With President Trump now shaping US policy, it comes as little surprise that Hollywood is taking steps to oppose him. Last month's call to cancel the Oscars in protest of Trump by Todd VanDerWerff of Vox was doomed from the start, but overt liberal activism from the people who make and star in movies is a real thing. As of this month, the talent agencies WME-IMG and United Talent Agency have commenced creating PACs and staging rallies in opposition to Trump's immigration policies.

But as the far-right internet content machine that is Breitbart will tell you (as often as it can), it's not just the people; the material Hollywood puts out has a liberal bias as well. According to an op-ed from last month titled "Rotten: Hollywood's Shocking Media Bias," the industry is telling stories to the American people that amount to "anti-men," "anti-gun" propaganda that ignore the world views of conservatives—and do so at its own peril. "[I]f it continues to ignore us—or worse, patronize us—only time will tell how low the U.S. ticket sales will fall," wrote Patrick Courrielche. And they are indeed falling.

But as a screenwriting student, I was told point-blank that being liberal in Hollywood is almost a prerequisite. The reason? The stories that work as movies are rooted in liberal ways of thinking. Liberalism, the theory goes, is pretty much baked into the "Hero's Journey" story structure, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell's oft-utilized outline for adventure stories.

For instance, when I asked John August, writer of such movies as Big Fish and Go, and host of Scriptnotes, one of the most authoritative podcasts out there on the topic of screenwriting, he told me that movies tend to be about a hero "going up against a villain—often a system—that's designed to keep them in their place," and since the central tenet of conservatism is traditionally a love for the status quo, "movie heroes are the opposite of conservative."

The world of highly profitable summer blockbusters generally overflows with these types of stories. Luke Skywalker leaves his life on a farm to join a literal rebellion against a literal Empire. Jake, the forgettable hero in the highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar, falls in love with one of the aliens on the planet his fellow humans are exploiting, and then ends up taking up arms against the system he used to be a part of. Wikus Van De Merwe follows a similar trajectory in District 9. So does Neo in The Matrix.

"They're rebels. Rule-breakers," August said.

Beyond summer sci-fi spectaculars, you'll notice that this formula also fuels many smaller and weirder movies like Dallas Buyer's Club, Sausage Party, and Spotlight. Rogues defy systems in love stories like Titanic, and Casablanca along with teen movies like Mean Girls and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In short, making your movie protagonist a rebel fighting a system is more or less the best way to ensure good box office receipts.

Conservative film critic Christian Toto begs to differ. "The 'system' the hero rebels against can be left-leaning," he told me. The conservative rebel protagonist he cited was the octogenarian hero of an indie film from 2012 called Still Mine. In that film, James Cromwell's character rebels against the government for the right to build his sick wife a house his own way, on his own damn private property.

Conservative to the core? Absolutely. Toto was quick to acknowledge however, that Still Mine was not exactly a summer blockbuster.

Toto sees untapped possibilities for conservative storytelling that would use essentially the same formula. "What about a ripped-from-the-headlines story of a homeowner who saved his family from intruders thanks to his gun collection?" he suggested. "Those tales may never be told. Yet they teem with potential all the same."

Toto acknowledged that movies like Straw Dogs, Die Hard, and Taken offer a version of this saving-your-loved-ones formula, even without the overt Second Amendment angle. "They sell, and they're larger than life," he told me. But he envisions movies that prop up everyday conservative values. "Most folks don't have Liam Neeson's 'particular set of skills,'" he avers.

All three of those rather conservative films flirt with liberalism as well: Taken can indeed be read to imply that guns should be left in professional hands, Straw Dogs regards small town-dwellers as uncivilized troglodytes, and Die Hard has absolutely no love for eighties business culture.

August sees this left-right overlap in movies as well. "Conservatives can see a lot in Star Wars that speaks to them: self-determination, religious expression, [and] small government." As for his own work, he told me Big Fish has conservative fans, because "it doesn't try to pigeonhole the Southern father into a set template, nor does it canonize his liberal reporter son." Instead, August said, it "shows them coming to appreciate each other without surrendering their viewpoints."

Meanwhile, if you go further left on the political spectrum, it's clear that Trump's arrival on the political scene was seen as a call for movies to become more liberal, not less.

Last year, Marlon Lieber and Daniel Zamora of Jacobin Magazine pointed out that blockbuster movie rebels such as Katniss in The Hunger Games lack real revolutionary verve. They tend to rebel against their own rebellions—eventually finding that change is worthless, and the only good place to turn is inward. Then last month in an opinion piece attempting to dismantle the idea of Hollywood leftism, Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times acknowledged the rebellious nature of the hero's journey protagonist, but pointed out that Hollywood's biggest bias is toward the wealthy. "[W]e mostly like to watch people who seem richer than they should be," she argued.

For his part, August pushed back when I suggested that there might be an even stronger liberal push from within Hollywood screenwriting faction now that Trump is president. August, who participated in the Paris version of the Women's March against Trump, argues that protesters such as himself just want "religious non-discrimination, governmental accountability vs. corruption, [and] not bragging about sexual assault," and that "[i]n any normal universe, these would be conservative values."

August told me that in the near future, he expects to see conservatives balking at what he calls, "stories of human decency and civic responsibility." August and his ilk create villains of course—often fascists, corrupt businesspeople, and evil politicians—and he argues that that doesn't come from a place of partisanship. Instead, screenwriters are focused on manufacturing heroes, and then "writing villains to oppose our heroes."

"If, through their words and actions, people are choosing to fill that villain role [in the real world]" August added, "that's on them."

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"Oh, movies are important and dangerous because we're the keeper of the dreams," said Susan Sarandon in The Celluloid Closet, a 1995 documentary about the history of onscreen homosexuality. "You go into a little dark room and become incredibly vulnerable. On one hand, all your perspectives can be challenged, you could feel something you couldn't feel normally. On the other hand, it can completely misshape you."

In a flash, Sarandon distilled what makes movies movies. That supposed power has driven decades of censorship and handwringing over what America should and shouldn't see in theaters, and what kinds of performers the industry thinks can bring it to them. Until recently, it was supposed, those performers had to be straight.

Today, though there are more out and proud LGBTQ performers, industry leaders and stories than ever before, there remain untold numbers of actors and actresses who still feel they can't come out publicly, things aren't necessarily easy for those who have, and that newfound visibility remains far from perfect.

Why is it so hard to come out in Hollywood? And what will the future of LGBTQ Hollywood be as the internet forces the entertainment industry to think outside the studio system? We asked 18 performers, screenwriters, directors, documentarians, producers, journalists and more to weigh in.

Interviews have been condensed and edited.

As actors, those personal fears or childhood scars don't go away just because you're suddenly on a TV show. So I think actors who may not be out are also just struggling with personal demons that may have nothing to do with their careers. Except that now you're talking about being out to millions of people at once, which only amplifies all those fears.

It's possible that being out has affected the kinds of roles that have come my way, but I honestly haven't felt that. In the last few years I've played several straight characters. And I'll tell you that not feeling like you have a secret on set that you have to protect in order to play the role has allowed me to bring way more of myself to those parts and to feel 100 percent more comfortable in my skin.

Maulik Pancholy played Jonathan on 30 Rock and is a voice actor on shows including Phineas and Ferb and Sanjay and Craig. He will appear as Nambue on Star Trek Discovery. As told to Matt Baume.

