The World is Burning. Why Can't I Stop Watching Mission Impossible?

Help! I just watched every single Mission Impossible movie in a row. Up until this past week I’d never even seen a Mission Impossible, let alone thought about it longer than it took for its theme song to do a couple of laps in my brain. I know what you’re thinking: “So what? It’s an immensely popular movie series that rakes in millions at the global box office. We’ve all seen them, that’s not anything special.” Listen, I hear you and I know. But that’s the whole problem, man. Why is it that now, a full 24 years after the first film premiered–subsequently spawning five sequels over the span of three decades (and still ongoing!)–that I’ve suddenly taken an interest?
Why me?
Why now?
WHY?
This is my mission. (If you choose to accept it.)

It’s a fairly rare occurrence that I don’t understand my own motives. As an otherwise observant and social person who gets her kicks writing film criticism, one of the strengths I will proudly boast is my ability to parse out meaning and motivation. Yet, ever since the COVID-19 lockdown stopped life as we’ve known it in its tracks, I immediately found myself reaching for a genre that I’ve hitherto actively avoided: action schlock. It started with the gateway drug of various De Palma films, and rather quickly zeroed in on the chronicles of one Tom “Ethan Hunt” Cruise. After seriously racking my brain as to why I've suddenly been taken by this particular impulse, I first zeroed in on the most obvious choice: a base desire for blandness.

Before this past week the Mission Impossible franchise, as I knew it through trailers and hype, represented banality to me. In what I’ll full admit is an unfairly dismissive blanket statement, I tend to find the action movie genre to be some of the most generic and tedious mass entertainment around. Now having actually watched all of the Mission Impossibles I at least can say I wasn’t completely wrong. Where the first film was built upon spy thriller homages and some unique gimmicks, it later muddied into this generic heightening of a hyper-masculine James Bond tribute band. I’d argue that The Fast and the Furious series is actually truer to the spirit of the first Mission Impossible than the majority of its sequels have been. De Palma reveled in wildly campy stakes and stunts, operatic almost in its highs and lows. I mean, the film opens with a betrayal at a black tie party in Prague, leaving Ethan Hunt shattered and accused of murdering those he loved, and it ends with a helicopter tied to a high-speed train going through the Chunnel as Hunt clings to the exterior. Also The Cranberries play softly in the background of the last sidewalk cafe scene–Need I say more? Instead of countdowns to the next tedious doomsday scenario, the main intrigue of De Palma’s is in Hunt finding closure; it’s less Bond and more of a Sherlock Holmes story with explosions and wild physical feats.

With the subsequent sequels, the comparatively whimsical spirit of the first has been replaced by a blandly formulaic structure. Now every setting change must be accompanied by a 15-minute shoot out. Every person is an expert in skilled hand-to-hand combat. Every shady schmuck on the street has tertiary access to nuclear warheads. Every day the doomsday countdown resets for the same ol’ threat of yesterday. Then there’s the constant rubber-mask death fake-outs that, after the first three movies feel far less thrilling and more like a spotlight on the filmmakers’ reluctance to subject us to any real emotional fallout.

Plus, Ethan Hunt is damn near invincible! Watching De Palma’s anxiety-ridden film, you’d never guess Ethan Hunt would be able to pack so much emotional and physical turmoil into one steadily aging body–but here we are. This guy gets into motorcycle accidents on the reg' without a helmet. This guy gets into helicopter accidents on the reg’ and walks away from them. This guy climbed the tallest building in the world in over 100° weather with one bare hand on glass and metal. This guy held his breath for over three minutes, got his heart restarted with a defibrillator, then stole and crashed a motorcycle, tripped over a car and then drove that at high speeds until he flipped it and then somehow walked away from the accident. Sure, he does suffer some slight physical handicaps as any given movie winds down to its third act. But unlike say the Mad Max franchise, you never see his limps or scars carry over from one movie to the next. Neither concussion nor fracture nor bruise nor break of bone stays this courier from the swift completion of his impossible rounds.

But I digress. Accepting this as true on at least some level, I then find myself in an even stranger conundrum: why would I be hankering for blandness during a time of global stasis? Heck, with my life on pause, I haven’t felt this idle since grade school summer vacation. You’re telling me (yeah YOU) that my impulse attempt at escapism is to somehow indulge in more monotony?
Ah. Then it dawned on me. I’ve been getting too caught up in the surface. My current obsession with Mission Impossible movies goes beyond mind numbing diversion, it’s a full-on indulgence in pandemonium.

