It’s interesting to wonder how 1968 would have played out in the age of social media.

It began with the Tet Offensive on January 30th. In the Spring, there was the assassination of not only one, but two progressive leaders of national stature, Martin Luther King on April 4, and Robert Kennedy on June 6. The students at Columbia University were on strike for most of April. Their French counterparts almost overthrew the De Gaulle administration in May. The Soviet Army would put down the Prague Spring a few months later on August 20th.

What exactly would have been the trending topics on Twitter?

According to the cinematographer and director Haskell Wexler it might have been a commercial for Coca Cola or Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. As he recounts in the documentary Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’, the inspiration for Medium Cool came from two sources. The first was the French New Wave, where avant guard directors like Jean Luc Godard had broken with the rules of Hollywood, and had begun making innovative new films with hand held cameras, natural lighting, and small crews. The second was the failure of the American media to adequately cover what was going on in the world. The world you saw on TV in 1968, Wexler remembers, was an alternate reality, and you weren’t on TV, he continues, you didn’t exist.

So when he got the opportunity to make a film about a boy from Appalachia who lived in the big city, he not only seized the opportunity, he seized the opportunity to completely rework the script. The result was Medium Cool, which is both fiction and documentary, a distinction, Jean Luc Godard had always argued, had much less relevance than most people think. After all, if you make a movie that presents itself as being purely fictional, you are still “filming objects in the world.” If you make a documentary, you are choosing which objects in the world you decide to film. Wexler decided to do away with the distinction altogether, and arrange the objects in the world he decided to film before he turned on his camera. Then reality hit.

For most of the Spring of 1968, Wexler had filmed a “documentary” about John Cassellis, a fictional Chicago TV cameraman played by Robert Forster. There was the Appalachian poor white ghetto in uptown Chicago, something I had never even realized existed until I saw Medium Cool, and where, interestingly enough, Chicago police officer would occasionally kidnap and torture poor white kids, just for the sport of it. There was the Robert Kennedy assassination, which Wexler poignantly dramatizes by filming a hotel kitchen, not in Los Angeles, but in Chicago. Then there was Resurrection City, the “occupy” encampment 43 years before Occupy Wall Street, the tent city organized by Martin Luther King’s “Poor Peoples’ Campaign” months after his death.

When Wexler returned to his home town of Chicago that August with Robert Forster and the rest of his small crew, he certainly knew there would be controversy, and protests. Chicago, which was under the control of the Democratic, but reactionary Mayor Richard Daley, was a tough city with a huge police force, and a hard, backward white ethnic culture that hated hippies and antiwar protesters. Even though a strong primary challenge from Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had pushed Lyndon Johnson into forgoing the opportunity to run for President a second time, the Democratic Party was set to nominate Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie, neither of whom would make an explicit statement against the Vietnam War. Wexler had already filmed the Illinois National Guard training to put down an urban insurrection earlier that year, but not even he could anticipate what would happen that August 24th in Grant Park, when the Chicago Police waded into a crowd of antiwar protesters, swinging their billy clubs and cracking skulls, staging a full scale police riot against a diverse crowd of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

Having seen Medium Cool three times, and Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’ twice, I do understand the gravity of what happened in Chicago in August of 1968, but I still only think I get part of it. Indeed, one of Wexler’s assistants remarks that even though they used three camera crews they captured only a fraction of the violence that took place, violence so intense, and so disturbing for being “American on American” violence, that it scared him more than filming in Vietnam did. Indeed, for many people of the “Baby Boom” generation, the spectacle of a militarized police force of American citizens attacking other American citizens was a crucial breaking point in American history. As cynical and worldly wise an observer as Hunter S. Thompson would go on to call it “the end of America.” Gore Vidal would compare the Chicago Police to Nazi stormtroopers.

I was only 3 years old in 1968, but the fact that I wouldn’t hear about the 1968 Democratic National Convention until I became politically active as an undergraduate in my early 20s is no accident. Medium Cool was so incendiary that Wexler’s studio did everything in its power to suppress its audience, giving it an “X” rating — purportedly for sex and foul language, but in reality, as Wexler remarks, for political content — and the most limited distribution they could justify under the contract. Nevertheless, while Medium Cool was not widely viewed upon its release, it’s every bit as relevant in 2015 as it was in 1968. Just substitute “Ferguson” for “Chicago” and “Occupy Wall Street” for “Resurrection City” and you’ll feel as if you were watching a film made last yesterday.

(Spoiler Alert: The bankers who almost destroy the world economy in 2008 are eventually bailed out by the Bush and Obama administrations, and get multi-million-dollar bonuses instead of prison sentences. The United States is now a police state on the verge of electing either a grandstanding racist millionaire or a corrupt Wall Street Democrat as its next President.)

As I arrived at my local movie theater late, and noticed the long line of families waiting to buy tickets for The Force Awakens, I decided to prepare to watch The Big Short by committing a small act of fraud. I snuck in without paying. After all, it’s better to risk arrest, then to miss even one of the previews, which are often an excellent way to measure the current state of public opinion.