I believe that people remain closeted because they're afraid of losing opportunities, which is a fancy way of saying they don't want their identity to mess with their money. Hollywood is really a game of facades. Everyone in this town has a narrative, and it's all about perception. If being straight is a part of your facade, if that's a part of your brand—well, you don't want to fuck that up by having the public find out your truth. I think people are afraid of everything they've built falling down around them. Especially if you're a person of color.

There aren't many women of color who are out. Being black and gay is still taboo in the black community. There's still a shame associated with being gay—and that's not going away anytime soon. We're making progress, but it's slow.

That said, I think being open about sexuality has actually helped me! My gayness, my blackness—me being proud of where I come from is what makes me special. Sure, I could've taken a different path, and maybe I would've had a different career. But I like being my authentic self; I like being a beacon of light for little girls that are struggling with their sexuality and are afraid to be themselves. That's more important to me than making a lot of money or making certain people feel comfortable.

Lena Waithe is an actor and screenwriter best known for roles in Bones and Master of None. Showtime recently picked up her drama The Chi, a forthcoming series inspired by her childhood in Chicago. This summer, Master of None returns to Netflix for its second season. As told to Jon Shadel.

I came out at a time in my life where I knew there wouldn't be another NSYNC album. I wanted to keep it private until I knew I wasn't going to influence anyone's business, meaning my four best friends. I was in an interesting situation, where 90 percent of my market was female, and teenagers at that. If I was going to rip the Band-Aid off, I was afraid it would be received as a betrayal and just ruin NSYNC. You're constantly told things: "Don't be seen with a beer in your hand, don't be seen with a girlfriend." They didn't need to say "don't be gay." It's implied.

My business completely changed after coming out. I was working on a sitcom, I had projects I'd been working on for years, and when they had to put the "gay" label on me, all those projects went away. My career went from being asked to do tons of stuff to only being asked to play gay stuff. It's very disappointing; you go from doing something as big as NSYNC, having a huge team around you and getting amazing offers, then you share a personal thing and it completely changes the way people perceive you. You become part of a minority. Business is business, and when you're part of a minority there's not a lot of money behind that, and they move on to something that will make them money and you get left behind.

Lance Bass is a member of NSYNC and was a daily panelist on NBC's The Meredith Vieira Show. He has won numerous awards in his career as a musician, appeared on Broadway in Hairspray, published a memoir titled Out of Sync, has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, and hosted two shows on Sirius XM. As told to Jessica Ogilvie.

I recently watched Ellen for the first time, and I never watch the Ellen show. I'm like, "How has this sort of butch, masculine-presenting white woman—who's been totally out of the closet for the last 15, 20 years—taken over daytime television to the degree where there are slews of white women clapping and oohing and ahhing at her when she dances in the aisle?" You know, who needs to come out when Ellen's coming out every day? I think that for me, what I'd like to see are those intersections of coming out around my class, my race.

I think if coming out is not done as a spectacle, and if it's done as an act of coalition building and intersectional allegiance, then yes, we'll see more of it. I think as people wake up and stumble around and wipe the sleep off their eyes, I think we'll feel the pinch to need to come out or recognize who's out and grab onto them to do something more tightly and more powerful.

Cheryl Dunye is a filmmaker and assistant professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her 1996 directorial debut, The Watermelon Woman, is widely considered the first feature film directed by a black gay woman. Her forthcoming film, Black is Blue, is due out in 2018. As told to Jennifer Swann.

Growing up, I never really came out, but everyone sort of knew. There's an old Spanish saying that's like, Que lo que ves no necesitas preguntar, "that what you see you don't need to ask." It's funny because it's true. I came out more for my mom than myself, so that she could be comfortable.

I never felt pressure to suppress my sexuality from my agent or anyone else, and I don't shy away from it. I feel like because I'm comic relief, I'm a sidekick, I'm endearing—it's like I'm everyone's best friend. The roles and characters I'm fortunate enough to bring to life are more forgiving. The difference is that when a muscular, model-esque Adonis comes out as gay, then they lose their demographic and their agents drop them. I have those friends, and I know they're gay, and I would never out them. That's their journey, their life. It is a different topic for them.

I get messages from people like, "Oh my God, you're Latino, you're short, you're round, you're not the stereotype." I'm not cookie cutter, that's for sure. But I made a career by owning who I am. Being short, stout, gay, Latino—statistically, I shouldn't be where I'm at. But I'm working in Hollywood because I want to be that example. When I grew up, I didn't see people that looked like me, but now I'm that person. I want kids to look at the TV and be like, "Oh my God, there is hope. I can do this. I can be this."

Harvey Guillen is an actor known for roles on SyFy's The Magicians, ABC Family's Huge and The Internship. As told to Ian Daniel.

I think the closet is absolutely generational, and I totally understand the importance of coming out, but what I don't understand is people my age ganging up on the Jodie Fosters and John Travoltas of the world, who grew up in the spotlight. They never had a normal youth that would have given them the freedom to make those discoveries in a private place. And coming out when they may have naturally wanted to do it would have been dangerous—not just for their careers, but socially, and maybe just interpersonally. And if your public image is part of how you make money, or if that's where you derive your self worth, then it might feel a lot more dangerous to you than it actually is to make a big change in that image. I think we need to be a little more forgiving of those who grew up in a totally different time, and whose lives are just completely distorted due to their massive wealth and fame.

And also, the sad thing is, if John Travolta came out, I do think it would help his career. I think that he and the Kevin Spacey's of the world are living under this kind of '80s assumption of what acting is and they've got to be able to play straight to get the straight roles, but I think that we're actually living in a far more personal, confessional time in entertainment. We're living in an era of reality television and direct-to-camera confessional YouTube stuff, so it's a totally different time when everyone is—major stars, you have access to their unfiltered minds through Twitter—so it would actually be beneficial to their careers. Especially among young people, like literal teenagers who over fifty percent of them don't identify as straight now, who do not know who those people are. I actually do think it would be brilliant PR move for them to come out this late in the game. I just really think it would shake shit up a little bit for their careers. I don't think anyone needs John Travolta to still be this like, beacon of masculinity.

John Early is an LA-based comedian and actor who can be seen in TBS' Search Party, Netflix's The Characters, and his Vimeo series alongside co-creator Kate Berlant, 555. As told to Tyler Trykowski.

I identify as a human being before anything else. Although I don't believe in labeling myself with one word, right now I'm into using the word "bisexual" because of its radicalness in our generation. There needs to be more visibility in all things surrounding that word, and I am here for myself and for that community. But I do not believe in the binary of sexuality or gender.

I joke that I was never in the closet, I wasn't even in the house. I've always done my own thing and been comfortable in it. But through working on myself and my sobriety, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with who I am and what that means on a public level. I have a podcast where I talk to people about just that.

I've always said that if anyone was going to be able to pull off playing in the spectrum—be able to pass as straight on television and be whoever I want in my personal life and still get the 15-year-old in Missouri to have a poster of me on her wall—I was going to do it. And at the end of the day, that's what it comes down to: Is your name going to sell tickets? That's it. I also realize this is a result of privilege I have, stemming from how I look and various other reasons.

I think the system itself is changing so fast right now, in the sense that there are new networks being made every single day. The amount of product for actors right now is exponential and raising every single day. I mean, Netflix is going to do 100+ original shows next year? That's insane. If you're already good at your job now, if you're already established, you're going to keep working whether you're gay, straight, transgender, bisexual, or, like, fucking Casey Affleck. You're going to work.

Nico Tortorella is an actor best known for roles in Scream 4, TV Land's Younger and Fox's The Following. His podcast The Love Bomb, in which Tortorella "explores love and the labels associated with it," premiered in September. As told to Ian Daniel.

