Notes from the sketch book — Among us

This six-part retrospective I have been working on boils down to one wild idea: the way filmshandled alien invasions between 1951 and 1988 is basically a measure of American culturalanxiety. We are not just laughing at guys in cheap rubber suits or pie-tin flying saucers. Weare tracking a very real, very distinct brand of paranoia. Watching these older films today hits differently—there is a deeply unsettling mirror reflectinghow we react to the chaos of our own modern world. If there is one big takeaway from thisseries so far, it is how the whole 'alien among us' setup built an inescapable...

How do you make a movie about the total collapse of the American character without the audience running out of the theatre in a panic? In the summer of 1982, John Carpenter released The Thing, and the audience did just that—they ran, they recoiled, and they rejected it. It was the summer of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a movie that offered a suburban fairy tale of intergalactic friendship, assuring us that the universe was benign and that our own government, though clumsy, could ultimately be outsmarted by a boy on a bicycle. Spielberg gave the Reagan era exactly what...