“Because there must be no bad surprises,” Sedgwick writes, “and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.” In Curtis films, the bad news seems to be the only real news and it is always uncovered in roughly the same way. The banks take over, a high-minded experiment fails, the sexy Soviets come marching in, and an unidentified Black American nods off, too high to act.

“There’s this kind of left figure, but sometimes not really on the left, who tends to think of power entirely in terms of organizations and figures at the top and elites,” UC Berkeley lecturer Jasper Bernes wrote to me. “I think of Julian Assange as a kind of figure like that, or maybe Glenn Greenwald. There’s a left media sphere which really doesn’t see anything happening except these powerful people making decisions and producing discourse, which is really not the way societies and economies work.”