The theater, which is located in a conservative, upper-middle-class suburb in northern New Jersey, was packed with white people, mostly yuppies, the majority of whom probably work on Wall Street, the kind of good, solid bourgeoisie who used to yell “get a job” at Occupy Wall Street protesters back in 2011. The previews were no less discouraging. The first was for a film called 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi by none other than Michael Bey. The second was even worse. A British film called Eye in the Sky, it will star Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren, and will apparently center around a group of “military intelligence officers” struggling to decide whether or to kill a “high value target” (a big bad terrorist) with a drone or to back off and avoid civilian casualties. Why oh why Helen Mirren? Why would you act in this fatuous propaganda? Do you really need the money that badly?

I was pleasantly surprised. First of all, The Big Short is just plain fun. Even though it ran for 2 hours and 20 minutes, I was never bored. Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and and Christian Bale are all excellent, and barely recognizable, as three oddballs who understand long before 2008 that the housing bubble is destined to pop. There are entertaining, and highly informative, cameos by Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez. Yes, Selena Gomez. She tells us more about Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) in 90 seconds than CNN told us in a decade. As The Big Short hurtled towards the inevitable, the financial industry crash in the Spring and Fall of 2008 and the Great Recession, I was unsure if I wanted to get out my guillotine and start sharpening the blade, or just plain laugh. In 2008, the American people got fucked up the ass by Wall Street, and what did we do? We blamed poor people and immigrants.

Nevertheless, The Big Short is such a lucid, and genuinely radical, indictment of the financial services industry that if enough people see it, my fondest dream — to see the bankers loaded up into tumbrils and carted away to be relieved of their heads in front of a bloodthirsty mob of sans-culottes — might just come true. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure some holier than thou ultra-leftist could pick a few holes in The Big Short. It is a mainstream, big-budget Hollywood film, after all, but there’s no getting around its central message. The business model of Wall Street is fraud. What’s more, unlike a TV show, which would feature a tough guy cop, or a 1970s paranoia movie, which would have a crusading journalist, the “heroes” of The Big Short are just as greedy and unlikeable as the corrupt system they hope, not to bring down, but to use to make money. Neither the corporate media nor the United States government are spared. A yuppie Wall Street journal reporter refuses to investigate what would have been a major scoop because he doesn’t want to risk his access at Goldman Sachs. A Securities and Exchange Commission official, a red-headed floozy played by Karen Gillan, shows up at a financial services convention in Las Vegas, not to investigate fraud, but to circulate her resume, and prepare to cash in for “services rendered” after she leaves the government. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, two corrupt bond rating agencies which are still in business and as corrupt as ever, are represented by a cranky old woman, who not only doesn’t care that she’s a bought and paid for employee of the big banks, but who is quite literally going blind.

I suppose that if I have any criticism of The Big Short, it probably has something to do with how the three anti-heroes played by Pitt, Bale, and Gosling are maybe just a bit too likable. A great filmmaker like Jean-Luc Godard would have made all three characters so flat out repulsive we would have looked forward to them meeting some kind of horrible death. In some ways, I suppose, The Big Short re-imagines the great man as an unpleasant oddball, a misfit with a glass eye suffering from Asperger’s, a fat nerd who feels guilty about what he’s doing, but takes the money anyway, a smarmy yet self-aware yuppie dirtbag who laughs all the way to the bank. We root for the system to collapse and prove them right. We want them to win, to walk away with hundred of millions, even billions of dollars, and live happily ever after. Yet, as clever, and cynical, as Gosling, Bale, and Steve Carell are in their respective roles, they’re never quite clever or cynical enough. Wall Street is rigged, even against people who understand how it works. The Big Short’s three anti-heroes become, in a sense, just three more average Americans caught up in a scam. The more you think you’ve fucked the system, the more the system fucks you. The more you think you’re in on the con, the better chance there is that you just might be the patsy.  There’s only one solution. Bring the whole thing down.

In Smoke Signals, a modest little film by Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie, Victor and Thomas, two men in their 20s, are taking a long-distance bus trip from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to Phoenix, Arizona. Across the aisle, Cathy, a pretty blond played by Cynthia Geary, is stretching her legs on the seat in front of her. Curious, and impressed by her flexibility, Thomas, an eccentric nerd, strikes up a conversation. Cathy is more than willing to oblige. The reason she’s so flexible, she tells him, is that she used to be a gymnast, an alternate on the 1980 Olympic Team. She continues, complaining about how Jimmy Carter ruined her chances at fame and fortune, how she would have been just as good as Mary Lou Retton, if only she had gotten her chance. While Thomas listens attentively, Victor, a strapping jock, just scowls. If she were an ex-Olympic level athlete, he wonders, what’s she doing riding on a Greyhound. Finally, he confronts her. Well, he tells her, if you were only an alternate, you wouldn’t have gone to Moscow anyway. So why blame Jimmy Carter? Cathy, called out as a bullshit artist, and probably a straight up liar, takes her bag and moves to the other side of the bus.

“Why did you do that for?” Thomas says. “She was nice.”

