John Stewart was always going to claim his ring. That much was a given on “Lanterns” from the moment HBO debuted the first images of Aaron Pierre’s John and Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan – there’s that, and DC Comics’ established lore. The question was always how.

The answer, in the end, was by breaking his lifelong conditioning, contradicting one of the main qualifications of heroic worthiness established by a council of powerful beings most people aren’t even aware exists. John was taught that Green Lanterns must be fearless beings capable of focusing and wielding their will. In 2016, John did exactly that when he finally took the ring from Hal and killed an adversary he’d grown to care about.

Maneuvering Hal to a place of vulnerability required focus. Summoning the will to surrender that power he’d trained all his life to inherit, to the Guardians of the Universe ordering him to betray his friend, is a Herculean act.

But the ultimate reveal of the “Lanterns” finale, besides resolving the mystery established in the series premiere, is that the supposedly infallible Guardians are wrong to view fearlessness as the ultimate virtue. “Fear and love make people scared,” John says to his friend Kerry (Kelly Macdonald), a small-town sheriff, “and scared people can do anything.”

What a long, strange hero’s journey it’s been. In its eight episodes, “Lanterns” wrestled with an array of concepts some viewers loved and others … well, you know, fanboys and the internet.

Along with being an origin story and an alien hunt unfurling in a 2016-set timeline, “Lanterns” grounds itself in a murder mystery that defines its 2026 plot running in parallel. Only in 2026, John isn’t a Lantern, and Hal, his one-time mentor, turns up dead.

Throughout the season, “Lanterns” played upon established canon to thread a host of themes. Among them are white male entitlement versus the crushing demands of Black exceptionalism; the complicated bond linking fathers to sons; and the agonizing bravery required of mothers raising boys the world is conditioned to ostracize.

That last one is how John solves the season’s overarching mystery, settling one of the story’s defining and tormented relationships into a peaceful place. On the surface, John’s trajectory is that of a son forced to correct his father’s failure. But it’s John’s mother, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), who always keeps him on task — even as it pains her to do it.

Only after John declines the call to be Earth’s Lantern and gets to know Kerry and her family, including her son Noah (Shea Pritchard), does he realize the purpose in breaking his programming.

(John Johnson/HBO Max)

Noah has his own to overcome. He’s a star high school jock, the pride of Rushville and the grandson of Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), who seduced John in 2016 and turned out to be the rogue extraterrestrial he and Hal were looking for: a Manhunter, synthetic beings created by the Guardians before the Lantern Corps replaced them. Zoe nearly destroys Rushville to save herself, while John almost violates his principles to seize the ring from Hal, per the Guardians’ orders, and take out Zoe.

If you watched that pivotal fifth episode and wondered why she smiled right before John put a bullet in her brain, maybe it’s because she knew she wasn’t the last of her kind. Noah is extraordinary because he’s also a Manhunter, created by the alien technology Zoe used to impregnate Kerry.

And as one exceptional son recognizes in another, the difference between how we’re born and what we become is who nurtures us.

Kerry is the reason that Noah grew up a kind, considerate young man. But he can’t help feeling the tug of his genetic programming to infiltrate the highest rungs of politics and manipulate the levers of power, he admits.

It’s only after he confesses to murdering Hal, looking visibly afraid all the while, that John realizes the only person more fearful of Noah being discovered is his mother, Kerry — the person who actually shot Hal Jordan in the face.

The fact that “Lanterns” is a conversation with and about fear — its avoidance and the lengths we go to to negate it — explains the audience’s divided response to the show. Some people will always want their superhero TV shows to feature battles and explosions every week. “Lanterns” delivered that primarily in its fifth episode, then fueled the rest with dramatic chemistry and punchy dialogue.

Its scripts also hold plenty of wisdom, including what exiled fugitive Lantern Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen) shares after John finds him on a dead world, along with a lantern Sinestro forged for Noah that uses fear as part of its power source. The fallen Sinestro calls fear an evolutionary intelligence: “Show me a species that’s fearless, I’ll show you something on the extinction list,” he says.

“If harnessed correctly,” Sinestro adds, “fear can be the most powerful force in the universe.” To charge Hal’s nearly dead ring, then, means changing the terms of engagement with its might. It also means erasing the construct of Hal’s consciousness that has guided John since his mentor died.

This turn illuminates something important.

Throughout its run, some viewers have been bewildered as to why some of the same people who loved “Peacemaker” and “The Boys,” two other superhero shows that indicted white supremacy, deemed “Lanterns” to be performatively progressive.

Basic hypocrisy is the simplest answer; it comes as easily to some of us as breathing. But what “Lanterns” does with John Stewart delineates the divide between sympathetic and empathetic storytelling. “Peacemaker” creator James Gunn and “The Boys” creator and showrunner Eric Kripke are paragons of a white guy conveying their understanding of nonwhite experiences from their perspective. Both shows’ white heroes understand that racism, and specifically Nazism, is bad.

