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The movie is hypnotic; we’re drawn along as if one thing leads to another–but nothing leads anywhere, and that’s even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope.

There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of them conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having nightmares about the plot. “Mulholland Drive” is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams–old ones and those still in development.

This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. “Mulholland Drive” works directly on the emotions, like music. Individual scenes play well by themselves, as they do in dreams, but they don’t connect in a way that makes sense–again, like dreams. The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, “I saw the weirdest movie last night.” Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.

Now comes the place the movie was building toward all of his time. Not a “climax,” nothing really exciting, only an experience that helps explain Sutter’s life up until now, and points toward his future. He takes her along to meet his dad (Kyle Chandler). A lot of the meaning here is in long shots. Sutter says the hell with it. Insults Aimee. What an affecting film this is. It respects its characters and doesn’t use them for its own shabby purposes. How deeply we care about them. Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley are so there. Being young is a solemn business when you really care about someone. Teller has a touch of John Cusack in his “Say Anything” period. Woodley is beautiful in a real person sort if way, studying him with concern, and then that warm smile. We have gone through senior year with these two. We have known them. We have been them.

When they make love the scene is handled perfectly by the director, James Ponsoldt. Neither is a virgin, neither is experienced. They perform the task seriously and with care, Aimee hands Sutter a condom and he puts in on and enters her carefully and they look solemnly into each other’s eyes. None of that wild thrashing about that embarrasses older actors, who doth protest too much.

The movie’s first hour continues on a, I dunno, realistic or naturalistic tone. It makes no point of it. It just looks at these two. They get to enjoy hanging out, and although Sutter says he has no intention of getting serious with Aimee, damned if he doesn’t ask her to the Prom. It’s not even that they fall in love; they just intensely enjoy one another’s company.

Guadagnino said in a press release shared with Our Era, “What struck me most was the strangeness of it — it’s the most accessible of his works, but what connected me to it was something I could feel within myself at the time: the idea of craving contact with somebody who reflects you, who you connect with on the deepest conceivable level.”

Craig disclosed he would have worked with Guadagnino on any opportunity, but, to be able to work with him on this specific film, Craig felt incredibly gracious. He wanted to show viewers that Lee’s addiction doesn’t define him. His discomfort with who he is does; causing him to always look for an escape in something, someone or some place.

For characters to fully come to life on-screen, as one sees with Starkey and Allerton and Craig and Lee, the cast needs to feel the story is in good hands. That comfortability and care oozing on set is what allowed Craig and Starkey to let go of who they are and go the distance emotionally and mentally to become their characters’ complicated selves.

While Queer depicts a very specific time and place, its themes - longing, loneliness, and the limits of what we can seek in another person; what they can do for us and what we must do for ourselves - remains universal.

“In my mind, the images and sets for Queer had to be coming through the eyes and mind of Burroughs,” says Guadagnino. “Thirty years after I started thinking about the novel as a movie, I was still committed to the idea of recreating Mexico City, Panama City and Ecuador as if these were artificial places reflecting the anguish and desire and imagery of Burroughs’ source material,” Guadagnino said in a press note shared with Our Era.

For the first two parts of the movie Lee has a certain undoneness to his clothing with his Hemingway silhouette. This contrast to Allerton’s uptight, refined and juvenile collegiate look creates a sort of sexual allure to him that captivates Lee upon laying eyes on Allerton for the first time. Their costumes highlight the two men’s stark incongruities - their age, their stations in life, their psychology.

The liberation created on set is what queer people seek to obtain.

There’s an oppressed feeling from both characters. Most times, it felt like Lee and Allerton were slightly cracking themselves open into who they were; always running to some place or to someone new. While the two men were able to open with one another at times, this film shows their personal struggles with being queer. Open queerness is a freedom that is priceless, but a price Lee and Allerton cannot afford. It’s this lack of freedom that many queer people experienced in the 20th century that creates a turmoil in them that leads them to feel that freedom through other means: seeking what others can offer.

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers

The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations. I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head.

