One of the best documentaries I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January was Escape Fire, a look at doctors, patients, and hospital administrators who are trying to bend the curve on health care, both by looking at costs and insurance, but even more importantly, at what we get for our money and our insurance. From Sgt. Robert Yates, who makes the decision to kick his addiction to pain medication after suffering serious combat injuries in Afghanistan and recovers with the help of alternative therapies as part of the military’s grappling with overprescription, to Dr. Erin Martin, who moves from clinic to clinic looking for a way to practice patient-centric medicine and to focus on outcomes rather than services, the movie raises questions far beyond the problems addressed by the Affordable Care Act. I spoke with the movie’s co-director Matthew Heineman about how to tackle some of the biggest, hardest changes in health care. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There are a lot of different stories in this movie—in a way, it reminded me of reading through Atul Gwande’s archives at The New Yorker. How did you find your subjects for the movie? And here there any who didn’t make the cut?

I think from day one, Susan [Frömke, Heinman's co-director] and I started making the film about three years ago as the health care debate was heating up. Like so many Americans, we were so confused about all the rhetoric, all the hyperbole. Health care was dividing our country. We wanted to cut through that and find out why our system was so broken, and who was out there trying to change it? We ddn’t want to make a film that was just about the problem, we wanted to be about solutions. We found characters and storylines who looked at the story through different angles…Like many films that we’ve done, we spent six to eight months doing research before we even turned on the camera…It was a pretty organic process. We met a few of our experts early on in that process, Dr. Andy Weil and Dr. Dean Ornish, and through them met some of our subjects…It’s a really complicated, wonky subject. So we know we also had to make it interesting, make it entertaining. We didn’t just want to make a film with a bunch of talking heads. We knew we wanted powerful, human stories that would carry the narrative, so at all times, that was in the back of our heads, how can we find characters that tell larger truths about our health care system, but that also have some sort of narrative arc. We found that in Dr. Martin, the primary care physician that’s struggling in a system that’s preventing her from practicing the way she wants to practice, and to find a place where she can practice the kind of medicine she wants to, [in] Sgt. Yates.

So much of the focus of our debate over health care reform is about getting people the insurance that will let them pay for care. But Escape Fire seems to be oriented towards the next debate: what it is that we’re paying for in the first place. I loved Sgt. Yates story because it got at the heart of what our expectations are for our care, and what we’re open to.

Completely. I think health care is incredibly, incredibly important. But i think the key question that our film presents is access to what? Access to a disease care or a health care system? Access to expensive care, to high-tech care, or oriented towards health care and patient-centered care? So many of these films are preach to the choir and are so partisan. We really didn’t want to make a partisan film. We wanted to make a film that would bring all stake-holders to the table…We screened the film at 62 medical schools. Last week we screened it at the Pentagon. And I think what we’ve found is that change doesn’t really have to come from Washington, change can really come at the local level, community by community, and hospital by hospital.
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At Sundance, I got a chance to see Arbitrage, the financial thriller from director Nicholas Jarecki that opened last weekend, that’s one of the first movies about the financial crisis to actually be about the financial crisis. The movie follows finance titan Robert Miller (Richard Gere) at a moment when he’s about to sell the firm he created from the ground up, even though he’s made what could be a disastrously bad bed on Russian copper. And as his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling), who has grown up working in the company and doesn’t want to sell, begins to figure out that the firm he’s selling is a house of cards, Robert crashes a car he’s driving, killing his mistress. As he struggles to cover up her death with the help of a young man (Nate Parker) whose father worked for Robert, a detective (Tim Roth) desperate to nail Robert starts closing in on him. I spoke with director Nicholas Jarecki about growing up in a family of commodity brokers, not wanting to just tell Bernie Madoff’s story, and why we love financial bubbles. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to actually start by asking you sort of where the concept–not just for the film as a whole–but for having it be sort of a prediction algorithm at the heart of the movie, instead of pure Ponzi scheme. We’ve seen so much of Bernie Madoff in the pop culture response to the financial crisis, but I was curious about the decision to have that be at the center.