Your typical Hollywood action movie formula tends to follow that of Alice in Wonderland; transport somebody into the unknown, take them on what would otherwise be a life changing journey and then spit them out where they began as if nothing happened. But when franchised, this formula starts to crack. The more you're brought in and spit out, and the more the stakes have to rise in order to maintain heightening, the more the original reality splinters. The chaos quickly becomes the new standard, and what becomes routine is the inevitability of chaos overwhelming all plans. "So how close were we?" Simon Pegg’s Benji asks Ethan Hunt at the end of Mission: Impossible - Fallout. "The usual" Hunt coughs from his gurney while everybody cringes, knowing they had waited until the literal last second to coordinate cutting trip wires that may have otherwise set off a nuclear explosion.

Now not only does chaos not seem quite so chaotic, but by the time we reach this latest film, we’re practically rooting against normalcy. I’d go as far as to say I’ve never seen a more convincing mainstream argument for anarchy than the Mission Impossible franchise. How many times does Ethan Hunt need to be disowned and dropped by his government for him to realize he's not actually working for the ‘good guys’? Living-GI-Joe-doll Agent Walker (aka mustachioed Henry Cavill) asks this exact question of him–”How many times has Hunt's government betrayed him, disavowed him, cast him aside? How long before a man like that has had enough?”–and by the sixth film it’s hard to see why Hunt doesn’t agree. If Ethan Hunt was honest, he’d acknowledge that the reason he continues the job has far more to do with a desire to push his own agenda than it does with upholding the morals of an institution that continually fails him.

Ethan Hunt’s relationship with not-coincidentally-Edward-Snowden-lookalike arch-villain Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) is yet another example of Hunt avoiding his subconscious desires to dismantle the system. Walker is right yet again when he says to Lane (or at least who he thought was Lane), “Hunt's the only friend you've got. You're only alive today because he didn't have the guts to kill you.” Hunt can’t directly kill Lane because Lane is the only standard against which he has to measure his own anarchistic impulses. It’s only when guys like Lane are running around loose trying to nuke everybody that Hunt’s own subversions seem comparatively conservative. But look inside yourself, Ethan. Your desire to save individuals is commendable but it’s also just a bandaid on the larger issue: a government that cares more for secrets and self preservation than it does for the human lives it was elected to serve. 

The only true difference between Hunt and the Syndicate is that Hunt is hoping for this structural shift to happen through incremental good deeds–he wants a revolution of reform without it having to stem from a tremendous loss of life. Well, I'm not knocking the guy there, instigating mass genocide is where I draw my line too. But Hunt’s attempts at incremental subversion have proven time and time again to not be effective, and I think somewhere between the fourth and the fifth film–somewhere between almost losing his wife and seeing that MI6 is just as corrupt as the CIA–it’s clear he’s at least subconsciously realized that. Ethan’s insistence on both rejecting direction from his government and yet not necessarily destroying their enemies leaves room for only one thing. Ethan, you have become the agent of chaos you wish to banish. Maybe the only reason you went after Walker with such intensity is because, like Highlander before you, there can only be one.

Perhaps on a coronavirus-less year I would have dismissed this franchise as simply Tom Cruise’s desire for money (and maybe a bit of a death-by-stunt wish?) masquerading as nationalist popcorn-fodder. But as I sit here temporarily jobless and stuck in the prison of my apartment (and perhaps my deteriorating mind), I find Ethan’s unwitting dedication to preserving chaos as somehow quasi inspiring. We as humans are wired to find and maintain order in our lives–whether that comes in the form of organized religion, traffic laws, or your morning coffee routine. But as COVID-19 has so impolitely shown us, nothing is certain and everything is unstable. It’s not that normalcy has disappeared as much as our lies to ourselves have been exposed. We’re just waking up now in the De Palma Mission Impossible, the confusion of a plan gone wrong and the plunge into an unknown and ruleless situation.

In the end, perhaps then what I’m drawn to more is in learning how to accept a level of anarchy in my life. By embracing the inevitability of disorder I can perhaps harness it not so much to tame but to create my own eye-of-the-storm-like zen to get through it. Of course life isn’t a movie and there’s no guarantee that a permanent resolution, or even a moment of calm, will be achieved. But if Tom Cruise, Paramount and Alibaba can make several movies that unwittingly champion the destruction of a society they’ve all profiteered off of, then we can come out of this horror show empowered to demand more from our corporate overlords. Fight the power, Ethans.