Tracking Esther down at an after-hours club and marvelling at her artistry, he resolves to propel her into pictures. The number she performs at the club, “The Man That Got Away,” is one of the most astonishing, emotionally draining musical productions in Hollywood history, both for Garland’s electric, spontaneous performance and for Cukor’s realization of it. The song itself, by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, is the apotheosis of the torch song, and Garland kicks its drama up to frenzied intensity early on, as much with the searing pathos of her voice as with convulsive, angular gestures that look like an Expressionist painting come to life. (Her fury prefigures the psychodramatic forces unleashed by Gena Rowlands in the films of her husband, John Cassavetes.) Cukor, who had first worked wonders with Garland in the early days of “The Wizard of Oz” (among other things, he removed her makeup, a gesture repeated here by Maine), captures her performance in a single, exquisitely choreographed shot, with the camera dollying back to reveal the band, in shadow, with spotlights gleaming off the bells of brass instruments and the chrome keys of woodwinds.

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.

The fact that she’s having an affair with an intern from her own company, risking everything that she’s built, is part of the turn-on. The spark plug of Kidman’s performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together. She’s caught up in an erotic fever, but it’s one that’s laced with agony.

Many filmmakers have interrogated the dream factory that employs them, but only David Lynch understands that to capture its insidious beauty requires rendering it a dream itself, in all of its prismatic glory. While “Mulholland Dr.” is — and is about — a dream, it feels like a disservice to the film to describe in such elemental terms.

it’s eminently possible to pull apart the surrealism in Lynch’s masterpiece to determine “how it works,” but doing so can’t ruin or even explain the film’s magic, which lies in how Lynch organizes every element at his disposal until real and unreal become indistinguishable.

their journey from A to B animates the desperate mystery at the film’s core, which revolves around personal identity and encompasses a web of taciturn mobsters, dopey hitmen, soothsaying cowboys, and ambitious filmmakers cut down at the knees.

Watts’ disarming portrayal of a wide-eyed naif evaporates the instant Betty enters a crucial audition; when it’s over, Watts and her character(s) suddenly feel unknowable and out of reach, just like movie stars.

the ugliness of the factory’s gears become readily apparent, and “Mulholland Dr.” becomes about the despair and heartbreak that comprise Hollywood’s background.

Time and again, Yang’s characters return to the feeling that something isn’t enough. A child’s presence isn’t seen as enough comfort to his comatose grandma if he can’t think of something eloquent to say. The effort spent on a massive video game project at work inevitably means not spending enough time with family (and vice versa). And the makeshift pile of memories and bonds that we acquire over the course of a lifetime — always doing our best — never feels like enough when we compare it against our Platonic fantasies of what could have been.

The finished film feels like a parting gift from an artist — already at the end of his tragically short life — who came to appreciate that a well-lived human life contains more poetry than all of the planet’s art put together.

David is unique because the love he carries for Monica quite literally allows his mommy to be real again, and in doing so it sees him become the only son humanity has left. The super robots designate him as an original because he actually knew a living person — he’s the realest boy in the whole wide world. And so the artifice of their experiment gives way to the most genuine of truths:  Love doesn’t exist in defiance of time — love is the defiance of time. And like David, the movie that Spielberg has made about him will never age a day.

Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players move and where they hit the ball. It’s an ideal representation of conflict, a perfect stage for pitting one competitor against another, so it’s no wonder that the game comes to stand in for all sorts of different things off the court.

The “Battle of Sexes” match in 1973, between Billie Jean King and then-retired Bobby Riggs, has since been mythologized as a turning point for women’s sports. If the social allegory of the Ashe-Graeber match was subtextual, the one in this spectacle—which ended in a decisive victory for King over the cartoonishly chauvinistic Riggs—was glaringly explicit. At a time when women’s liberation was becoming a force that threw all sorts of conventions into question, and plenty of people were for or against the gains of the movement, seeing the debate represented by a game of tennis surely had a comforting appeal. For those with more regressive beliefs, rooting for Bobby was certainly easier than really articulating a justification for maintaining massive pay disparities between men and women, both within and outside of professional tennis.