Well, I thought a lot about Madoff: when I started writing the story he had just been caught and I was reading all this wonderful financial journalism in Vanity Fair, of all places. Greydon Carter had commissioned these pieces, which he collected into a book called The Great Hangover. It was all this wonderful financial journalism from great writers like Michael Lewis, and real inside stuff. And I was pretty familiar with this world because my parents were commodity brokers, and still are. And so I know a lot about business and was around it all my life in New York. But Madoff was less interesting to me because I read something he said in jail, “Fuck my victims. I carried them for 25 years and now I’m doing 125 years.” So to me, that was very sociopathic, and the idea of a Ponzi scheme also too simple. I felt like I’d seen that movie, even 25 years ago. Even 25 years ago I feel like I’ve seen that movie, you know?

So what I was more interested in was kind of a man, once good, after many years of success perhaps read one too many of his own press releases, and down the slope he goes. And for that story, I needed a financial crime that was less overt, a little more of a slippery slope, if you will, you know, something that he could get into, make this illiquid investment and you know “Okay we need a little more time”…That’s the thing he never really saw coming, and he says that to his daughter. He says, “It’s like a plane crash–it just happens.” So, even the most brilliant minds in the world–I know from personal experience–can make mistakes like this, and the world can turn upside down, and the South Pole is north.

Well, it also struck me that while Bernie Madoff could have happened at any time and place, and the fact that he was exposed in the middle of the financial crisis, his crimes have been conflated with the crisis, even though they don’t seem to have the same root symptoms. You seemed to find something actually much more symptomatic of the economic trouble we’re in–that sense of certainty that the market would always go up despite past lessons.

Well I’ve lived now, personally, through three bubbles. ’87, [the] ’00 tech bubble, and now the housing bubble. And I’m 33 and I think I’m just starting to conclude that we like bubbles. It’s something that we do. We like to build and get really enthusiastic and “Let’s go get that house, flip it, it’s no money down….The sky’s the limit!” And it’s not. And that’s when people get carried away. I think that’s kind of a common human thing. So in a way, I understand Robert Miller – he was trying to make a good deal. He was trying to make money. It was too good to be true. Unfortunately it was too good to be true. But it could have gone the other way…These brilliant hedge fund guys, they took some HUGE gambles. And what if those gambles hadn’t work? They easily couldn’t have. So we see in Cosmopolis, a film that just came out that some friends made, the main character and he’s made a big bet on the Yuan, the Chinese currency, and he loses his whole fortune in one day. And it can happen. And I know people it’s happened to.
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I loved The Sessions (then titled The Surrogate) when I saw it at Sundance, and I wish the trailer captured a little bit more of the movie’s tart humor. What’s unusual about The Sessions, which is based on an article by the late Mark O’Brien, isn’t just that it deals with the sexual lives of disabled people, an almost untouchable subject in modern popular culture, but that it’s a movie that is directly about the disparate experiences of people with disabilities without encouraging the audience to pity the main character:

Mark is funny, in the movie. He’s smart. He’s eloquent. He faces something he’s anxious about—losing his virginity—directly and with a lot of self-awareness. He’s not a saint, which is a relief. Mark gets to make mistakes and cross boundaries, but he also takes responsibility for those errors and grows from them. In other words, he’s a specific person, rather than a stand-in for a set of traits or the means by which able-bodied people learn tolerance and get to be awed by Mark’s perseverance and hope.

I think we need a lot more of this in pop culture. People with disabilities have different experiences of the world than able-bodied people do, in a whole range of areas. Folks with disabilities have higher unemployment rates than able-bodied people, and a lack of adaptive technologies can make it harder for them to access educational opportunities and appropriate housing. But the fact that our society and political system have been slow to accomodate disabled people, and that disabled people live involve different challenges and frustrations, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities are pitiable or saintly, or that their experiences are wholly different from able-bodied people’s. Mark’s intimacy issues and fear that he’s unlovable may spring from different wells than your standard romantic comedy heroine’s, for example, but the movie is a variation on a conventional romantic comedy structure. He is definitely not your Judd Apatow-style schlub—he’s an accomplished poet, as O’Brien was in real life—but his conversations with his priest (a very funny William H. Macy) and his caregiver (Moon Bloodgood) are funny in some of the same frank ways. It’s depressing to watch pop culture, and people more broadly, get caught up in disabilities such that they fail to see the people, and the characters, who have disabilities but are hardly the sum of them.