We've been having this conversation about diversity in Hollywood for a while—though not long enough—but certainly it touches on women and people of color and people behind the camera and in front of the camera and LGBT people and trans people, and it's all connected. I do like to see [actors] come out and be out, because it just adds more complexity to what kinds of roles and range they can play, and what we all accept and appreciate as the complexity of human experience. So to kind of minimize that or sort of say, "Well, let's not make a big deal out of queerness" I think is kind of conservative.

I do think there's a fear of being typecast as gay, and I wouldn't say that that fear is baseless. There still is a double standard to some degree, although I think it is sort of dissipating. But the experience that we're coming from is that Sean Penn can play Harvey Milk, but a gay actor has less flexibility to play a straight leading man, for example. I do feel like that's sort of changing and we're in the middle of an evolution, and the only way it's going to change is for people to stand up and come out and continue to express the diversity of the human experience and be sort of uncompromising about that. And if there's enough well-loved actors and celebrities that are authentic about who they are, people will still want to see them.

Rhys Ernst is an LA-based writer, artist, and filmmaker who serves as a producer on the series Transparent. Last year, he released Relationship, a private photo diary documenting a six-year relationship with the artist Zackary Drucker, in which both transitioned genders. The documentary mini-series he executive produced, We've Been Around, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award this year. As told to Jennifer Swann.

It used to be when people heard I worked in Hollywood that the first question out of their mouths was "Who's gay?" But I don't get that question much anymore. I don't think people are as obsessed over sexuality like they once were.

For a while, it was the glass closet—it seemed hardly anyone was coming out. But now that more major celebrities have, it's made it less of a thing. It's not as scandalous or forbidden. It's not as titillating to think about who is or who isn't gay. Take Kristen Stewart's recent Saturday Night Live monologue—the fact that she said she was gay seemed almost secondary to Trump's obsession with her. I just don't think sexuality carries the same scandalous weight that it used to.

That said, I see both sides of it—coming out is a very personal journey. And even once you're committed to doing it, you can botch it in a lot of ways. I think the most in-your-face coming out in recent years was Ellen Page, and I interviewed her about that. She got on stage at this Human Rights Campaign event in Las Vegas and announced to the world that she was gay. But then you have what Jodie Foster did at the Golden Globes. She sort of gave a coming out speech, in which she never said she was gay. It seemed like she was doing these acrobatics to not have to say it—but still say it. Once you're going that far, just say it.

It's personal, sure. But if a celebrity came to me for advice, I would encourage them to come out openly. It still helps people to hear it—to hear the words "I'm gay" or "I'm lesbian" from a public figure. Especially for kids being bullied in schools and those in states like Texas and North Carolina, where these discriminatory bills are being passed.

As senior writer at The Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch has extensively covered the entertainment industry, profiling celebrities from Ellen Page to RuPaul to Anderson Cooper. As told to Jon Shadel.

I still believe that the single most important act there is for LGBTQ people is coming out. If every gay person in America came out today, people would understand the depth of our power. But we're getting there, too. We're getting there. And one of the reasons we have that kind of power is because we have come out in such great numbers… Traditional PR is one way [for celebrities to come out], and I've done it all sorts of ways with my clients. It depends on the circumstance. You have to understand, when you take somebody out, there has to be a strategy. Am I just coming out to live a true life? Is there a commercial venture associated with it? You have to determine the what and the why and then build from there.

Years ago, in 2010, I had a deal with A&E to put a show together called Coming Out, where we were actually going to take celebrities out of the closet and follow their journey. It proved, at the time, to be un-castable. I just couldn't get the caliber of celebrities I needed to come out. But the irony of the whole thing is that so many of the people that were approached are now out. I approached [Titanic actor] Victor Garber, and I approached Tuc Watkins, who's a soap opera actor, and I approached Jonathan Bennett from Mean Girls, and it wasn't quite right for any of them at the time, but they're all out now. So that's a very good measure to me of how far we've come.

Howard Bragman is the founder and chairman of Hollywood PR agency Fifteen Minutes. A publicist with more than 30 years experience, Bragman is known for helping celebrity clients including country singer Chely Wright, Bewitched star Dick Sargent, and more recently, Michael Sam—the NFL's first openly gay football player—come out of the closet. As told to Jennifer Swann.

I think when you compare movies to television, there's a real split in diversity of all stripes. Yes, we saw more people of color lead prestigious films in the past year—the box office reflected it—but there's still been a conservative retrenching when it comes to who ought to lead a film, and that's been motivated in large part by the global audience. If it weren't for people holding studio executives' feet to the fire, we wouldn't be seeing a whole lot of people other than generic white guys in movies. And we still do.

But on television, you have auteurs like Shonda Rhimes and Lee Daniels, who have proven they can draw audiences for shows that aren't just white guy procedurals. As a result, you see more gay characters and actors on television than in movies. There's a couple reasons—the most famous actors to come out as of late are television actors, predominantly. And there's also so many channels, all of which are looking to get into original programming.

Really, if you're a gay actor, now is the time to be out, because there's plenty of work out there. Television is so back and there's so many more shows now that it provides for more of a safe space for actors to come out. I'm not saying that someday you couldn't have a comic book superhero come out in a movie. I'm sure that will happen at some point. But with the pace it's taking those giant movies to even produce an incidental gay character, I just don't think that's their priority. Most television shows at this point at least have a gay character, whether it's regular or recurring or a guest star. It's really rare for a new television series to have not touched on that in some respect.

Kyle Buchanan is a senior editor at Vulture, where he covers the entertainment industry. As told to Tyler Trykowski.

The whole notion of this kind of "tearful confession"—you know, you go on Oprah and reveal your truth and all that—kind of presupposes that it's a really big deal, that it's something that's going to be really challenging to people. But that's just not the case anymore, for the most part. I don't think audiences really care as much, and in this day and age when there are so many out celebrities, when gay marriage is legal… there's just not that need. I think the default is kind of like, OK, so what?

With trans people, there are two different situations. There's the situation that Caitlyn Jenner and Lilly Wachowski went through, where they're already known in the public as one gender and they have to go through the coming-out process. There's no way to do that privately, obviously, because your appearance has to change so much. So that's really difficult, and I think that's part of the reason why Caitlin waited so long to come out. The other case is that of people who transitioned a long time ago and are just seen as their gender, and people today don't know about their past. So there could be people in the public eye who are waiting to come out as trans.

Jen Richards is an LA-based writer, actress, and producer whose web series, Her Story, was nominated for an Emmy last year. She was a series regular on E!'s I Am Cait and will appear in the upcoming CBS show Doubt and the CMT series Nashville. As told to Jennifer Swann.

Very few people were out when I came out in 2002, and that's kind of why I wanted to do it. It would have been huge for me, as a 13-year-old, to watch an out gay person on TV who was like me—someone who was nerdy, and not especially fashionable, and into music. That would have been mind-blowing to me.

It's way easier to come out now, because everybody has to be a 360 degree public figure these days. You have to let people into your personal life on social media, so it's easier to incorporate it into your persona. You don't have to force a magazine to do an interview with you anymore—you can just be yourself online.

The way that people make careers in the entertainment world today is completely different from how it was even five years ago. You can kind of steer your own ship through this world. It's not like the studio system. People don't have traditional, predictable careers anymore. You can kind of make your own way, make your own thing, and live pretty well in this industry. There's a growing middle class in the entertainment industry now, and it's made up of people who defy categorization, who are writers, and performers, and sort-of-comedians but not really. You can kind of do whatever you want, so there's no reason not to incorporate your sexuality into that. And I think it's been a good thing for me. It's always been one less thing to worry about.