Within their love triangle, tension arises with the dawning recognition that in a one-on-one sport, there’s always another person who doesn’t have a place on the court. Save for the night they meet, when Tashi induces Art and Patrick to kiss each other for her entertainment, the three of them rarely engage with one another at the same time: Someone is always watching from the stands, whether literally or metaphorically.

During Patrick and Tashi’s brief romance, a post-coital conversation seamlessly transitions into a discussion about Patrick’s poor performance as a pro, and eventually becomes a referendum on why their relationship doesn’t work. Confused, and trying to make sense of it all as their banter swiftly changes definitions, Patrick asks: “Are we still talking about tennis?” “We’re always talking about tennis,” Tashi replies. Frustrated, Patrick tersely retorts: “Can we not?”

As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their 1980 book,Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” In other words, we’re always talking about things in terms of other things—even if it’s not always as obvious as it is in Challengers. Metaphors are more than just a poetic device; they’re fundamental to the way language is structured.

No matter what issue is at stake, or how grand it may be, it can always be reduced to an individual’s performance on the court.

While Patrick is still dating Tashi, and Art is transparently trying to steal his best friend’s girl, Patrick playfully accuses Art of playing “percentage tennis”—a patient strategy of hitting low-risk shots and waiting for your opponent to mess up

Art asks for Tashi’s permission to retire once the season is over. Art knows that this would be the end of their professional relationship—he would no longer be able to play dutiful pupil to Tashi. But it might also be the end of whatever spark animated their love in the first place, as you can’t play “good fucking tennis” in retirement. Tashi says she will leave Art if he doesn’t beat Patrick in the final. Tired of playing, but unable to escape the game, Art curls up in his wife’s lap and cries.

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying. And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic.

Living in an immigrant, multilingual family will open your eyes to all the ways humans can misunderstand each other. My story isn’t unique, but I grew up unable to communicate in my family’s “default language.” I was forbidden from speaking Korean as a child. My parents were fluent in spoken and written English, but their accents often left them feeling unwelcome in America. They didn’t want that for me, and so I grew up with perfect, unaccented English. I could understand Korean and, as a small child, could speak some. But eventually, I lost that ability.

I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.

This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated.

It made everything twice as complicated. I shared caretaking duties with non-English speaking relatives. Doctor visits — both here and in Korea — had to be bilingual, which often meant appointments were longer, more stressful, expensive, and full of misunderstandings. Oftentimes, I’d want to connect with my stepmom or aunt, both to coordinate care and vent about things only we could understand. None of us could go beyond “I’m sad,” “I come Monday, you go Tuesday,” or “I’m sorry.” We struggled alone, together.

You need much less to “survive” in another language. That’s where Google Translate excels. It’s handy when you’re traveling and need basic help, like directions or ordering food. But life is lived in moments more complicated than simple transactions with strangers. When I decided to pull off my mom’s oxygen mask — the only machine keeping her alive — I used my crappy pidgin to tell my family it was time to say goodbye. I could’ve never pulled out Google Translate for that. We all grieved once my mom passed, peacefully, in her living room. My limited Korean just meant I couldn’t partake in much of the communal comfort. Would I have really tapped a pin in such a heavy moment to understand what my aunt was wailing when I knew the why?

For high-context languages like Japanese and Korean, you also have to be able to translate what isn’t said — like tone and relationships between speakers — to really understand what’s being conveyed. If a Korean person asks you your age, they’re not being rude. It literally determines how they should speak to you. In Japanese, the word daijoubu can mean “That’s okay,” “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” “Yes,” “No, thank you,” “Everything’s going to be okay,” and “Don’t worry” depending on how it’s said.

In their quest for social change, givers like Arnold are reluctant to support “causes”; they want to “solve problems—big ones,” as Callahan puts it. But, in Arnold’s case, lessons had to be learned along the way. His early forays into philanthropy, including an effort to reform public pensions, were scorned, with critics noting that Enron’s collapse had resulted in the loss of billions of dollars in pension funds.

