Several days ago, before I got distracted by the Michael Mann film now on the world’s TV screens 24/7, I was at work on a response to this essay by my pal Dan Kois in the New York Times Magazine. Dan’s piece discusses his newfound skepticism over what he calls “aspirational viewing” – watching certain films and TV shows (among others. he singles out Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the 2008 Kazakh shepherd film Tulpan, and HBO’s Treme) because of a need to feel like a more sophisticated viewer. “As I get older,” he says, “I find I’m suffering from a kind of culture fatigue and have less interest in eating my cultural vegetables, no matter how good they may be for me.”