Dave Holmes is a writer, actor, and former MTV VJ. He writes for Esquire Magazine and hosts the podcast International Waters and the Friday Forty live show at Meltdown Comics. His latest book, Party of One, is a memoir about music, coming out, and feeling weird. As told to Matt Baume.

I won an Academy Award in 2010 for my documentary about growing up in the black church, Music by Prudence. I came out in that film. And I got no calls from Hollywood agents after. Not one. No one even inquired. It just felt like, with me a black gay man, they weren't interested in the stories that I wanted to tell or my voice. And I know that straight white documentary directors who weren't even getting nominated were getting lots of calls. For me, it was just, "OK. That's Hollywood." Hollywood has lots of problems with race and homophobia, and it's not like I expected anything different to come out of it.

I don't think the doc world is at all involved in the Hollywood system. We are very much outsiders, our own community, and we're accepting. The doc world has its own issues and it also has a long ways to go, but it's very different from Hollywood. When I look at Hollywood as someone who's sort of an outsider, it's pretty shocking. It amazes me in this day and age that it's still major news for an actor to come out, and that there are still closeted actors. And not only actors but producers, directors. I just don't understand why. Maybe if someone's a romantic lead, and they feel they will lose their audience, but I don't think the box office has shown that. An actor's an actor. He's acting. It doesn't matter if you're gay or straight or what your sexuality is. It's mind-boggling that Hollywood still thinks this way. It likes to think of itself as progressive, but I think it's quite conservative.

Roger Ross Williams is a documentary director and writer. He won an Oscar in 2010 for Best Documentary Short Subject for his film Music By Prudence, and has directed several notable short and feature-length documentaries, including last year's Life, Animated, which is nominated for an Academy Award this year. As told to Ian Daniel.

There's a lot of fear in Hollywood: Executives are afraid of losing their jobs; networks are afraid of losing advertising revenue; writers are afraid of getting fired; actors are afraid of losing fans. This keeps everyone second guessing themselves and avoiding anything they consider risky.

In fact, before I sold Looking to HBO, I had successful, knowledgeable people telling me not to pursue the project because it wasn't "commercial enough"—they said that nobody would want to do it because it was all gay guys.

And a few funny things happened when we were casting the show. Some people would be begging to come in for an HBO series, but then they'd mysteriously disappear after they read the sides and saw it was gay stuff—not just straight actors, but gay actors, too. Other times, an actor would come in and say, "I think what you guys are doing is really brave." Brave? Only a straight person would call a gay show brave. Even so, it's hard to generalize—straight actors like Raúl Castillo and Frankie Alvarez in Looking, can dive right in and learn to rim with the best of 'em.

So, things have changed a lot since I started in the industry 15 years ago—the world is different, and so is entertainment. Hidden and systemic problems do still exist, but things have definitely improved. Like recently a straight guy who works as an agent told me, "I made myself watch your show until I didn't think dudes kissing each other was gross." I guess that's a good sign?

Michael Lannan is the creator and producer of HBO's Looking, a dramedy series that focused on the romantic lives of several gay friends in San Francisco. Looking: The Movie aired last July. As told to Jon Shadel.

When it comes to the closet, you are really talking about huge, bankable film stars—someone who has a lot to lose. That's the only door you are really potentially closing for yourself. You might have a career if you come out, but you are not considered for big tentpole franchises, action movies. You're not that symbol of masculine, swashbuckling fantasy that hordes of young men are going to buy tickets to and believe it might be them in the movie.

You understand the pressure on younger stars who are on the cusp of what could be a good career, a ten-year run and big juicy action parts. Overseas markets are increasingly important, and there are countries where that's going to hurt foreign box office. So it becomes, Will I get any of this if I'm honest?

I think it changes with age. Film stars in their 20s through 50s, when they think they've got something they can monetize, don't want to do anything to risk being the biggest possible star. You get the sense that they're saving being gay as a hobby for their retirement once no one cares who they're fucking anymore.

It's different behind the scenes. I've been out since high school; I barely recall being in. I've not heard a story about a writer not getting a job because he was gay. I'm not saying it doesn't exist—I would never allege that there aren't still plenty of people coming up against an invisible wall—I just haven't experienced it myself. People are more concerned with the quality of your work.

Joe Keenan is a television writer, producer, and novelist. He is best known for his work on Frasier and Desperate Housewives, and for his three novels, Blue Heaven (1988), Putting On the Ritz (1991) and My Lucky Star (2006). As told to Jessica Ogilvie.

I don't think there is a political or moral stance in Hollywood to marginalize LGBTQ people. Instead, I think there's a fear that advertisers or audiences might resist or give negative feedback in response to someone's sexuality or gender. It's the entertainment business—the dollar is the bottom line, so it's all about perception and what an audience will accept.

I am both a filmmaker and an educator. I have many LGBTQ students, so I know the vibrant and healthy dialogue that comes from telling the stories of marginalized people. But I think there is a corporate fear that "America" will not accept diversity. This is also an industry primarily run by relationships: Who knows whom? Whose father was in the business? Who went to the "right" university, was in the "right" fraternity?

These dynamics—corporate fear and the nuances of this "relationship business"—exclude many: LGBTQ people, people of color, women. Take gender issues. There's a deep and pervasive prejudice about women's capabilities as directors, and that's been a monumental stumbling block. It isn't changing much. In the Directors Guild of America, the next highest percentage of employment after white men is African American men—not women, or white women.

There are actually more lesbian than straight-identified women who are actively employed as directors. I muse that perhaps male executives think that queer women are somehow more relatable because of the misconception that they fit more into a "male" paradigm.

Becky Smith is professor and vice chair of production at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Smith has directed numerous films and TV series over her prolific career, including Bravo's Emmy Award-winning Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the documentary series Gay Weddings. As told to Jon Shadel.

In 1970, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, I played a bisexual character in a musical, and it went against the tastes of the local chief of police. I was arrested, illegally, and faced a potentially very harsh jail sentence. It was uncovered that the whole thing was illegal, and of course I was released and there were no charges or anything. It was a huge win. But it was prejudice that put me in that situation. I had traveled to enough places back then to know that gays were not only being harassed, they were being imprisoned. Forget about whether you could get cast, it was whether you were going to have freedom. There were things happening in the world that were more frightening than whether I would get the next job.

Of course, more people are out today. And those who have been out there on the front lines before us, who have risked their lives and reputation, who have done everything they can to give voice to the LGBTQ movement—I think they have broken us through in ways that make it easier for more people to come out and lend their voice and create a larger voice that is now refusing to bow down.

My father used to say to me, "Don't get angry, get better." He meant it in terms of when I lost out on an audition, but I started thinking, "Just keep working on yourself, and ultimately you'll be able to rise above." And so I didn't let it make me afraid that I wouldn't have a career.

The only advice I would give to closeted entertainers today is the advice I took for myself: It was lonely and it was scary and it was dark and I was unhappy, so be true to thine self. You're not going to be happy living in the dark. You have to come out into the light to have personal happiness.

Kenny Ortega is an award-winning producer, director and choreographer. His credits include Hocus Pocus, High School Musical, and Michael Jackson's This is It. As told to Matt Baume.

Follow Matt Baume, Ian Daniel, Jessica Ogilvie, Jon Shadel, Jennifer Swann, and Tyler Trykowski on Twitter.

