Culture

65 Million Years of Toxic Capitalism

‘65’ is as American as a film can get

Over the weekend, my husband and I saw 65 with some friends, including another Dutch citizen. The presence of two Europeans is relevant, and if you don’t want to know why, stop reading now before I spoil everything.

Little known fact: This movie was made after The Movie Idea Guy filled a fishbowl with little slips of paper with history’s most successful films printed on them and randomly drew two slips.

On one slip was printed Star Trek. On the other was printed Jurassic Park.

Movie Idea Guy smiled.

“Looks like we’re getting a movie about an interstellar traveler shooting up dinosaurs,” he said.

And the rest is history.

We don’t start with the dinosaurs.

We start with Adam Driver and Thandiwe Newton on a beach, their young daughter playing nearby. When the camera pulls back, we see definitely-not-Earth geographical features.

We learn the little girl is ill, and that Driver’s character will need to accept a years-long mission in space to pay for her medical care.

This is so damned American.

I whispered to my husband, who is Dutch, “So it’s 65 million years later and we are still trapped in toxic capitalism?”

To my husband and our Dutch friend, as well as his wife and another friend with European connections, this was ridiculous. In other countries, if your child is sick, you don’t have to do anything crazy to get care. Your sick child is seen as a human being who requires care, not an opportunity for profit.

It’s a favorite device in American television and movies, though: Somebody is ill, and because the American medical system is solely concerned with making a profit, the main character will have to Do Something to pay for it.

See also Breaking Bad: If Walt had been teaching in Europe, he wouldn’t have needed to make any meth. His treatment wouldn’t have broken him.

The movie was fine.

I love Driver and Newton. And I can suspend disbelief when I have to, which I had to do a lot in this movie. Terrible calamities occurred every few seconds, as you’d expect if you were trying to make your way through a dinosaur-ridden landscape.

I’d find it all much more enjoyable if not every single catastrophe was overcome at the very last possible second. It takes me out of the movie each time the escape is over-the-top and miraculous, and I have to remind myself, “Just go with it. It’s an American movie. There’s probably a law.”

But it did seem a little strange to me that a culture that developed completely independently of and lightyears away from Earth 65 million years ago was American to the core.

The three races depicted in the film appeared to be just like three of the races on Earth.

I’ve often wondered how different human beings have the potential to look. We have light-skinned people living in less-sunny climates. We have dark-skinned people from sunnier parts of the world. We have races in which people are notably taller or shorter. We have different types of hair and eye color.

What if you were God?

And what if you popped a few dozen humans on an exotic world? Even if they had the same genetics as humans on Earth, I wonder how different might they look from the humans who developed in different parts of Earth?

But the appearance thing didn’t really bother me. Nobody would have watched the movie if the main characters’ appearances had been altered to look unrecognizable to us. So the appearance was fine. The culture? Not so much.

Right here on Earth, we have countless different cultures. Western culture isn’t the only or best framework. Denying children healthcare because their families don’t make enough money to pay for it is a sick and evil concept.

I hope the American for-profit healthcare system exists in only one place in the universe, and I hope we can fix it before another 65 million years roll by.

About me:

I’m a writer in central Illinois. Find me on Substack, Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn.