'[The] Flight of the Phoenix'

Hope for the future of 'Salvage'

Happy 2024, readers!

I have a bit of salvage for you today, and it’s a metaphor for the past few months here on Salvage.

Hollywood has been rewriting its old stuff for years, so if I mention the title The Flight of the Phoenix, you might mistake it as a reference to a 2004 film starring Dennis Quaid, Miranda Otto, Tyrese Gibson, and Giovanni Ribisi. That’s Flight of the Phoenix—with no The at the beginning of the title. While that film contains a similar scene, let’s dredge up a real relic today. The Flight of the Phoenix (which, I’ll grant you, sounds just a bit pretentious, like The Ohio State University) was a 1965 Jimmy Stewart film that also starred, among others, Ernest Borgnine, Peter Finch, and—to my delight—Richard Attenborough.

The Flight of the Phoenix is the story of the crew and passengers of a plane downed in the Sahara. Racing against the heat and their dwindling water supply, they work to cut apart the wreck and build from it a flyable plane that will carry them to water, safety, and civilization. Much like Lord of the Flies, the marooned crew is a microcosm of (Euro-American) humanity’s intercultural dynamics. Together they hope for a future—seems relevant at the beginning of a new year—but they struggle with scarcity, prejudices, the drive to… [Read more]