If you saw Matt Damon's latest film, The Great Wall, last week, please let me know what it's like to have all that legroom in the theater. Did you stretch out? Throw your bag in the seat next to you? Did you move around between the front, back, and middle? Or did you just take a nap on the floor near the stairs? Your options must have been plentiful, because the film made a scant $21 million here in the United States in its opening weekend. That's compared to the $245.7 million that it made overseas. Of that total, a whopping $171 million came from China alone. But that was to be expected. A movie set in China about a mercenary defending the Great Wall from CGI monsters better destroy box office records in the country. It's a thirst trap for Chinese filmgoers.

Conventional wisdom says that for a movie like this—one with a historical, foreign setting and fantastical elements— to succeed in the US, it needs a big (preferably white, male) star. One need only look back at the whitewashing of M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender in 2010 to see how Hollywood views stories that have an Asian origin or location. That movie, which was based on a Nickelodeon animated series inspired by Chinese martial arts lore, made $188 million in foreign ticket sales. That's $131 million in America, but only $4.5 million came from China. (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=lastairbender.htm) That film barely made back its $150 production budget, and likely lost money after factoring in marketing costs and the percentage of net earnings that go to theater owners. The similarly whitewashed video game adaptation Prince of Persia also bombed, but the result was even more grim than Last Airbender in the United States. That film made $90 million in America, but $245 million globally off of a $200 million budget. That's despite casting Jake Gyllenhaal in a role that logically should have gone to someone from the Middle East, if not specifically someone Persian.

Over and over, whitewashed films are embraced overseas, but American audiences generally reject them. That will come into play again when Ghost in the Shell, itself based on a Japanese manga comic, is released on March 31. Characters that, in all other adaptations of the source material have been Japanese, are made to be white for the American feature film. Scarlett Johansson's casting as the film's lead caused a great deal of controversy—doubly so when rumors began to spread that the studio had considered using CGI to make its white cast look Japanese.

Matt Damon's presence in The Great Wall was an effort to adhere to this conventional wisdom and make the film palatable for the average American consumer. And yet it didn't and the movie bombed. So what happened?

The answer might lie in our country's shifting attitude toward cultural appropriation, a concern that seems to matter more to the West than the rest of the world. The Great Wall is already the 20th highest grossing film in Chinese box office history, with nary a concern for Matt Damon's presence as a swashbuckling white American protagonist. It could be that in a nation defined by its melting pot status—but with two centuries of white hegemony under its belt—the ridiculous white savior trope is all too real for us and drags up that history of racial animosity, which we really can't escape now that Donald Trump and his white supremacist apologist administration is in the White House. Put more simply: The Great Wall is a throwback to a time when American audiences were less apt to consider the racial politics of a movie where a white action hero saves the day in an "exotic" land, ala Tarzan or any manner of John Wayne film. Still, the Chinese market wants those movies, and we'll keep making them to satisfy the desires of a cash rich nation hungry for American schlock.

The Chinese appetite for American films seems boundless. Of the 50 biggest all-time grossers in China, 21 of them are at least American co-productions. Increasingly, American films use Chinese capital to fund their operations, and that leads to more and more subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to China in the plots of these movies. Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, Arrival, has a pivotal role for the Chinese government and Chinese officials that likely guaranteed it a release in the country. (China is highly selective of the films it allows in the country.) Last year's Ghostbusters reboot was denied a release because of the ruling party's ban on "cults and superstition." Including Chinese settings in movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction or going after Chinese production investment, like in Star Trek Beyond, opens that lucrative market up for high-risk, high-reward studio blockbusters.

The Great Wall is such a transparent Chinese cash grab—a film about the Great Wall, set in China, backed by Chinese investors—that it was never going to work here. The key for studios going forward is to find a middle ground. Furious 7, the third highest grossing film in Chinese history, wasn't made for China. It wasn't filmed in China. There are no Chinese lead actors. But it did have Chinese financial investment. It simply worked as a movie, and that's really all any of us want—good movies. Great Wall reminded me more of Big Trouble in Little China—John Carpenter's fantasy-action-comedy starring Kurt Russell as a bumbling, arrogant truck driver who gets caught up in the mystical underground of San Francisco's Chinatown. Russell's character, Jack Burton, is pig-headed, clueless about other cultures, and highly conceited. Big Trouble bombed when it was released in 1986, but it would likely fare much better today, considering Hollywood's fascination with China and America's fascination with dim-witted blowhards.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter

John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He was made to endure weeks of walking with so little food and water that some of his fellow captives died. Four more were killed one night in a wild-animal attack. Then the boys were given military training that involved "running up to [six miles] in the heat and hiding" before being given guns and sent to fight "the Arabs."

He spent four years fighting, bombed from the skies and blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold against an enemy sometimes less than a mile away. "I think, 'If I killed that one it's a human being like me,' but you are forced," he said. One day the inevitable happened: Nhial (not his real name) was injured, treading on a mine while on early-morning patrol with two other soldiers in a patch of Upper Nile state surrounded by their enemies.

"I stepped on it and it exploded," he recalled. "It threw me up and down again—and then I was looking around for my foot. I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot. When I saw there's no foot I feel shock. I was really confused. If I was not with the two others I would kill myself because I thought there was no use for me now, so I decide to die."

Read more on Tonic

The Oosterhoff-inator is back at it again.

On Friday, Sam Oosterhoff, the youngest MPP in Ontario history found himself in the middle of the lamest election finance controversy in recent (and possibly all) time. For a backbench rookie MPP, the 19-year-old Oosterhoff is now well known because of his record breaking win and his, at first, staunch social conservative views.

So, it seems odd his nomination for the 2018 election will be challenged, again, by Tony Quirk, a member of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party's executive. In last year's by-election, Oosterhoff defeated Quirk soundly and the 19-year-old also has the support of Tory party leader Patrick Brown on his side, but still, the lil' social conservative is in for a fight.

So, in order to start building a war chest, he took to Go-Fund-Me to attempt to raise $50,000 for his upcoming campaign. The thing is, well, some pondered that you might not be able to do that under Ontario's election laws because of the option to donate anonymously on GoFundMe, which Oosterhoff and his fam were quickly told about on the ol' Twitter machine.

When challenged on Twitter over it, Oosterhoff's bro Aaron said that the anonymous donations are not really anonymous because "names are submitted, just not public on GoFundMe page." This actually seems to be true. Furthermore, Elections Canada told a QP Briefing reporter they have no issue with it, and other politicians have successfully used GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites for similar reasons.

No matter if there was any rule breaking or not, the prospect of looking shady must have spooked Canada's littlest MPP as the GoFundMe page was quickly shut down and most tweets referencing it were deleted. But in the time it was up, Oosterhoff raised a cool 275 bucks.

Anyhoo, we here at VICE decided that we would help our homie out with some suggestions about what he could do with the sweet, sweet, 275 bones burning a hole through his pocket.

A bunch of Lemon Gin:

Look at young Osterhoff—sweet, sweet Oosterhoff—this is a man who homeschooled so fucking hard that you just know he's starting his partying phase now. Now look into his eyes, deep into his sparkling eyes, and tell me that it is not a sure fire conclusion that this man's favourite party drink is Lemon Gin.

This man loves Lemon Gin and for his secret little bangers he could get 11 bottles of the sweet, succulent nectar that gives him hope—Gilbey's Lemon Gin. Available at a LCBO near you!

One framed print of his head on David Hasselhoff's body:

You know young Sam is fucking sick and tired of all the David Hasselhoff jokes lobbied at him by his fellow MPPs.

