By bigging up blockbusters and superheroes, the PM’s former chief adviser proved himself the pop culture motherlode in his explosive Commons performance
![‘The aliens are here’: how movies shape Dominic Cummings’ vision](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0a2e5aa552a4eb2cc8ae8b289a8e416a2eed4011/0_123_3328_1996/master/3328.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=3e1382174f933fb8faba093e118c4f95)
There are three ways to look at Dominic Cummings’ explosive appearance at yesterday’s joint session of the Commons health and science and technology committees. The first is that we witnessed a brave whistleblower speaking truth to power about a wave of horrifically preventable deaths. The second is that Cummings was spitefully acting out, rewriting history in order to further a handful of personal grievances. And the third is to notice that he referenced quite a lot of films, and to just concentrate on that instead. Today, we will be doing the third.
It should surprise nobody that Cummings is a fount of pop culture references. During the pandemic, the entire Conservative government has fallen back on cinema in an attempt to find a way through, from Matt Hancock’s revelation that the film Contagion helped to inform his vaccination strategy, to Boris Johnson’s admission that his movie idol is the crap mayor from Jaws.