James' World 2

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Basran Burhan was born in Indonesia, on the centrally located island of Sulawesi. He studied archeology at Hasanuddin University, at first, he told me, mostly because he liked how it involved “a lot of outdoor activities.” After graduating, in 2010, he worked for a few different Indonesian research and cultural heritage institutions. He also became an independent archeologist, helping organize excavations for a researcher named Adam Brumm at Griffith University, in Australia. Burhan’s fieldwork struck Brumm as exceptional, and on the strength of it, Brumm tried to get Burhan into a Ph.D. program. But Burhan’s imperfect English delayed this project for a number of years. Instead, he kept working for Brumm and his team.

In 2017, Burhan was helping Brumm and other researchers plan their next season of fieldwork: searching for evidence of Paleolithic humans in Sulawesi. Earlier that year, Brumm had briefly explored a new area on the island that seemed promising. Burhan and a team of six Indonesian archeologists were sent there on a field exploration.

The survey lasted for several weeks. At some point, poring over a map of the island’s southern region, Burhan found his eyes drawn to an area he’d never noticed, let alone visited—a valley in a mountain region twenty miles or so northeast of the city of Makassar. There were no roads into the valley, and there was nothing on the map to suggest a way through the bush and mountain peaks. The map did indicate rice paddies and other signs of human habitation, but Burhan didn’t know if the area was currently populated. A good part of archeology is simply exploration. Burhan thought, Why not?

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The discovery of the Sulawesi warty pig helps put to rest the idea that figurative cave art was unique to Europe.Photograph courtesy Basran Burhan

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Kristen Stewart hit the height of her fame as the star of the Twilight movies about a decade ago, and to many audiences, she will always be a teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. Last month, in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times, the actor said she’s probably made “five really good films” at most. The quip immediately inspired blog posts and social-media jokes about how perhaps the Twilight quintet filled all of those slots. Stewart didn’t name the movies she had in mind, but for the internet, the opportunity to dredge up her early filmography was irresistible.

After all, when the franchise about shiny vampires who play baseball came out, film pundits maligned Stewart’s melancholic air and nervous energy. She had “two expressions: blank and slightly less blank,” Claudia Puig wrote for USA Today. “She’s such a bundle of bland that you wonder why these supernatural creatures are so crazed about her,” the critic Richard Roeper wrote. YouTubers made compilation videos of her overused lip-biting quirk. It didn’t help that Stewart seemed to bring the same walled-off discomfort to her public appearances, defiance that implied ingratitude. Here was the headliner of a franchise that would make her the highest-paid actress when she was 22 years old, and she refused to appreciate her luck.

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Temple Hill Entertainment

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Eternals is the latest film belonging to that great, teeming, not-so-riotous achievement in cross-platform multi-vertical corporate synergy/narrative cat-herding known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

You perhaps read the above and rolled your eyes. Maybe you muttered something unkind under your breath as well. If you didn’t, you assuredly know someone who did. That’s just simple statistics: Superhero films have become our cultural furniture; they’re the steady, unceasing hiss of universal background radiation none of us can escape.

And today, with the debut of every new film and television show, more and more prospective audience members find themselves aching to escape, to rid themselves forever of these children’s characters and their microweave pajamas and their hypertrophic musculature and their too-tidy, infantilizing morality tales.

It’s not a backlash, really, because backlash suggests a reflexive reaction driven by a sudden, overwhelming need to reject, to force out, to detoxify. What some critics and audiences are manifesting now, as they find themselves wading clavicle-deep through whatever particular numbered MCU Phase we find ourselves in, is something softer and sadder — a weariness bred by familiarity.

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