Compliance, Craig Zobel’s terrific movie about a real series of events, in which fast-food restaurant employees were convinced by a prank caller posing as a police officer to detain and strip-search their coworkers, on the grounds that they’ve been accused of theft, is rooted in things like the Milgram experiment, which tested the extent to which group morality could drive individuals to do heinous things to other people:

But the movie, which comes out in August, is also subtly and importantly about how that desire to comply with a prevailing sense of what’s right is heightened when the police are involved (or people believe the police to be involved). In Compliance, the man on the phone takes Sandra, a supervisor at a fast food restaurant, someone who doesn’t have very much authority, and asks her to take on some of his. He tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), one of her employees, has stolen money from a customer’s purse. It’s a small accusation, but it’s a weightier matter than the day-to-day operation of a restaurant. Until that point in the day, the biggest problem Sandra’s faced has been who left a freezer open, spoiling food. Even if she finds the culprit in that case, it’s a no-win situation for her: Sandra’s still going to be held responsible. The call from the man who says he’s a police officer, and his request for her help in detaining Becky, gives Sandra an opportunity to do something for which she’ll earn credit, even acclaim. Helping the police gives Sandra the opportunity, or so she thinks, to be not just a good employee, but a good citizen.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to see the law enforced and for justice to be done. But that’s not actually exactly the same thing as doing what the police ask, all of the time, without question. Compliance is about the danger of giving someone else the ability to validate your goodness and to ask you to collaborate with them without asking them to meet high standards of responsibility and ethics or verifying that they’re following the law and that their requests are in accordance with it. The mere assertion by the man on the phone that he’s a police officer is enough to get Sandra to follow his directions. And even if the man on the phone had been able to verify that he was a police officer, there’s something frightening about the implication that Sandra wouldn’t have questioned his orders even as they get more baroque and invasive. She values the promise of approval too much to verify or consider any of the steps she’s told she has to perform to receive it. There’s a lot of cultural conditioning behind Sandra’s values and her assumptions, whether it’s the way police procedurals regularly treat brutality as a way of communicating the stress of the job rather than a sign of rot, or the idea, presented even in a forthcoming episode of a wannabe-skeptical show like The Newsroom, that the police almost always arrest the right person and prosecutors almost always secure convictions. But trusting that a job title or a badge suddenly removes the possibility of fallibility, weakness, or evil from a person is a dangerous thing. Compliance will probably be read and reviewed as the story of a bizarre one-off incident. But that string of incidents couldn’t have happened outside a larger cultural context.

Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles was one of the first movies to sell at the Sundance Film Festival, and one of the best documentaries I saw there. The movie follows timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie as they seek to build the largest house in America, a palatial mansion they’ve dubbed Versailles. In addition to exploring America’s consumption addictions, Queen of Versailles is also a concise explanation of the roots of the financial crisis: the Siegels’ business relies on cheap credit, both to fund the construction of new timeshare developments, and to get customers to take out loans so they can afford the second homes that are, for them, an embodiment of the American dream. The movie follows the Siegels as they overextend themselves on their home, and as they experience the consequences of their customers’ defaults. It’s a sharp, surprisingly sympathetic story. I spoke with Greenfield about her relationship with the Siegels, American consumption, and how the fate of the 1 percent impacts the 99 percent. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you first get interested in the Siegels’ story?

I’m a photographer also, and I had been working on a project about wealth and consumerism. My last film had been a short called Kids + Money. I was photographing Donatalla Versace. Jackie was one of Donatella’s best customers at the time. I made a picture of Jackie’s gold, blingy purses that ended up being in Time’s 100 Best Pictures. Jackie told me about building America’s biggest house. In [another] picture [Jackie showed her], there were 7 kids on the steps of her private jet. I was also working a project about women and aging, and the fact that she had all of these kids, I was just interested in her as a subject…I was interested in her character as a billionaire. She didn’t act like we expect rich people to act, she didn’t have this protective veil that we expect to come with wealth. There was that dichotomy that, eventually, spoke to me about the American dream and the connection between this house and the American dream.

You mentioned that Jackie was different from other rich people you’d encountered. What was the difference?

In my own work on wealth, when I photographed rich kids in Los Angeles for example, there was a jadedness that I never saw in Jackie. She loves the stuff. She wasn’t part of upper-class society. She didn’t use the money as a way to join a country club with other rich people. She would socialize with people from her family, which was all kind of part of the entourage, and they’re not rich. Her relationship with the domestic staff was non-traditional and non-heirarchical in a way. She didn’t have the protective barriers of wealth. She’s very open, very generous. I saw in her a way to document an inside view of wealth…The thing about Jackie and David is they kind of embody our virtues and our flaws of the American scene…As over the top as Jackie is, I’ve gone to Costco and loaded up on a cart of stuff I did not intend to buy because it’s two for one or bigger is better. I started out with this inside view of the rich, but at a certain point, it turned, and that turned for me when they had to put their house on the market. A lightbulb went on, and I realized they were similar to people that I’d photographed in foreclosure cities, in the crash in Dubai. It became an allegory for the overreaching.