(John Johnson/HBO Max)

“Lanterns” is also co-created by three white guys — showrunner Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof and Tom King — who tapped Vanessa Baden Kelly, a Black woman, to tell John Stewart’s story from a place of firsthand experience. By placing us inside John’s life, Baden Kelly vicariously produced, in some, a feeling of familiarity and, in others, discomfort. She wrote John’s story from a place of empathy; Gunn and Kripke, along with the “Lanterns” creators, can only be sympathetic.

Sympathy is, by its nature, separate from another’s discomfort, thoughts and prayers offered from a distance. Empathy can make us feel things we may not like, including reactions like fear. Hence the Christian nationalist push to brand empathy as toxic.

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Intentionally or not, then, John’s ultimate choice to let Noah live and keep Kerry’s culpability in Hal’s death a secret is a demonstration of empathy’s bravery. With Kerry’s nurturing to keep Noah in check — perhaps — John can embrace his destiny on his terms, as he tells arrogant Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), the Guardians’ official doofus, when John calls for him.

“Think of me as an independent contractor. No Guardians. No Corps,” he says. “You take the stars, have fun. I’ll take the dirt. I’m completely confident we won’t get in each other’s way.”

One of the last things Hal Jordan’s hologram tells John before he blinks out, possibly forever, will define Pierre’s hero moving forward, along with this series, should it earn a second season. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid,” he says.

Then, as John charges his ring, he composes a new oath: “In brightest day, in the darkest night / I’ll embrace my fear. I’ll do what’s right / I choose this ring, I choose this fight / In service to this lantern’s light.”

Earth has Guy Gardner’s sympathy, but the world needs John Stewart — a hero who knows fear and was raised to understand what to do with it.

All episodes of “Lanterns” are streaming on HBO Max.

The post HBO’s “Lanterns” was always about its heroes’ fears, and our own appeared first on Salon.com.

To film Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie “Digger,” a satirical black comedy about an aging oil tycoon facing a potentially apocalyptic crisis he fathered, Tom Cruise needed extensive prosthetics — six hours of prosthetics, to be exact. Upholding his reputation as the most intense person in any room, Cruise has proudly touted that, by encouraging the makeup artists (and running drills with them using a stopwatch), they worked the entire process down from six hours to less than one. As this is basically unheard of, the anecdote plays great on a press tour. But Cruise’s story is also an ironic reflection of “Digger”: an undeniably ambitious project whose assuredness conveys a stubborn disregard for everyone but itself.

Typically, that kind of thing isn’t so bad in a movie. More filmmakers would do well to be so confident in their vision that they successfully tune out intrusive thoughts about what anyone else will think, refusing to dull their boldest ideas and temper their biggest swings. But “Digger” complicates this certitude, weaving its audience into the fabric of its story so tightly that they’re bound to their seat, forced to sit with their eyes peeled open as Iñárritu points his finger back at them. His thematic concepts and narrative red herrings rely on the viewer’s presence. Without us, there is no one to hoist blame upon when the film reveals its layers, no one to compare to the film’s wide-eyed spectators of global collapse. 

“Digger” can’t be a great film on its own; its success relies on generating strained discourse, on the cowardly option to chalk up its seismic errors in judgment and smug self-satisfaction to a difference in intellect. “This film is supposed to be annoying,” it argues time and again. “It’s supposed to move at a slug’s pace, and be lit with the putrid pallid color of a corpse’s husk. If you don’t get that, you must not be able to understand that this movie is already our reality.” To make a movie about the end of the world that asserts the viewer needs to understand their own complicity assumes an uncharitable worldview that keeps a vertical mile’s distance between the art and its spectators. With “Digger,” Iñárritu commands — to quote “Real Housewives of New York” alum Kelly Bensimon — “You come up to me; I don’t go down to you.”

But I’ll play ball. Americans did, of course, elect Donald Trump a second time. It’s fair to assume many of us require a stern talking-to, like dogs who need their pills hidden inside the cheese that is Cruise’s Mr. Movies persona. But the problem with Iñárritu’s approach is that he’s fashioned “Digger” as a satire for a post-satire world, a state of living where every day is almost comically bleak. The more glaring issue, though, is that he seems to think this is a novel concept, one he can mine with a twist that strips “Digger” of its parts to examine the relationship between the audience and the artistic outlets (like this very movie) they use for a blip of respite between the horrors.

Once Iñárritu peels the skin off, he resumes taking cheap shots at the exposed wound, reducing our connection to art to a distraction. He assumes that, these days, the public goes to see movies or plays, watches television, or reads books either to avoid this dismal reality or absolve themselves from it. While that notion may be true for some, it’s not universal, and Iñárritu’s haughty assumption only reflects how disconnected “Digger” is from the very reality it presumes to understand well enough to satirize.

Saying all of this broadly without context would be an argument as compelling as Iñárritu’s — which is to say, not very. That does, however, mean that a key spoiler for the film, which occurs about 40 minutes into its runtime, is just ahead. If you would prefer not to know more, pause here. (But bookmark this page to return to, won’t you?)

