GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Hollywood Did It Right: THE FIRM turns 30.

Unlike so much modern “content”, what we used to call “movies” before we decided to deconstruct an entire creative industry and turn it into just another tech business controlled by the almighty algorithm, THE FIRM does not have a “message”… at least, not in the current Year Zero political sense of the word. The movie’s only “message” is an entirely uncontroversial one… that corruption and murder are bad and we should avoid them both.

In that sense, THE FIRM is an “old fashioned” movie, one composed of black hats and white hats, good guys and bad guys, and the innocents caught between them. It has not had its story twisted and pretzled into some kind of allegory meant to evoke the Emmanuel Goldstein villains of our current moment… Donald Trump, perhaps, or the Murdoch family. To create movies that are morality plays meant to overtly deconstruct our own political current events is an unfortunate modern habit which, I believe, fatally anchors a movie in the time in which it was made and mortally wounds its chances of ever becoming a timeless classic.

THE FIRM exists in defiance of this unfortunate modern cliche. It is not about the specific problems or the politics of the early 1990’s, but about human nature and the eternal battle between good and evil. It was made, not to teach us a lesson, but to entertain us… to tell us a story… to thrill us… to surprise us… to make us laugh in a darkened theater on a Friday night, and to send us home smiling.

This is how it used to be, both in Hollywood and in movie theaters across the fruited plain… it is, perhaps, the way things ought to be.

And here are related thoughts from The Critical Drinker on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.