Moskovitz and Tuna weren’t keen to embrace traditional development organizations, which they are inclined to view as lethargic and bureaucratic. For them, grant making is akin to venture-capital investing: they want to act decisively and disrupt traditional models and structures. They have contributed $32 million to a group called Give Directly, which is not interested in vaccinating children, digging wells, building toilets, and creating schools. Rather, it gives cash handouts to the poor, who are free to spend the money as they wish. Callahan is skeptical of the ideology guiding Moskovitz and Tuna—who favor Silicon Valley mantras such as “empower individuals over institutions”—but he knows they are too influential to ignore. The couple will give away hundreds of millions of dollars every year. They are not yet thirty-five years old.

There are growing concerns about the influence and reach of the superwealthy: “Philanthropy is becoming a much stronger power center,” Callahan says, “and, in some areas, is set to surpass government in its ability to shape society’s agenda.” The state has retreated; the givers have advanced.

in many U.S. cities, elected officials are overwhelmed by debt obligations, and as a result have precious little money to spend on parks, museums, and other public services. The givers have no such constraints. In Boston, the Barr Foundation has done much to shape the city’s arts, culture, and political milieu. In Houston, Richard Kinder is helping to forge a massive network of urban trails. In Detroit, the Kresge Foundation is contributing funds for a new light-rail system. In New York, the Leon Levy Foundation has helped to revitalize a pair of Brooklyn landmarks, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. These are worthy endeavors, but Callahan is right to express concern about a fundamental shift of power from a “hollowed-out public sector” to elite private givers who are not fully accountable and operate in dark corners.

In 2008 Stephen A. Schwarzman, another cofounder of Blackstone, gave $100 million to the New York Public Library at a moment when the Library was secretly undertaking a dubious real estate and construction scheme. For nearly a decade, the NYPL refused to reveal how Schwarzman’s money was being utilized. Only in recent months did the Library account for the gift’s use: the $100 million formed part of the endowment and will soon be used for new renovation projects.

Under an initiative backed by Broad and like-minded funders, L.A. could add hundreds of new charter schools in a decade. Broad is quick to refute allegations that he is overreaching: “I think everyone is getting heard,” he informed Callahan. “We’re getting heard, the philanthropists. The unions and administrators are getting heard. Overall, we’re creating debate.”

That may be so, but increasingly the debate is among people who already agree. The Givers makes a persuasive case that the superwealthy are expanding their influence at a moment when many Americans are bolting from civic and political life. The author, drawing on the scholarship of Theda Skocpol, evokes an earlier era when mass-membership organizations such as trade unions flourished, giving ordinary citizens a certain degree of influence vis-à-vis elite power structures. These days, he writes, “We’re fast moving toward a future where private funders, not elected officials and the citizens they answer to, choreograph more of public life.”

Of the top eighty American foundations, only twenty-six post detailed information about their current grant making on public databases. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, endowed by Warren’s wealth, “has no real website and the information available on its grant making through tax returns is always a few years out of date,” Callahan notes.

The Givers is alive to these and other contradictions in the philanthropic sector and poses thorny questions for elected officials and nonprofit leaders: why is a check to a right-wing think tank tax-deductible but a check to a conservative senator is not? Why are many large foundations spending a mere 5 percent of their assets each year when they can easily afford to spend more? Why do so many foundations exist in perpetuity, instead of “spending down” and closing their doors? Why is the sector so lightly regulated by government, particularly the IRS? Finally, what exactly is the public getting in exchange for colossal tax breaks granted for philanthropy, which mainly go to rich people?

The Givers, which went to press before Donald Trump was elected, concludes with a stark and prescient warning: the nonprofit sector should initiate its own reforms, before politicians do it with a heavier and more mischievous hand. “It’s not okay,” he warns, “to settle for a status quo in which the foundation world remains forever a black box.” His proposals for change—the creation of a new U.S. federal office of charitable affairs, a reevaluation of what should qualify for tax-exempt status, trustee boards that are more inclusive and transparent—are not likely to be embraced in Trump’s Washington, however.

