What is The American Sublime? It's 'news that stays news.' Here are just some movies where you see America's condition continually reflected back at itself. Things just keep happening in America that these movies seem to predict. America is too big and quick for most books to capture any more than small parts of it. It needs the quickness of movies, and even most movies can't do it. But these never stop being relevant, and many of them were directed by one-off directors, who captured something so essential that it took too much out of them to ever do it again. Many of the directors were never the same thereafter and could only do it once. There are plenty of great movies not on this list, but these are the movies by which you learn about America, and seem to tap into an unnameable spirit so American that you feel as though the movie is watching us as much as we're watching the movie.
This is nothing even resembling a definitive list. Movies are the American artform, and there is a giant list of really good movies in danger of being forgotten. There is so much I haven't seen that I still desperately want to, but....
Absolute Essentials:
Citizen Kane - If there was any question that Citizen Kane is not the greatest work of art of the 20th century, that was put to rest when Donald Trump became President. Nothing else need be said.
Rear Window - Hitch is both underrated and overrated. Along with Spielberg he is the greatest technical filmmaker there has ever been, but he is a sociopath who put his mental illness into his movies. But Rear Window is a top 5 of all time movie. It's a modern myth about how our time is the first in human history about how our neighbors are complete strangers to us.
The Manchurian Candidate - The most underrated of all American movies that was unseen for 30 years because it basically called the Kennedy Assassination (and it was Kennedy's favorite movie). Trump pumped entirely new relevance into it. It shows the hollowness of the political process and just how easily demagogues and hostile foreign powers can exploit it.
Nashville - A country western musical. 24 main characters, most of whom get their own song. A cinematic democracy. Virtually every type of person you meet in America is here, in the Nashville music scene.
Do The Right Thing - What can be said? It's the ultimate movie there will ever be about race relations.
The Searchers - The ultimate movie about racial hatred and how it warps the soul.
Blue Velvet - The suburbs hide terrifying and very weird things.
The Godfather Movies - What can you say that hasn't been? It's the ultimate movie in the world about evil. It's the ultimate movie about what ethnic groups really do to gain acceptance in America.
The Last Picture Show - The odds are always against the survival of small towns. They have always been dying everywhere in America and the people living there are quietly desperate their whole lives.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - From the same year as Last Picture Show comes the movie about how American towns were really established. A combination of whorehouses, starvation wages, resistance of corporate control, and people willing to die to make the communities thrive.
The Social Network - It's still the ultimate American classic of the 21st century. The founding of facebook, the moral rot of privilege that goes into its founding, and all the foreboding that our internet era heralds.
The Truman Show - Now that we're on the internet, we're all on TV just like Truman, lulled into comfort at the expense of our privacy, and every day, voyeurs can learn ever more about us. If we weren't all acting for the camera in the age of TV, we all are now.
American Graffiti - It's not the movie you think it is. On the one hand, it's a nostalgic look America at its peak from a period just ten years later when decline had already set in. On the other hand, it documents the process of how smart people always leave small towns and the people they love to rot.
Birth of a Nation - Look, you gotta watch it. The language of the American artform was codified by incitement to lynching and genocide.
Taxi Driver - Cities harbor many terrible things and warp the people forced to encounter them. Travis Bickle is the story of every internet conspiracy theorist, every vigilante gunman, every untreated person with mental illness, and a sizable population of America's veterans and policemen.
Blazing Saddles - The more powerful minorities get in this country, the more morons will reject them for the color of their skin.
Doctor Strangelove - It's not my favorite movie. It's not funny except in the abstract, but if you don't recognize the madness of the people in this movie, you never lived in Washington.
Duck Soup - There's a sizeable population of leaders who are just laughing at us all the way to our destruction.
M*A*S*H - It seems absurd, but what do soldiers really do when they're not... killing people and dying... This is probably about as realistic a depiction as it gets.
It's A Wonderful Life - You can't deny it, hokey though it may be. America's survival depends on the self-sacrifice of people like George Bailey. They are the most genuine American heroes there are.
Patton - You will never get rid of soldiers who have war in their soul and seduce whole countries into believing that war is a glorious thing.
Rebel Without a Cause - New generations hate this movie. They see James Dean as a whiny narcissist. They're right, that's exactly what James Dean is in this movie, and that's exactly what they still are. American adolescence is arrogance to cover desperation. Most of us don't emerge unscarred.
A Simple Plan - Lower-middle-class, small town poverty, the desperation and loneliness of life without a future, and the ease with which desire for better is woken and spoiled into something murderous.
Being There - It basically called Reagan, W., and Trump. All you need is a person of below average intelligence to mouth a few slogans, and the powerful of the world can run a human avatar to work their levers through him.
Network - The sensationalization of American TV news. Some thought it was exaggerated at the time. Nobody does now.
Harlan County: USA - The process of how corporations divide communities.
Apocalypse Now: I bet this movie will be more and more important as the decades wear on into centuries. This is war in the raw, and compared to other countries, America has fundamentally been spared the worst. But we won't be spared forever, and when we're not, we'll see that Apocalypse Now foretold everything.
Dirty Harry - However you feel about it, it's the ultra-right wing point of view, articulated with absolute clarity and devastating effectiveness.
Mean Streets - Scorsese's first big movie and still maybe his best. If you want to see where David Simon gets nearly everything, it's all here. The movie is about being trapped in being a lowlife - the violence, the pettiness, the guilt and shame. It could just as easily take place in a coal mining town as on the streets of New York.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - Masculinity in America has been reforming since before the 20th century. If you think today's men are bad, you didn't want to encounter the men John Wayne personified in softer form. Jimmy Stewart played the new American man, who got the girl by doing the dishes, going out of his way to help friends, and sharing his fears.
Chinatown - America, like everywhere, is built by psychopaths on a bed of rot.
Election - High school is the ultimate American experience, and Election is the best movie to ever take place in a high school.
Shadow of a Doubt - Behind every functional American family is the same chapters of horror as every other family.
Lincoln: This is the political process in the raw, the sausage getting made, how it is necessary, and how it can and must be used for good because those who would use it for ill will always be among us.
City Lights and Modern Times - He starred, he directed, he did his own stunts, and when sound came, he wrote his own music. To this day, Chaplin was the most watched and recognized movie star the world has ever seen. It doesn't say much to say his influence has waned, because he was such a star because he spoke for literally the entire world. In the second half of the Gilded Age, he was the voice of poverty - and in these two features he tackles in depth the living circumstances and working circumstances of destitution.
Almosts:
The Night of the Hunter
The Sweet Smell of Success
Ace in the Hole
Mississippi Burning
The Insider
In the Company of Men
Carrie
Animal House
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Right Stuff
The Wolf of Wall Street
Dog Day Afternoon
Midnight Cowboy
All The President's Men
Hoop Dreams
Atlantic City
The Best Years of Our Lives
On the Waterfront
Red River
The Big Heat
A Streetcar Named Desire
Rocky
The Deer Hunter
Avalon
Tootsie
Casino
Boogie Nights
The Apostle
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Affliction
Vertigo
The Apartment
The Great Train Robbery
Freaks
Scarface
WALL-E
12 Years a Slave
Hopefully I'll do TV, books, music, and art before too long. Probably not....
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