Dividing Movie Types Between “Coastal Elites” And “Ordinary Americans” Is Tempting But Dangerous

Thoughts of “the bubble,” and of its rhetorical cousin “real America” kept coming up as I tried to organize my feelings about the year’s movies. The phrases are both booby traps—labels that, when applied to culture, seek to impose a divide between art that is oblivious and art that is aware, or between movies that are about and for honest plain-spoken Americans (current example: Patriots Day) and movies that are for “coastal elites” who think rural white dudes are scary as hell (I don’t know … Nocturnal Animals?