"Hey, Oosterhoff, save any damsels today?" "Hey Oosterhoff, I hear you're big in Germany." "Hey Oosterhoff, that video of you getting slammed off lemon gin and eating a hamburger off the floor was real sad."

So, in order to seem like a good sport and shut those idiots up, Oosterhoff could buy a big framed print of his head on David Hasselhoff's body for his office. One he could look at and laugh through gritted teeth, "The Hassel(Ooster)hoff is to the rescue!' before going to his desk and weeping softly underneath the glow of Hasselhoff's hunky frame.

Some books and an internet connection:

You're going to be heading into battle mon ami, you might as well read up on like The Art of War, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Growing Up is Hard, What's Going on Down There?: A Boy's Guide to Puberty—if none of those work, hell, there is always The Secret.

Adding that all up you even have $181.24 left over, and you know what you can do with that? Get an internet connection, yay!

Here, on the interweb, you will be able to google Election Ontario— not saying that you did anything wrong big guy—just saying that, you know, maybe it would be in your best interest to do a little light reading before you launch your next donation service.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on  Twitter  .

Journalists from the New York Times, CNN, and Politico were barred from entering Sean Spicer's White House press briefing Friday, the New York Times reports. ABC, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, and conservative outlets Breitbart News and America News Network were apparently welcomed in.

"Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties," New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, said in a statement. "We strongly protest the exclusion of the New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest."

TIME magazine and Associated Press reporters decided not to attend the briefing in defiance of the actions, which were swiftly condemned by the White House Correspondents' Association shortly after.

"The WHCA board is protesting strongly against how today's gaggle is being handled by the White House," Jeff Mason, the president of the press corps association, said in a statement. "We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not. The board will be discussing this further with White House staff."

The move follows Trump's combative comments about the media during his appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference for right-wing activists and political leaders Friday morning. The president criticized polls from CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN, and said journalists "make up sources."

"Nobody loves the First Amendment more than me," Trump told a roaring crowd. "But [the media] never will represent the people and we're going to do something about it."

An uncomfortable video has surfaced showing a security guard relentlessly following a black customer around a Calgary Walmart for no apparent reason. 

Jean Ventose, 21, a University of Calgary student, posted the four minute clip to his Facebook wall Thursday, along with the comment "Here is how I started my morning."

The video, which has now been viewed more than 275,000 times, takes place at Walmart Sage Hill. It opens with the guard, a white woman wearing a blue jacket marked "security" saying "You can't take my picture that's against policy." She holds up her hand trying to block the camera.

Ventose replies, "I'm gonna ask you nicely stop following me."

The guard then crosses her arms, looking angry, and continues to follow Ventose as he walks backwards filming her.

"You see this, this is real bro, I live in Canada. This is real out here."

Ventose told VICE he popped into the Walmart, which he regularly shops at, to pick up some headphones. As he was looking over his options he said he spotted something blue out of the corner of his eye but didn't want to turn around because, "I felt like it would be really awkward." He said the person was also adjusting headphones, as if shopping for them.

"Probably like five minutes after, I decide to actually look over and that's when I realized it was a security guard," he said. "I felt more pressure to get out of there."

So he started walking away with a pair of headphones.   

"That's when she started following me. I asked her 'Why are you following me?' and she said 'Sir you have to pay for that in the electronics'."

Ventose, who said he's experienced this type of treatment before, told VICE he immediately whipped out his phone to start filming.

"I'm never able to catch these situations on camera. I just decided, you know what? Proof."

A Walmart spokesman sent a statement to VICE saying the company is reviewing the incident and is "sorry that [Ventose] is upset by the interaction. At this time, we do not believe that our associate acted out of malice."

The statement also said Ventose is welcome to contact the company to discuss his concerns.

"It is always a concern for us when our service falls below the expectations of our customers."

Jean Ventose says he's been profiled before. Photo via Facebook

The guard, who frequently has a smirk on her face, follows Ventose around the store refusing offer any kind of explanation as to why she is doing so. At one point, he asks:

"Why were you standing there pretending you're gonna buy headphones? Why don't you follow somebody else that's gonna steal something? Stop following me, you're going to make me not want to shop here. Move around. I'm a customer, I come here, I buy stuff."

She remains silent.

"Quit following me! Yo, come get your security," Ventose begins to yell. No one helps him, however at this point the guard says "Don't yell in my store, please."

He replies, "This ain't your store. I'm a customer. You should give me some customer service aight. If you want, go look at your cameras and watch me."  

They have a back and forth where he continues to say "you should move around and let me shop" and she replies "don't yell in the store please."

Ventose says he's yelling to let everybody know that she's following him. "Leave me alone," he says.

Then she deeply sighs and wipes her brow, as if she's the one being inconvenienced here.

Ventose tells her she's going to lose her job if she doesn't leave him alone. He told VICE that during this time, staffers who were around and off camera or within earshot ignored his requests for a manager.

"Nobody wanted to help me."

Finally, a woman in a red uniform appears and tells Ventose he can shop freely. The guard tells him to put the camera away.

"I'm taking this to the board. I'm taking this to higher people. I told you to stop following me. I told you. You just see a black person with dreads and you feel some type of way. Don't ever judge nobody," he says.

"Thank you. Thank you. You made me feel so uncomfortable. I live in Canada. I would never expect shit like that. Never."

Ventose said he hasn't had an apology from Walmart and no longer feels comfortable shopping there. He believes the guard should be fired and trained properly.

On his Facebook post, others have commented about having negative interactions with the same guard. One woman even wrote, "This is not the first video I seen of her doing this to a customer!"

While Ventose said he can't say with certainty that the guard was racially profiling him, "it felt like harassment."

But he said the strong outpouring of support he's received has made him feel better.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Over the past few days, the Trump administration delivered a major blow to transgender rights, set back prison reforms, and revealed disturbing details on the practical implications of its immigration-enforcement measures. But for all this tumult, this week was (again) relatively quiet when it came to major news or developments on key campaign promises. Both Donald Trump and Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan have indicated this may soon change. Trump and VP Mike Pence have recently been promising that a full Affordable Care Act (ACA) replacement plan, arguably Republicans' biggest priority, is on its way, while Ryan said last week Congress would deliver a plan after its recess this week and should get it passed by late March.

This outward resolve may sooth a base increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of real action in the Trump era. However, looking at where replacement plans are today, these promises may just be bluster, destined to disappoint even Trump and the GOP's base.

Both elected Republicans and right-wing think tanks have floated several ACA alternatives since 2009. However, as a side-by-side comparison chart of recent major plans put out recently by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, in all this time they've never developed a consensus plan. There are a few recurrent themes across proposals—creating high-risk pools that would partition chronically ill patients who need a lot of care from the market, allowing insurance sales across state lines, encouraging the growth of health savings accounts, and killing the mandate to buy insurance, to name a few. But a lack of unity on the specifics, especially more controversial elements like funding mechanisms or the fate of Medicaid expansion, explains why the GOP has failed to meet Trump's campaign promises on the speed of repeal and replacement, and blew through their self-imposed January 27 deadline for devising legislation as well.

On Friday, Politico received a leaked version of a two-week-old House Republican bill that ought to send chills down the spines of anyone who gets coverage through the ACA. In addition to ticking most of the aforementioned points of GOP consensus, like eliminating the mandate requiring people to get insurance, it would strike down the ACA's Medicaid expansion and replace income-based tax credits based on income with age-based credits. As Vox explains, broadly this is better for young healthy people who don't need much care and worse for older sick people as well as the poor. It would also defund Planned Parenthood, a threat Republicans have often made. And in a move economists will love but many Americans will find controversial, it would cap tax exemptions for employer-provided plans in order to pay for a lot of what it proposes.

