Thinking about Harrison Ford can hurt. Dark thoughts can arise. That’s not good, because Harrison Ford is celebrating his birthday today, so as a congratulator you shouldn’t be sad, actually. But what can you do.
It just sticks to look at “Stars Wars” again. Again in “Indiana Jones”. You could also watch less historical, certainly excellent films with him – “The Only Witness”, for example, is said to be really great – and then be able to write about how versatile the action mouth hero Harrison Ford really is. In short, one could prepare for this text in a serious film journalistic manner. But you just watch “Indy” again as he runs away from a rolling stone ball, unfortunately there’s no other way.
What is it? What is it that hurts? First thought: There are simply no more such films. Juicy adventure movies starring guys like Harrison Ford, burly dudes with their hearts in the right place. If you look at today’s so-called stars in the action genre (the adventure genre, does that still exist?), the first thing that comes to mind is a bunch of muscle mountains in body-hugging costumes. Chris Hemsworth with a six-pack and a giant hammer in the “Thor” films – post-heroic postcard masculinity exaggerated as a superhero to the joke. Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars for allegedly pumping himself into the role of… what exactly? of the man? Johnny “vs Amber Heard” Depp? phew Then you think of Ryan Gosling in “Drive”, this cold, sexy and empty. Ryan Gosling chasing Harrison Ford in Blade Runner 2049. Then you think of Harrison Ford again.
This guy, who is now turning an unbelievable eighty years old, doesn’t seem a bit out of date in his more recent films either. Rather grown out of time. The cinema has become smaller, it has remained the same size. But then you think, maybe that’s not true.
Today, Han Solo would have problems with the rebellion’s diversity officers
Perhaps Harrison Ford’s talent lies simply in creating a certain feeling that has a hard time in the cinema today. In any case, it immediately comes to mind when you see the young Harrison Ford as Han Solo in “Star Wars”: A loudmouth who doesn’t know what to do with the Force and all that esoteric stuff and prefers to trust his laser revolver. A cowboy who would certainly get in trouble with the diversity officers in today’s rebellions against the dark empire, but who, ten miles against the wind, you can tell that there is a very nice guy hiding behind the facade.
It was the beginning of the 1970s, the time of New Hollywood cinema, which was not lacking in new minds and ideas, but was lacking in charismatic stars who were able to carry the films with their presence and appeal. Almost a bit like today. Ford seemed like a guy like Clark Gable or James Stewart, as if he had ridden over in a horse saddle with two revolvers from the golden age of cinema. On closer inspection, however, he did fit into New Hollywood with its ambivalent characters – only that the ambivalence in his case did not consist in tilting into the gloomy and wild, as in the case of many of his colleagues at the time, but in the opposite direction. Which is almost more exciting. Because where do you actually tip?
At the crucial moment, everyone knew that Han Solo would shed his cowboy costume and be a knight – but not quite yet. Ford’s crooked corners of his mouth and his teasing struggled with this tension forever, he created the character and maybe his whole career with it. Beneath the surface of the hard dog, something playful, soft, flowing, larger, was hiding just so clearly that one could guess it.
In “Indiana Jones”, from 1981, the same ambivalence is at work, here between the whip-wielding adventurer and the archaeologist with a doctorate, between intellect and instinct, reason and sensuality; in “Blade Runner” (1982) finally as the boundary between man and machine, man and human copy. Isn’t an actor always a human copy?
The SZ editors have enriched this article with content from YouTube
Load content now
Harrisonfordian has never worked better on Harrison Ford than in this cinematic artwork by Ridley Scott: we suspect he’s a replicant, but we don’t see it. We don’t feel it. We feel – well, we just feel this special feeling, this actor, this one star, if you please, so inimitably produced: these floods of something human. This security. That trust.
They stick by him, they just can’t help themselves
The most exciting reflection on this is probably “Mosquito Coast” (1986) by Peter Weir. It’s about an adventurer and inventor, a Harrison Ford star role, but in which he is cast against himself, against his indomitable niceness. The inventor wants to leave behind what he sees as a degenerate USA and wrest a new home for himself and his family out of the jungle in Central America. This, of course, goes terribly wrong, and everyone but the increasingly dictatorial, obstinate father wants to go home soon. And yet they stand by him. You just can’t help it. Sure, of course.
When everything is still fine and the family is in the USA, the father has visitors at home. He wants to win the farm workers for one of his projects. The son comes down to listen, when the door swings open, one of the men stands in front of him and says: “Your father is a great man. He is my father too. We are all his children!”
That’s probably the core of the Harrison Ford feeling: Oh, if only one of these could be my father! Someone who, as president, fights with terrorists on planes to protect me and the country, like in “Air Force One” (1997). One who is always there. You have to get into such elementary emotional realms to become a star.
The other is, of course, sex. It always works, even today, because sexual desire can happen on an equal footing. Father feelings, on the other hand, are asymmetrical per se. They are always aimed at a powerful man, although his power, as can be observed with Harrison Ford, does not have to be that of authority or, who knows, may even be. Still, worshiping strong men for anything other than their sex appeal has become suspect.
The SZ editors have enriched this article with content from YouTube
Load content now
One of the secretly grounding scenes of contemporary cinema goes like this: Adam Driver, one of the most interesting actors of his generation, of another generation, as the dark Jedi Kylo Ren, pierces the chest of his father Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, with a lightsaber. “I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the power to do it,” he says just before the lightsaber flashes. He says: I don’t know if I have the strength to endure this love. This may also say something about today’s cinema. Definitely about Harrison Ford.