CELLULOID HEROES

It’s been 69 years since Hollywood decided to exploit a passing fad called rock ’n’ roll, teaching us a valuable lesson still treasured today: If you need an emotional shortcut, add more guitars. From Blackboard Jungle using “Rock Around the Clock” to hypnotize impressionable teens into mugging old ladies for their purses, to The Crow creating a template for school-shooter warm-up playlists for decades to come, to modern blockbusters beating us over the head with bullshit nostalgia—cinema doesn’t just help us make sense of the world, it reminds us how badass a riff can sound when it’s played over an action star jumping out of a helicopter.