Notes from the sketch book — Among us

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...