What do you see as David and Jackie’s virtues? Much of the movie is about their mistakes.

I guess what I mean by the virtues is they’re both rags to riches stories. Jackie came from humble origins, was really smart, and then, a flaw of American culture, realized that her beauty would get her further than her engineering degree. David also came from nothing and is totally devoted to his work. In a way, they are success stories. But what they did with their success was build bigger and bigger. As they fall financially, you do see them finding other values. And for Jackie, it wasn’t until the hardships came, that I really saw her as a survivor. In the beginning, with all the stuff, you wonder if you love him for money.
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The Invisible War, the Kirby Dick-directed documentary about the sexual assault epidemic in the military, was one of the best movies I saw at Sundance. Its exploration of the culture of which scandals like the Tailhook case are just a symptom is powerful. And the movie takes on a rarely-discussed subject, how sexual assault affects men both as victims and as through their wives’, daughters’, and parents’ trauma. The Invisible War is a difficult movie to watch, but it’s a moving and bracing one, and it’s helped spark a national conversation about the damage done by indifference and abdications of responsibility within the chain of command. I spoke to the movie’s producer, Amy Ziering, about finding men and women who were willing to come forward about to share their stories, and how the military can lead society—if it decides it wants to change. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m curious how both of you came to this subject matter.

We read an article in Salon about four or five years ago, and we were kind of shocked and appalled by what we’d read, and started doing our own investigating, and found [the story] was correct if not worse. Of course, we’d been aware of things like Tailhook and Aberdeen, and these scandals that were reported in the press. But we hadn’t been aware that it was an ongoing problem in the way that it was. The statistics were one of the things the article helped us point us towards. These flare-ups that were reported in the press as these one-off situations were symptoms of an underlying chronic condition. They would get attention when there was this cluster issue that rose to the surface. It’s misperceived in that way…It’s served the military and promoted what we we have called a coverup. Its ideal situtation is [assaults are] presented as a strange, aberrant occurrance as opposed to something that’s ongoing and daily. They do temporary damage control and everything moves on.

How did you find your subjects? Given the consequences women often face for speaking out about being sexually assaulted, it couldn’t have been easy.

We did extensive investigative work. we went to VA centers and put out flyers. we talked to everyone who was an advocate in any way, we used social media, we had a Facebook page. One reason this issue hasn’t come forward is it doesn’t breed naturally outspoken advocates. The nature of the trauma is so severe and radically debilitating that people are reticent to speak up because of the retaliation they’ve experienced, and because of the difficulties they’re having in their day to day lives. It’s hard to become an activist when you can barely get out of bed…That was a very long process. By the time we decided who we were going forward with as our main subjects, we built a good, trusting relationship. We were careful to preselect people who we thought would have the stability, wherewithal, fortitude to handle public scrutiny when the film came out. The last thing we wanted this to do was negatively affect anybody. Any interview, we said your mental health comes first, we can stop and start.

How have they reacted to seeing the movie?

Hugely positively. It’s been life-changing just to feel like they’re not alone, they have this community, and to feel suported and believed. That’s a huge difference to someone who’s been marginalized. Two of them said it saved their marriage. Many of them, when they’ve shown relatives, the change in the relatives’ attitudes really improved all their family relations…We’ve had several people offer to fix Kori’s jaw, and we have three families that have banded together to undertake that.
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It’s going to be an excellent summer for movies. As I’ll lay out tomorrow, The Avengers levels up the superhero movie. The fact that there’s already talk of a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel means we could be headed into a world with two big action franchises anchored by women. Prometheus looks visually and conceptually astounding. The Dark Knight promises to be a visually and intellectually rich conclusion to a powerful, darkly moral trilogy. Brave will finally put a girl at the center of a Pixar frame. But in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I wanted to call your attention to a movie that won’t get a third of the promotional heft of any of these movies but that is audacious and wonderful, intimately engaged with questions of poverty and global warming, and that features a little girl as a superhero. I refer, of course, to Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was my favorite movie at Sundance, and finally has a trailer out:

In addition to being just hugely fresh in perspective and subject matter, Beasts is interesting to me because some of the special effects were crowdsourced. I’m curious to see how audiences react to them—and to what y’all think of this trailer amidst a blockbuster glut.

