A few days ago, the New York Times published a provocative list titled “What is the definitive movie about America?” Its writers came up with a couple of inspired options, like “Dazed and Confused,” along with a handful of interesting questions (“Disclosure Day”? “The Florida Project”?). Since no one asked, I thought I’d offer five candidates. They are:

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). James Stewart, the quintessential American actor, plays a newly minted senator who arrives in Washington, DC, brimming with high school romance, only to discover that the place is a rigged game of corruption. In other words, things haven’t changed much. It’s shocking to see how cynically clever a Frank Capra movie could be, but of course the movie is about how Stewart’s fallen idealist falls to the ground and nearly commits suicide to save the system. The message: Maintaining America’s greatness is always a war.

The Godfather (1972). In the era of the counterculture, the wool was being pulled from our eyes about America: how much it really worked, the private values ​​that underpinned our public morality. Francis Ford Coppola’s totemic gangster tragedy was the New Hollywood classic that most deeply channeled the perception of a underworld in control. He used the mafia as a metaphor for the cruelty of capitalism, exposing the dark side of those who pull the strings.

Nashville (1975). The best movie ever made about what life is like in America. it feels as. Robert Altman’s 1970s masterpiece channels the casual tumult of the everyday: the hype, the joy, the crowding, and the sense of possibility it all presents. It ends with a song that expresses what may be the most profound thought about America ever expressed in a film: “You may say I’m not free, but I don’t care.”

Rocky (1976). Speaking of Capra, Sylvester Stallone’s milestone brought it all back: not just the corn dog glory of Old Hollywood, but the mythological value system at work in it, the belief that America was a place where an underdog could rise as a god. As much as “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” “Rocky” reestablished the model for what movies would be, but it also helped pave the way for Ronald Reagan and the persistence of dreams as powerful as they were illusory.

Dirty Harry (1971). In the ’90s, when I started listening to right-wing radio shows in the back of taxis, I saw that the hosts (Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh) had figured out how to turn every number into a Charles Bronson movie. The revenge thrillers of the early ’70s, at once vicious and demagogic, became the model for talk radio and Fox News, and for the worldview that emerged from them. And the “Citizen Kane” of those films was “Dirty Harry,” the rogue urban cop thriller that turned Clint Eastwood into a new kind of nihilistic icon. It is a fantastic piece of cinema with unmistakably disturbing political connotations that have carried over half a century into our own era.

Well, this 4th of July I wanted to get those great American movies out of my system. But that’s not really the point of this column. I could have chosen many other films, as I’m sure you did too. Whatever is a “definitive” movie about America will mean different things to different people, because that’s how vast and ever-changing America is.

However, as I pondered the question (“What is the definitive film about America?”), it made me realize how much American films used to matter. be about America. One of the primary definitions of films is that each one of them, in its own way, is a shared dream. And since the American dream arises from our shared, conflicting, and collective ideas about what that dream should be, movies have always been the perfect setting to debate it.

But the era of cinema about America may now be fading. Today, the definition of the country is changing, more than it has in a long time. Are we still a democracy? More specifically: do we still believe in democracy as a fundamental value, as he fundamental value? I would say that an increasing number of people don’t. And as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” demonstrated, there will be no democracy unless you are willing to fight for it. If not, what you might get is a “godfather” nation.

When did American movies stop being about America? In the era of the studio system, movies played an important role in defining what America was about. You could say that the original Hollywood moguls created a white picket fence America that was more mythology than reality, but there’s no denying that people strove for it; What you see in so many classic Hollywood films is an image of values ​​and behavior that is largely aspirational. From the clash between freedom and law that defines the Western genre to the passionate assertion of justice in a film like “12 Angry Men” and such dramatic and profound examinations of the fight for racial justice as “In the Heat of the Night,” the films showed us what we wanted America to be.

And in the era of New Hollywood, by dramatizing how far America had fallen from many of those ideals, the movies showed us bold new truths, but they also put us back in touch with the spirit of idealism in a different way. The new movies, from “Midnight Cowboy” to “Chinatown,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Shampoo,” were often filled with cynicism and despair, and had heartbreakingly flawed heroes and heroines. However, these films also tapped into American dreams. Now it was the disconnect between what the characters lived and what they dreamed that defined the very space of American cinema.

Today, increasingly, the space of American cinema is defined by one word: fantasy. And without descending into a harangue against fantasy culture, it is worth pointing out that the fantasy worlds where our films increasingly take place add up, both in philosophy and sensation, to a kind of abstract no man’s land. The films are set in distant galaxies, or in the airtight funhouse of the horror imagination, or in candy-colored animated landscapes designed to be friendly to five-year-olds.

From time to time, you do watch a deep movie about America, and when that happens, it can strike a chord. I think audiences experienced that last year with “One Battle After Another,” which had the audacity to be extremely topical: taking a spiritual inventory of what was happening in the country right now, the discord, the oppression and the desperate search for the oxygen of freedom. And three years ago, “Oppenheimer” was a historical drama that seemed like a catharsis, a referendum on what the American invention of the nuclear bomb entailed, but also what it meant. meantand what were its consequences.

However, it is difficult not to think of them as major exceptions. When it comes to movies, the disconnect Am The feeling in our 250th Fourth of July celebration is that of the extraordinary turmoil that America is going through right now, when it seems that everything that was taken for granted for so long—the stubborn persistence of the middle class, the values ​​of free speech and democracy—is at stake, and the fact that we are navigating all of this, living it every day online, in our conversations, in our families, but without seeing it reflected in the metaphysical mirror that movies hold. it always has been. I don’t know if it would be possible for a Hollywood film to offer a “definitive” view of our tumultuous times. However, more than ever what we need today is for movies to start looking at America again, so they can once again give us the big picture.