Iñárritu spends the film’s first quarter setting the scene and characters — strangely quite literally, raising what looks like a stage curtain but is revealed to be a window shade. Cruise’s Digger Rockwell rises from bed and tries to feed his bizarrely acting cat before learning of an explosion on his oil rig in Greenland. Lively scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns Digger that the explosion has sent a massive ice shelf toward Norway, which will flood the coasts and hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s only the beginning. The explosion has triggered more movement, with another glacier headed toward Alaska. To avoid panic and stay ahead of the narrative, Digger meets with the president (John Goodman) and the military to discuss next steps.

As Digger and the president peer out a window, a light flickers. A tree in the distance falls, and a giant hand emerges from the ground to put it back in place. Iñárritu reveals that all of this is rehearsal for a new production of the cult-classic play “Fossil Fools,” about a real-life climate disaster and its players who changed the world forever. Digger and all the characters we’ve met so far are actors. This explains their blowhard nature. Their constant screaming and yelling is a feature of the play’s meta-satire. Unfortunately for us, the film’s audience, it doesn’t make watching the rest of the rehearsal any more enjoyable.

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If anything, the “twist” — in quotes because I tend to see anything that occurs less than an hour into a two-plus-hour film as a plot point rather than a twist — blunders the viewer’s goodwill. The jokes are less funny because they don’t occur within the film’s natural rhythm. The overacting is exhausting because it’s not only Iñárritu’s creative choice, but rather the methods employed by the play-within-a-movie’s director. Every single frame of “Digger” is thrust through an extra two meta layers. This is an interesting exercise for the filmmaker, surely, but the rest of us are stuck waiting for Iñárritu’s larger message to come into play. Placing the narrative left turn so early into the film almost feels like a tactic to curb theatrical walkouts.

Those who resist the urge to use their precious time doing anything else will be rewarded not with payoff, but indictment. You there, yes you, the one sitting in seat 11E; you’re no better than the doomed dunces coming to see this production of “Fossil Fools.” Like them, you want the satire to make you feel smart, to make you feel like you’re one of the good guys? Too bad. By simply continuing to exist and endure this life you didn’t choose, you are no better than Digger Rockwell.

The film, of course, doesn’t say this in so many words. But it doesn’t have to, either. Cruise’s character is an intentional parallel to his own cinema-championing schtick, an actor who believes every scene he’s in should carry some semblance of the truth. But when he argues veracity’s importance, the play’s producer, Kenny (Jesse Plemons), reminds him truth doesn’t matter to the audience. The people are coming for catharsis. They want to cheer on Digger’s demise. This momentary cleanse won’t save them, but it will keep them going.

There is no shortage of ideas to dredge from this truth, about how we use art to cope, sometimes to our own detriment. When “Digger” briefly strikes this resonant note, its warring aspects begin to coalesce, before Iñárritu strikes them with a shovel and breaks everything up again. Just after the opening night’s audience gets their emotional release, a tone fills the theater, with a voice cautioning of a “Level 4 warning.” (What convenient timing, this happening after the play has finished!) Without surprise, the audience dons their luxury PPE — branded “LUNGZ,” complete with a cutesy “Z” at the end, because all these sheep adapted to their new normal so willingly — and makes their way into war-torn streets patrolled by drones and robot cops. Roll credits, roll eyes.

 

As if this whole affair weren’t self-satisfied enough, Iñárritu jabs his finger at the audience one last time. After about 90 seconds, the film’s end-credits song is interrupted by the same “Level 4” warning, this time aimed at the viewer trudging out of the theater (or, in the near future, asleep on their couch). 

In a film full of contrived indignities, this is the most maddening, suggesting that anyone watching the film is no more clever than the “Fossil Fools” audience members. Iñárritu portrays the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality. His film has ill will spewing from every pore, a complete loathing for humanity. Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end. Tell us something we don’t know. 

Riffing on the human need for emotional engagement through the arts with such venom is not just a slap in the face; it’s evidence of Iñárritu’s gnawing insecurities. By lampooning the desire to see our experiences in art without crafting any emotional resonance of its own, Iñárritu comes off as unjustly malicious, upset that his films are too sprawling and cluttered to pull off that connection consistently. How brutally ironic that “Digger” is Warner Bros.’ last film before being swallowed by Paramount–Skydance. It may have ambition, and it may have exactly the kind of role Cruise needs to pursue. But the film merely gestures to its own unfortunate place in history, without ever cementing it as a tragedy. Dig into one’s ideas too much, and eventually they’ll become hollow.

The post There’s no solving a problem like Tom Cruise’s “Digger” appeared first on Salon.com.

For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”

But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship. 

But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds. 

The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.

I’m talking about votes. 

Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.

Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.  

“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication. 

Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives. 

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This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.

Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is. 

MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.

Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men. 

The post Jon Ossoff’s not-so-secret weapon against JD Vance and Marco Rubio appeared first on Salon.com.