Katz, writing after Trump’s victory, argued that Callahan has sidestepped the central issue: Our current dire political situation is the product of both traditional American anti-statism and a very different and deliberate assault on the state by plutocrats. We do not have so many billionaires, and thus mega-foundations, because we now have a larger and more adept entrepreneurial class, but because the structure of (mostly federal) economic policy has been captured by people of wealth, who have rewritten the laws to enable themselves to become extraordinarily rich…It seems to me that the new plutocrats are in fact the problem, and they are quite unlikely to be part of the solution, as Callahan contends.

My own wish is that Callahan had confronted, in a more pungent way, the structural features of the behemoth that looms before him: the grant-making model itself, upon which modern American philanthropy rests. Foundation leaders advocate transparency, inclusion, and equality, but they operate in a strikingly hierarchical manner. They are a cloistered elite.

Does this top-down model—in which grantees spend immense time and energy chasing cash—inhibit the growth of dues-paying organizations, which may be more vibrant and democratic than nonprofit organizations dominated by an aloof board of trustees and an executive director? Passages in The Givers suggest that Callahan has pondered these matters, but he stops short of a full critique.

There are now more than ninety thousand private foundations, whose assets total $700 billion. These foundations supply money to more than a million tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations. Some of these nonprofits are financially secure, but many chafe under immense anxiety as they await annual grants from their masters in the foundation suites.

Bridging the gap between James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” remains one the greatest and most instructive movies of its kind because it shows that denial is the real ectoplasm that binds ghost stories together, and love just the most satisfying conduit through which it might be made flesh.

The great project of someone’s life might be the pursuit of a sustainable balance between doubt and conviction, or fear and security; most people will construct and/or cling to whatever answers might spare them from the mortal horror of being hounded by certain questions. To that end, it’s no coincidence that many of the most unsettling ghost stories ever told revolve around characters who refuse to accept that they’re in one to begin with, as no other genre is so fundamentally dependent upon the power of denial. Likewise, no other genre is so determined to erode it.

Textured with Williams’ usual grain and kept alive by his keen eye for detail, “The Sweet East” essentially sees America as a series of concentric cults. Lillian is like a teenage Virgil leading us on a tour through some kind of stupid new hell where anyone who believes in anything does so with an all-defining religiosity that demands to be mocked.

Everyone sees her as the perfect screen on which to project their own narrow view of the world. That’s true of the self-obsessed filmmakers who “discover” Lillian on the street (they’re played by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris, both very funny as hyper-talkative artists who assume that everyone sees the genius of their inane period piece). It’s true of the hunky movie star who turns her into the paparazzi’s latest cause célèbre (Jacob Elordi), and it’s true of the set PA Mohammed (Rish Shah), who’s convinced that he alone can “save” her.

She always was something, she never is something, and the movie around her seems unsure if that’s sustainable. On the one hand, Lillian is the only character who avoids the embarrassment that naturally attends sincerity, and there’s a palpable degree of wish fulfillment baked into a character who so convincingly doesn’t give a shit (even though everyone is obsessed with her). To paraphrase one of the people she encounters, Lillian is Teflon enough to defy a digital culture that force-feeds her a series of unworthy choices, and she emerges from every encounter unscathed… whereas other characters are liable to get their heads blown off. In a film that adopts a “South Park”-like approach to making fun of everyone, Lillian is never the butt of the joke.

On the other hand, there are a few fleeting moments in which “The Sweet East” confronts its heroine with something approaching self-awareness. Her wanton use of the word “retarded” — a slur that the Dimes Square crowd embarrassingly tried to reclaim as an expression of their freedom from liberal moralizing — feels at first like an unfortunate side effect of a movie that allegedly features appearances from Peter Vack and Betsey Brown (their names appear in the credits, but I never clocked them on screen). Later, however, someone coolly confronts Lillian about that habit, leaving her at a total loss for words. When another character snipes that they “don’t like being told things about myself,” it almost sounds like the movie is admitting to a posture of its own — that it’s recognizing that lack of belief as a belief system unto itself.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.