| Every week I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the July 24 transcript of the chat here and submit questions for the July 31 chat here. This week, a reader tries to capture the spirit of America in a watch-list. For reasons that I can no longer remember, I was talking with my mom the other day about what movies most accurately represent America. I suggested “Selma,” because I think it effectively captures both the country’s struggles and triumphs, but it’s also set in the past, so maybe it isn’t the best contemporary example. What do you think? If you met someone who had never been to the U.S. before and was largely unfamiliar with what it’s like, what movie (or TV show, book, etc.) would you use to introduce them to this country? This is a terrific question because it can be answered in so many different ways. If I was feeling melancholy, I might recommend “Hell or High Water,” David Mackenzie and Taylor Sheridan’s marvelous revisionist Western abut a pair of brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) robbing banks to avoid losing their mother’s house, and the oil underneath it, to a reverse mortgage; it’s a film that uses one of the quintessential American genres to capture a sense of lost opportunity and unfairness. If I was feeling downright cynical, I’d tell you to watch Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain,” a story of the American dream gone rancid with entitlement. And if I was just feeling sad, I might put on Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” which I think is a remarkable chronicle of American moral downfall. More optimistic readers floated Ron Shelton’s baseball romantic comedy “Bull Durham,” one of my all-time favorites, as a movie that embodies both the American ideal and the sport that’s theoretically the American pastime. An inevitable “Hamilton” movie would also fit the bill: The musical is an argument about the ways in which America’s greatness is bound up in its flaws, and the extent to which America is a project rather than a single stable state. As a companion to “Selma,” I might recommend Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X”: The latter is epic while the former is relatively intimate, and they make corresponding arguments about the possibility of social transformation in the United States. And throw into the mix Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”; in America, local identity is as important as national identity. I also might suggest Ken Burns’s “The Civil War,” both as an American origin story and as an articulation of a particular idea about American greatness, though that’s a real commitment. But I’d love to know what would make all of your lists. |
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