We’re at a moment when a cohort of actors who cut their teeth in hipster-friendly projects like Party Down and the Frat Pack movies are coming of age. Whether it’s Lizzy Caplan’s emergence as a viable romantic comedy star thanks to her wonderful turn on New Girl; or Adam Scott’s Parks and Recreation-minted heartthrob status; the wave of goodwill Jason Segel is riding right now after his successful reboot of the Muppts franchise; or Aaron Paul’s search for the role that will take him beyond his turn as morally conflicted meth cooker Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, these actors are all starring in romantic comedies this year. It’s fascinating to see what, if anything, is different about this well-worn trope as taken on by actors less invested in traditional Hollywood glamor than in self-lacerating humor. Mostly it seems that they’re just as invested in marriage and commitment as prior generations, but the obstacles to their happiness are different.

For the younger set, there’s Damsels in Distress, a decidedly odd-looking comedy about a group of college girls (played by actresses way too old for the setting) out to save their classmates from the scourges of depression and cads with donuts and tap-dancing. The movie’s quirky enough that I can’t tell if there’s an abstinence metaphor or there will be an abstinence subplot here. But there’s still something interesting about a college sex comedy framed around a very different framework and with characters who have very different priorities:

Then, there’s Save the Date, which doesn’t have a formal trailer yet, but is one of the movies from Sundance that’s stuck with me most closely. Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan play sisters Beth and Sarah, the former about to get engaged to Andrew (Martin Starr) a drummer in a rock band, the latter shaken by an unexpected proposal from Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), the frontman for that same band. When Sarah breaks up with Kevin, she embarks on casual relationship that turns into something more serious. To a certain extent, it’s a movie with very conventional themes: love can show up at surprising times! Marriages are more important than weddings! But it’s interesting to see those themes play out in a setting and with semi-bohemian characters who might have rejected marriage in another generation of movies:

Bridesmaids let it be known that sometimes women go a little crazy in the process of planning a wedding, even when they’re happy for the bride. Bachelorette, which also stars Caplan along with Kirsten Dunst and Isla Fisher apparently goes much darker, exposing a group of women who get decidedly vicious when the least conventionally attractive of their number gets engaged before they do. I’ll be curious to see if the movie is honest in its darkness or an occasion to paint all women as catty, status-obsessed, jealous, and willing to tear each other up:

At Sundance, one of the most powerful documentaries I saw as Love Free or Die, director Macky Alston’s chronicle of Bishop Gene Robinson’s fight to get the Episcopal Church in America to recognize gay clergy and gay couples’ marriages—as well as the story of Robinson’s own wedding to his long-time partner in New Hampshire. In addition to being a moving story about Bishop Robinson’s life and work, Love Free or Die is a counter to a major progressive assumption: that the gay rights movement will have to proceed largely without the help of major American religious institutions.It’s also the rare Sundance movie that you can help bring to your own community: details on how to do that are available on the movie’s website. I spoke to Bishop Robinson and to Alston in Park City about making the movie and arguing that gay people religious people shouldn’t have to give up their faith—and that the church shouldn’t have to lose its members. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I was wondering if maybe both of you could talk about the experience of working together and for Bishop Robinson, about moving to the center of the frame in a documentary instead of being one of many subjects?

Bishop Robinson: This was a big decision for me, to allow a film crew into my life and my family’s life for, you know, three or four years…I wouldn’t have done it with someone I didn’t trust implicitly. And Macky has just been true to his word about doing this film with great sensitivity and taste, and we so agree on the message of the film, which is that love trumps everything, and when people get to know us as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people, it changes everything, because then they’re not responding to an issue, they’re responding to a person.

I guess also, in the back of my mind, you know, all those kids that I hear from, literally every week, who are in some little town in Idaho or Alabama or halfway around the world, who seem to draw inspiration from my being public about who I am, and yet saying, you know, you don’t have to give up your religion and your faith just because you’re gay. And I wanted to make this film for them as well.

You talked about letting the camera crew into your life. Was that stressful? What were those conversations like with your family about deciding to go ahead, as well?

