Remembering Six Days, Seven Nights

Looking back it can seem that Six Days, Seven Nights was very much a movie of the 1990s.

After all, it was a romantic comedy in a period when the form was doing well. When, in fact, at least one big romantic comedy was an expected part of the summer movie release slate.
When Ivan Reitman was still directing big comedies.

When Harrison Ford played off of an Indiana Jones image that was still a fairly fresh, fond, memory for many--certainly in comparison with what it was in 2023.

When Anne Heche was still being cast as a lead in major movies.

When the cast of Friends were still landing major film roles in those days when it looked as if they just might graduate from TV star to film star (Matt LeBlanc, in fact, making his bid for action hero stardom just a couple of months earlier in Lost in Space, another thoroughly '90s film).

Alas, if the film was very much of its time it was no great hit at that time, not quite living up to either the critical or the commercial expectations held for it, and I will not try to persuade you that it is some criminally underrated gem. Still, it has its good points--like appealing visuals, and a few memorable lines.

Of the latter one that has stuck in my memory was spoken when after Ford's plane crashed in a storm, stranding his and Heche's characters on a Pacific island, and Heche asked why he couldn't just fix the plane and get them back home again. After all, isn't he one of those "guy guys?" she asked. Who can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and . . . build you a shopping mall." Can't he do that?

No, he says, he can't do that--but he can do this, he tells her, sticks a finger in the corner of his mouth and snaps it to make a popping noise.

It was, for a Hollywood film, a rare (and amusing) acknowledgment of the idiotically exaggerated notions people have of others' competence. It is an important plot point that after happening on a lucky break Ford's character is handy enough to (with a little help from Anne's) get the plane in the air again--but no, no one can go "into the wilderness with a pocket knife and a Q-tip and build a shopping mall," even as films and TV shows and stories written by and for the stupid ceaselessly make us think they can, partly out of the groveling elite worship to which the arts (and artists) have depressingly always tended, partly because of the ceaseless exhortations to and promulgation of fantasies of self-sufficient ultra-individualism summed up in the name "Robinson Crusoe," partly because of wildly outdated notions about how things get made and great things happen in the world--the last, of course, absolutely unhelped by that divide between the "two cultures" that so many would like to pretend does not exist.