Most people watching Smoke Signals are likely to think the same thing. It seems bad form for Victor to cramp Thomas’ style, especially when Thomas is so obviously a 25-year-old virgin, but Victor has his reasons. He and Thomas, both Coeur d’Alene Indians, are two losers going nowhere fast. Unemployed, without college degrees, dependent on women, the trip to Phoenix is the first time either of them has been more than 100 miles from the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. Victor, who is traveling to Arizona to pick up his late father’s possessions — his father, played by the great native American actor Gary Farmer, had abandoned the family in Idaho years earlier — was only able to buy a pair of bus tickets at all because Thomas, and his mother, lent him the money. He’s an angry young man, aware that he’s got no future, and a past full of physical and emotional abuse, and he sees a reflection of himself, and Thomas, in Cathy the gymnast. Thomas, who’s as angry as Victor, but much better at hiding it, copes by by telling stories, most of which, like Cathy’s tall tale about the 1980 Olympic team, are transparent bullshit based on half-truths and flat out lies. Victor does not have a plan to get out the underclass, but he knows that bad stories, half-baked, unpublished fiction, are a drug.

Thomas, in other words, is a failed writer, a young man with the emotional need to tell stories, but neither the discipline to write them down, nor the social connections to get published. He’s living in a world of illusion. In Thomas, Sherman Alexie, a highly successful Native American novelist and short story writer, sees himself, what he might have been had he not pulled himself up by his bootstraps, gotten off the reservation, and put his thoughts down on paper. In Cathy the gymnast, Victor sees what he’s probably destined to become, a 30-something failure living on the high that comes from telling lies to people who have the need to believe them. The only way out, he recognizes, is by a harsh, uncompromising devotion to the truth. He needs to shred the veil of illusion that keeps him and his people down. What he doesn’t yet realize, however, and what he will find out in Phoenix, is that the truth about his own family is probably too much for him to bear.

Smoke signals begins with a flashback to 1976. Sherman Alexie is an early Gen-Xer like me, and the entire film is a sometimes awkward, sometimes rewarding multi-layered narrative that bounces back and forth between the middle-1970s, the early 1980s, and the late 1990s. In the flashback to 1976, the Indians on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation are celebrating the Fourth of July, aware that it’s a white man’s holiday, but enjoying the fireworks and the celebration nonetheless. Thomas and Victor are still very small children, not even toddlers. Victor’s mother is working at the grill. Thomas’ grandmother is helping her cook. Victor’s father, Arnold Joseph is drinking, probably drunk. Suddenly, Thomas’ house goes up in flames. Arnold rushes inside, snatching the infant Thomas, and lowering down from the second story window to safety. Thomas’ parents, die in the fire and Thomas, sadly, is a now an orphan, but Arnold, who showed so much courage and presence of mind, is a hero. Something about the fire, however, destroys Arnold’s sense of well being. As the 1970s come to a close, and the 1980s begin, his drinking only gets worse. He abuses his wife, and the young son, running away for days at a time, and, finally, for good. Even though the story common to so many Native Americans, poverty, alcoholism, and spousal abuse, would seem to explain Arnold Joseph’s eventual breakdown, something about it doesn’t seem to fit. Arnold Joseph was not a heavy drinker before the fire. Is it survivor’s guilt? Victor, who never touches alcohol, grows up blaming himself. Was it something he did?

When Victor and Thomas reach Phoenix, they find out that Arnold Joseph had become close to Suzy Song, a young native American woman. Arnold’s death has so upset her that for the past several days, she’s been AWOL from her job as a hospital administrator. Victor and Thomas never find out whether or not Arnold and Suzy had been lovers, but what they do find out is that Arnold, like Thomas, liked to tell stories. In fact, all Arnold ever did was talk about his son Victor, the boy he had abandoned in Idaho. Victor, who can hardly bear the news that his father abused and abandoned but still loved him, accuses Suzy of lying. You never knew my father at all, he declares, but Suzy, in an angry outburst, lets him know that she probably knew Arnold Joseph better than he did, that he told her what had really happened that Fourth of July all those years ago back in 1976.

At first, Victor has no way of knowing if Suzy is telling her the truth. Perhaps she’s lying. Perhaps Arnold Joseph was lying to her, but early the next morning, Victor starts up his father’s truck, grabs Thomas, and the two men leave Suzy without saying goodbye. On the way back to the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, they argue. Thomas tells Victor that Suzy was telling the truth, that he knew all along about who really started the fire that killed his parents. Their discussion so heated, with Thomas showing more and more ability to stand up to Victor, that it only ends when they run into another car that has skidded off the road onto the shoulder.

Victor, like his father, becomes something in between a hero and a scapegoat. He might have been able to avoid the car crash if he had been paying closer attention, but legally it was the other driver’s fault, and he did have the presence of mind to run and get an ambulance for a badly injured passenger. Victor and Thomas end up back on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation, and their lives pick up exactly the way they were before the long bus trip. That absolutely nothing is resolved make the last 20 minutes of Smoke Signals both frustrating, and yet somehow expressive of the truth about life on the reservation. Victor has found out something he has always half suspected. Thomas has added another story to his collection of unpublished and half-baked narratives. That’s about it. While fiction can be liberating, Sherman Alexie seems to be saying, it’s usually just another form of self-medication through illusion.