Bishop Robinson: I think they trusted me and my trusting Macky. And, you know, my husband – my legal husband now, but my partner for 24 years – is not a public person, particularly, and, you know, he didn’t know he was signing on for this 24 years ago…But he also believes, you know, believes in the power of integrity, and the power of one person’s story to inspire courage in many, many people. And our greatest hope for this film is that everyone will see themselves as a prophet, as a potential voice to call their Aunt Betty or to talk to that co-worker that works next to them about the gay and lesbian people they know in their lives, and that the discrimination that has historically been true for us is just simply wrong, so that each person can become empowered to do justice work, which is what this is really about. It’s really not enough to be compassionate, although that’s wonderful…Beyond compassion, we need justice. And that’s true to the Biblical record, that we’re, yes, we’re called upon to love, but we’re also called upon to fight for justice for those who are marginalized. And so our greatest hope is that this film will empower people to do that.

This is a documentary, but it fits into a larger pop-culture spectrum that has become more accepting of gay love stories but that doesn’t often bring the church or faith into those stories.

Bishop Robinson: Well, and, to be honest, when the church is brought into it, it’s almost always a negative. And I think the culture is behind the times a little bit, because the culture has so often written off religious institutions. They don’t realize that religious institutions are changing, and they’re changing at a remarkably fast pace. And I think one of the things this film will do is catch people up on the remarkable progress we are making in religious institutions for the full inclusion and acceptance of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Macky Alston: The research shows also that we cannot skirt religious communities if we want freedom, our freedom, LGBT equality in the US, that the number one reason that people are voting against us is their religious convictions. And so…we have to speak from our own faith convictions, and we have to be engaged with people of faith to help them understand, help us understand how we can be better Christians, or Jews, or Muslims, living into a number one mandate of our traditions: to love your neighbor, whoever that neighbor is, and to do justice. So helping people understand the compatibility—in fact, the mandate—in their faith traditions to love and to stand for justice. That’s the only way that we’re gonna get the votes in 2012 in these critical states like Minnesota, Maryland, North Carolina, Maine. And one of my struggles with secular organizing in this movement is that, I think, folks just hope that we don’t have to go there, that in a separation of church and state-based society, we can stay separate.
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Over the past week or so, I’ve gotten more and more irritated by the indiscriminate use of the word “controversial” to describe art and pop culture. It’s a classic case of a word not meaning what the people who use it seem to mean. And in some cases, deploying it can be actively unhelpful in communicating to an audience what’s actually interesting or moving about a piece of art.

Take Compliance, one of my favorite feature films out of Sundance. The subject of the movie, the detention and sexual assault of a young fast-food restaurant worker named Becky, is undoubtedly uncomfortable viewing for some people. The first time it aired at the festival, some members of the audience by images of star Dreama Walker underdressed or nude and being mistreate (and in proof that being a rich progressive doesn’t make you classy, some creep decided to shout things about how hot Walker is in the midst of that discussion). But the subject matter of the movie isn’t actually controversial: nobody thinks that the things that happen to Becky should have happened, and the movie makes it clear that they’re awful. And the making of the movie itself doesn’t seem to be the source of the controversy. As director Craig Zobel told me, he worked with Walker both to make sure she felt she wasn’t being exploited as an actress, and to make sure she felt like the movie would be something audiences would walk away from having absorbed the messages that Zobel intended to send. There may be a controversy over whether artists should portray bad things happening to women at all, but our culture seems to have settled on an agreement that it’s generally fine as long as you’re not making snuff pornography. Compliance is challenging, uncomfortable, and deeply moving. It is not controversial.

The Los Angeles Times does a nice job of fisking another occurrence of the phenomenon, this time NPR describing the long-dead and long-canonized artist Jackson Pollock’s work as controversial. There are controversies adjacent to Pollock, of course: if a toddler does the same thing, but without intention, is it art? Is the painting authenticator Paul Biro claims to have verified as the work Pollockreal or part of a scheme by Biro to pass off fakes? But Pollock’s work itself is not the subject of a genuine controversy: describing it that way is just a way to gin up pageviews.

Or worse, alleging controversy where there is none is a way of indicating false equivalence in an attempt to avoid charges of bias. The claim of false equivalency is one of the biggest debates in journalism right now, the source of the debate over whether the New York Times should “fact-check” (probably the wrong term for it) politicians’ claims. But art, even more so than politics, is an arena where writers should feel comfortable making judgements and refusing to pretend there’s an equal debate, or a debate at all, where there isn’t. Labeling something controversial or treating it as dangerous when it’s merely challenging is a way of keeping people away from art rather than getting them to engage with it.