Fiction That Explains Our Facts

What films and books would you choose to explain our present moment?

Sometime after our second (maybe our third) round of scotch, I posed a question to my friends, which became the basis of a game that occupied us for a solid half hour. “What four films,” I said, “would you give somebody to introduce yourself to them?” By which I meant what four films did they think best described them? And then I had an idea:

“Scratch that. Which four films would you give somebody to explain each other?”

So, if friend A wanted to explain our mutual friend B to a new person, which four films would best do the job? Our respective answers told us something not only about the friend being “explained” but the person doing the choosing. We used themes, characters, and storylines of various films to express something of the other person. One friend, instead, named a film whose production history represented something of his chosen person. There are no right answers here, only interesting ones.

Some days later, I read an interview with Henry Oliver, of the

The Common Reader

. Miller was asked, Wh…