How Hollywood Stopped Making Movies About America
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- The author responds to a New York Times listicle, "What Is the Definitive Movie About America?," by nominating five candidates: "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), "The Godfather" (1972), "Nashville" (1975), "Rocky" (1976), and "Dirty Harry" (1971).
- The column argues that studio-era Hollywood built an aspirational "white-picket-fence" image of America — seen in Westerns, "12 Angry Men," and "In the Heat of the Night" — that audiences strove to achieve.
- New Hollywood films "Midnight Cowboy," "Chinatown," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Dog Day Afternoon," and "Shampoo" dramatized, in the author's telling, the disconnect between American ideals and lived reality, channeling cynicism and despair back into a strain of idealism.
- The author characterizes modern American cinema as dominated by fantasy — distant galaxies, horror "jump-scare funhouses," and candy-colored animated landscapes — rather than films engaging with contemporary America.
- The essay flags "One Battle After Another" (2024) and "Oppenheimer" (2023) as rare recent exceptions that took "a spiritual inventory" of current American discord and the legacy of the atomic bomb.
- The author draws a line from "Dirty Harry" and early-'70s revenge thrillers to the worldview that grew into right-wing talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Why it matters: The essay reframes the "best American movie" question as a civic one — arguing that Hollywood's pivot to fantasy coincides with a contested definition of democracy on the 250th July 4th, making the absence of a definitive American film itself a referendum on the industry's relevance. It enters a long-running debate about whether mainstream cinema still reflects national life, and frames two recent films ("Oppenheimer" and "One Battle After Another") as proof that audiences will respond when Hollywood tries.
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