Whether that bill represents the current state of a House Republican plan is unclear. House conservatives have in the past been uncomfortable with some of its elements. But the House itself is just one battleground—any replacement will have to pass the Senate as well, and that's a taller order.

"I have no idea what the Senate is doing," says Sabrina Corlette, a former House staffer who directs research projects at Georgetown University's Center on Health Insurance Reforms. However, she cautions, "It is not typical for the Senate to defer to the House and take whatever they come up with."

Some senators have proposed or backed plans that look quite different from the House's—most notably Kentucky Republican Rand Paul's predictably libertarian proposal. More important, many Republican senators may find it hard to swallow the House plan's Medicaid rollback. A whopping 20 Republican senators hail from states that opted for Medicaid expansion and are less disposed to jigger with the program's current status quo than their House counterparts. Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski has strongly indicated she might oppose any swipes at Medicaid, and some expect moderate Maine Republican Susan Collins to join her, which would almost be enough to guarantee the House plan's failure on its own.

Combine these concrete intra-party wedge issues with broader concerns—caught on audio at a Republican retreat in late January—about the political risks involved with replacement, and you've got a pretty good recipe for continued timidity, aborted grand plans, and stalls.

"We don't have details, and the GOP has been slow to release any," says the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, healthcare economist Gerald Friedman, who has worked on and supported single-payer system proposals, "because every plan they have will hurt someone, and there are real differences of opinion within the GOP."

In theory, the White House could help Republicans unify around a plan, as Obama did for the Democrats when they passed the ACA. However, while Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has ostensibly been working with Congress—and was expected, in the run-up to his 10 February confirmation, to have significant influence on final legislation—it's unclear what exactly he could be working toward, or how effectively.

So, despite talk of a coming grand plan, Corlette says it's impossible to even say for sure what will be in a final bill. There are still too many opaque processes and moving parts.

Corlette adds that it's also unclear how Republicans will try to implement it. Their current strategy is to use the budget reconciliation process to pass repeal and ideally some kind of reform with a simple majority vote. However, Corlette notes, "the provisions in reconciliation have to directly affect federal revenue or spending," which may be interpreted to preclude measures like allowing the sale of insurance across state lines. This may force Republicans to push elements of their plan into piecemeal ancillary legislation, which could in turn face a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, leaving them dead in the water.

It is entirely possible for Trump, Ryan, and company to deliver a full ACA plan next week as promised, and it may resemble Friday's leaked draft. But the notion that it will be passed in March is borderline farcical. In fact, there's some acknowledgement within the GOP (even in the recent past from Ryan and Trump) that we may never see any sort of repeal—the most recent and notable recognition coming via former Republican House Speaker John Boehner's Thursday remarks that the notion of repeal was laughable. There is some acceptance that the ACA framework could be kept in place, but "repaired"—a necessary move, given the flaws in the existing system.

Unfortunately, for the GOP, any delay on its floated timetables could cause serious troubles. As I noted last week, Congress will soon be forced to turn to other issues, like the federal budget, which could take away ACA momentum and reopen further internal GOP disputes. Corlette notes that insurers also have to make their plans as to whether to stay in healthcare markets and how to price their plans soon—the recent exit of Humana and scale-down of Aetna from participation in ACA exchanges shows that the uncertainty of the current political climate has many providers spooked. Strong language and executive actions from the White House could calm insurers, thus alleviating some time pressures on a replacement plan. But that sort of action seems unlikely given Trump officials' actions to date and the spate of policy issues and scandals they are having to deal with on a day-to-day basis. The more time that goes by without a bill passing, the more pressure and protests Republicans will face from constituents afraid of losing their insurance. That could make plenty of congresspeople skittish.

"If they don't do it quickly, then they will be in trouble," says Friedman. "Their base wants ACA repeal, but the longer they wait, the more opposition will develop."

All of which is to say that there's a real fire under Trump and the GOP's collective ass right now to find true consensus legislation and push it forward. There's just no real sign they're making the progress they need to on untangling knotty issues—and it's not clear how long they can go before people start calling this a failure.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

A year after the outcry of #OscarsSoWhite, in an award season wooed by a musical about canoodling white creatives, many have been quick to praise the Academy's attention toward black-led narrative films like Moonlight, Fences, and Hidden Figures (the latter out-computing La La Land as highest-grossing Best Picture nominee). But equally striking is that four out of five Best Documentary nominations boast black directors, and three of the films directly confront our country's layered history of racial oppression. With the mainstreaming of white supremacy and the number of hate groups increased a second year in a row, it makes sense to take solace in the feel-good finale of movies like Hidden Figures. But might it be even more important to face up to the realities that led to this point in the first place?

Compulsory viewing for a country in crisis: Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, Ava DuVernay's 13th, and Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America. These three documentaries expose through a remarkable variety of lenses—literal, in the archival footage spanning place and age; legal, in the numerous policies either entrenching or challenging racist norms; and personal, whether the ire of an expat intellectual or the woe of an inmate wrongly accused—how the myth of America as the land of opportunity has been built on the theft of both land and opportunity from black human beings and has consistently relied on white lies and black labor to keep the dream afloat.

These lies are hardly innocuous, however glittering their packaging. James Baldwin—on whose incomplete 1979 manuscript Notes Toward Remember This House Peck's movie is based—was a film critic in his own right and cautioned against the role Hollywood could play as racial panacea, "designed not to trouble but to reassure." Be it a doleful Doris Day singing in the kitchen or the indulgent train climax from The Defiant Ones, I Am Not Your Negro montages Hollywood scenes of white cluelessness with contemporaneous shots of real-life brutality against blacks, achieving a Kuleshov-style shock throughout. Against a backdrop of lynchings and Jim Crow mania, escapist cinema (of the type still Golden Globe grabbing today) feels less harmless than complicit. As Paste's Shannon M. Houston puts it, I Am Not Your Negro is a "film disinterested in bringing pleasure to white audiences, figuring out white people, or offering up white heroes." For this white viewer, at least, this comes as a welcome astringent, Sea Breeze for a brain clogged with visual platitudes.

Reviews of the three Best Documentary nominations toss out the term "incendiary" so often, one imagines a screen bursting to flames like a reel of old celluloid. Variety's Owen Gleiberman said that watching the Baldwin film is "to feel that the fire is here," and certainly 13th and O.J… aren't afraid of the heat either. 13th is as pithy as O.J… is epic, condensing into 100 minutes the last 150-plus years of state-sponsored criminalization and mass incarceration of African Americans since the 13th amendment "abolished slavery." DuVernay (whose Selma was snubbed by the Academy two years ago) does for the US prison system what Al Gore did for global warming in 2006: proclaim loudly what experts already know, but the powers that be perpetually muffle. With a lineup of talking heads across discipline and party—Michelle Alexander, James Kilgore, Khalil Muhammad, and Angela Davis, to name a few—13th informs as a means to infuriate. When even Newt Gingrich shows up to decry the injustice of crack-cocaine laws, one knows that this isn't some liberal delusion.

