off. For one thing, anyone who knows Midwest school schedules knows that by June 5th, all the kids are out of school. For another thing, asserting that the Cubs game, which our trio only attend, is definitive, when the Von Steuben Day parade, which Ferris actually inserts himself into, is disregarded, is nonsensical cherry picking of the highest order. The Von Steuben Day parade was as real as the Cubs game, and took place on September 28, 1985. If any real world day has to be picked, I would pick that one.

Except that one won’t work either. September 28, 1985 was a Saturday, for one, and it’s too early in the school year for Ferris’ hijinks, for another. We know Ferris has skipped school nine times by the time The Day Off rolls around, and missing nine days when school has been in for barely a month is a lot, even for Ferris. Ferris is a free spirit, not a chronic truant.

If one must pick a specific day — a questionable assertion, as I will relate momentarily — it would most likely be a day in late April, when Baseball is in season, the kids are not quite yet attuned to things like prom and graduation (and for the seniors, college), spring has sprung in the Chicagoland area, and Ferris would decide that that the day is too great to spend all cooped up in class.

But ultimately, trying to pin The Day Off to an actual calendar day is folly — and not only folly but absolutely antithetical to the point of The Day Off. The point of The Day Off is freedom and possibility, not to pin it down with facts and schedules. Facts and schedules are for classes! The Day Off doesn’t ask for any of that. It only asks: What will you do, if you can do whatever you want?

What Ferris wants is to have a day in Chicago with his best friend Cameron and girlfriend Sloane. Inconveniently that is a school day, and while Ferris has bucked the system before (nine times!), as he says to the camera — Ferris breaks the fourth wall more and better than anyone before or since, yes, even better than Deadpool, I said what I said — if he does it again after this, he’ll have to barf up a lung to make it stick. That being the case, The Day Off needs to be a day more than just hanging with friends. It has to be an event. Making it so will, among other things, require the “borrowing” of an expensive car, the chutzpah to brazen one’s way into a place that will serve you pancreas, the cunning to evade parents and school principals and, significantly, the ability to make your depressive best friend confront his own fears.

Oh, and, singing “Twist and Shout” in a parade. As you do.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.

Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.

(I even got called “Ferris” once or twice! Not in high school, but in college, at The University of Chicago, where somewhat exceptionally among my peers at that famously intensive school, I didn’t grind or panic about my grades, I would actually leave campus to see concerts and plays and to visit a girl at Northwestern, and I got a job straight out of college reviewing movies for a newspaper, in the middle of a recession. I apparently made it all look easy, thus, “Ferris.” Spoiler: It wasn’t all easy, not by a long shot, the girl at Northwestern wanted to be just friends, and I got that job because I was willing to be paid less on a weekly basis than the newspaper paid its interns. I only achieved Ferris-osity if one didn’t look too closely.)

There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon). I’ve never gotten to that point, but it’s surely true that Ferris becomes less of a character goal and more of a character study as one gets older. Ferris himself understands that he is living in a moment that’s not going to last: As he says in the movie, he and Cameron will soon graduate, they’ll go to separate colleges and that’s going to be that for them. Ferris’ trickster status is predicated in his being in a place and time where his (let’s face it mild) acts of transgression have little consequence. The penalties for him here are of the “I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record” sort, and even those are thwarted by Cameron letting him off the hook for property damage and a soror ex machina moment. Ferris knows it, which I think is why he takes advantage of it. After graduation, things get harder for everyone, even for privileged white boys from the north suburbs.

This might mean that Ferris eventually becomes one of those people who realizes he’s peaked in high school, and what an incredibly depressing realization that might be from him (Cameron, on the other hand, will not peak in high school; once he’s out of his dad’s house he’s going to thrive. Sloane is going to be just fine, too).

I do wonder, from time to time, what has become of Ferris. Many years ago I wrote about what I think happened to Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye; I said I expected he went into advertising, was good at selling things to “the youth” and became a mostly functional alcoholic. My expectations for Ferris are similar, although more charitable: He goes to Northwestern, is popular but not nearly at the same level (Northwestern has a lot of Ferris types at it), gets a job in marketing, does very well at it, marries someone who is not Sloane, moves back to his hometown when they have kids and when they get old enough to go to his high school, he bores them with his stories about his time there. The kids, it turns out, didn’t ditch. Ferris has grandkids now. He keeps in touch with Cameron and Sloane through Facebook. They’re fine. He’s fine. It’s all fine.

If it sounds like I’ve given Ferris an ordinary life, well, that’s kind of the point. Early on, I said the point of The Day Off was, what will you do, if you can do whatever you want? It turns out, for all his cleverness and antics and quoting of John Lennon, what Ferris wanted was actually pretty ordinary: To have a great day with his friends, while he still could have a great day with his friends. And, well: Who wouldn’t? Just because what he wants is ordinary doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or that it wasn’t a shining moment that all three of them will be glad all their lives that they got to have. Our lives are made of moments like these, where one day you get to do what you want with the people who matter to you, and you look around and you say to yourself, yes, this.

Most us don’t then mount a parade float and lipsync to a Beatles cover, true, and if we did we would probably get arrested. But this is why Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a fable, and why the actual date of The Day Off doesn’t matter. What matters, and why I come back to this movie, is the joy of a perfect day, with the people that will make it perfect. My Day Off isn’t this day off. But I’ve had one or two of them, and, hopefully, so have you.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/12/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twelve-ferris-buellers-day-off/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58638