Prison also sets the stage for the five-part, nearly eight-hour saga O.J.: Made in America—with Simpson speaking at a parole hearing at Nevada's Lovelock Correctional Facility in 2013. Sentenced for armed robbery, the "Juice" looks positively squeezed dry as he recounts his duties as a porter inside. No matter your take on the 1995 trial, the image of one-time Heisman winner and American golden boy mopping tile and cleaning toilets in late middle-age is sobering. It is hours later in the series that it becomes near impossible to sympathize with the jealous narcissist who continually battered his wife.

But O.J… is as much the story of race wars in Los Angeles at it is the story of Orenthal James Simpson. The Watts Riot of 1965, the police shooting of Eulia Love in 1979, and the 1992 beating of Rodney King are tackled in depth, and Edelman doesn't pull any punches when it comes to O.J.'s willful rejection of black identity and solidarity. (One image of Simpson bro-palling with Trump proves especially stomach-turning; the current president also makes a creepy cameo in 13th). "What are all these niggers doing in Brentwood?" Simpson asks about the protestors in his posh hood after he's arrested by the LAPD. If Baldwin argued that the degraded term was invented by whites out of desperation, and had nothing to do with black people, O.J. seemed to embrace the term as a way to distance himself from the African American community.

Part of what makes this documentary so engrossing is how seductively it spotlights not only the draw of the superstar himself but the way in which his entire selfhood was warped by post-racial hooey. Which is more disturbing, Edelman seems to ask: the vicious murder of O.J.'s wife or the man's undying, ostensibly raceless, charisma?

The documentaries are a reminder that we do not live in a post-race age. And Baldwin, with his own brand of unflappability, points out that we may never. "Is it at once getting much better and still hopeless?" asks TV host Dick Cavett about the "Negro problem" in 1968. "I don't think there's much hope for it," Baldwin replies, "as long as people are using this peculiar language. It's not a question of what happens to the Negro here… the real question is, what's going to happen to this country?" It would be fascinating to have gotten Baldwin's take on the O.J. trial, had he lived but eight years longer; "I'm forced to be an optimist," Baldwin said. "I can't be a pessimist, because I'm alive."

And yet pessimism, perhaps necessarily, permeates each one of these docs, a rejoinder to fantasies of progress that have airbrushed the last eight years. In one of the final shots of 13th, lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson puts it thus: "People say all the time, 'Well, I don't understand how people could have tolerated slavery?... That's so crazy, if I was living at that time I would never have tolerated anything like that.' And the truth is we are living in this time, and we are tolerating it."

If so much of media toils to conceal this fact, at least these three films shake us awake, snap us out of La La Land and into the nation that, for so many and for so long, has never been home of the free.

Follow Eileen G'Sell on Twitter.

While today's Oscars have a reputation forhighlighting independent films like Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, honoring indie darlings is a relatively new thing for the institution. Twenty-five years ago the awards went to Hollywood blockbusters with obscene budgets and major industry backing: The Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. (The previous two years, Warner Bros.'s Driving Miss Daisy and Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, which grossed $424.2 million, took the top prize.)

But Quentin Tarantino's 1992 crime film Reservoir Dogs was essential in expanding Hollywood's scope to include independent films. Tarantino's directorial debut told the story of a diamond heist committed by suit-wearing thieves; along with 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape and a slew of independent films distributed by Miramax, it disrupted Hollywood, as American independent films in its wake continued to break boundaries, gain praise, and win awards. In the 90s, they accomplished what studio films like The Godfather and The Exorcist achieved in the 70s; sure, big budget films like Titanic and Forrest Gump continued to dominate awards season, but numerous indie films broke out into the mainstream, such as Kevin Smith's Clerks and Wes Anderson's Rushmore.

Reservoir Dogs was produced by Lawrence Bender, a 34-year-old who had previously produced Tale of Two Sisters (a drama narrated by Charlie Sheen) and the Sam Raimi horror flick Intruder. He went on to produce many of Tarantino's films, excepting Death Proof, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight. In addition, he's also served as the executive producer of an eclectic mix of movies, from the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth to the Emma Roberts-led live-action reboot of Nancy Drew.

On the eve of Reservoir Dogs's 25th anniversary this October, Bender spoke to VICE about the night he met Tarantino, why superhero movies changed independent filmmaking, and how Trump might affect the film industry.

VICE: What do you see as the film's legacy?
Lawrence Bender: Wow—we're gonna talk like that, are we? We made that movie right at the beginning of what became a wave of independent filmmaking that hadn't existed before. The studios had been making great movies in the 70s, and in the 80s the independent movies tended to be Cannon action movies [like Chuck Norris's Missing in Action]. Reservoir Dogs happened right toward the very beginning of the surge of being able to make independent [films] that weren't just exploitation movies. They were movies that broke the mold in a different kind of way.

How did you meet Quentin Tarantino?
We met through a mutual friend [Scott Spiegel], who directed Intruder and also co-wrote Evil Dead II. He was saying, "Hey man, you gotta meet my friend Quentin. He's got all these great ideas." He had some summer party where I was talking to Quentin, and I was like, "Tarantino? That name sounds familiar. I feel like I read a script by a guy with a similar name. It was called True Romance." He was like, "That's my script!" I was like, "No, no, I don't think it was Tarantino. I think it was another name." And he says, "No, that was my script!" I either met him for the first time there—or at a midnight screening of the 3D House of Wax. It was one of those places.

Were you and Tarantino both heavily influenced by the Hollywood films that came out during the 70s?
Quentin's like a professor that has multiple PhDs in the world of film. He's not just a brilliant filmmaker—he's studied film his entire life. I grew up in the 70s, so I'm personally influenced by the 70s because that's the era where I was seeing movies all the time—from Dirty Harry, to The Godfather, to The Conversation.

What were your expectations for Reservoir Dogs ?
Quentin and I are very different. He studied film his whole life, and I didn't, so I had no idea what to expect from him. I just knew we were making a movie. We had a dream that we'd get picked up at Sundance and Cannes, and Miramax would see it, buy it, and release it. All those things happened—our dream came true.

The other amazing thing that happened was that before we started making the movie, Sundance called Quentin and said, "We'd love for you to come to Sundance and be part of the Sundance Film Lab." We'd just finished casting and were gonna go into prep, and he said, "You hold down the fort. I'm gonna go to Sundance and do this film lab." That's why Sundance means so much to us—Quentin got to go and have this amazing experience there.

Did Hollywood underestimate Tarantino at the time?
It was very hard to get Reservoir Dogs financed—but it's always hard for a first-time filmmaker. The reaction at Sundance was pretty amazing, but at the [same time], people were saying, "Is this too violent?" Then some nay-sayer said, "Well, can he direct women?" Which we laughed at. He made Pulp Fiction next—clearly, he can direct women.

It sounds like making Reservoir Dogs was a positive experience. Was the rest of your work in Hollywood like this?
Times have changed. The 90s felt like a second golden era of movies. Quentin and I got to make a bunch of amazing movies one after another: Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Dusk Till Dawn, Four Rooms, Kill Bill. I did Good Will Hunting, too. I'm not a pundit, so it's not easy for me to say, "Hollywood's this, Hollywood's that." But it's clearly a place that's run by the major studios. They're all publicly traded and owned by big conglomerates with vertical integration. Big tentpole movies are what drives the business.

It's a hard time for new filmmakers to come into the business, because the business is so driven by these big tentpole movies. On the other hand—and there is another hand—there's been such an enormous amount of wealth creation in the world, which has created many new financiers. People come and say, "Well, I wanna make movies!" For whatever reason, there's an enormous amount of men, women, and companies out there who are financing independent movies like Moonlight. A lot of the movies that are nominated weren't made by studios—they were bought by studios.

Are there any young filmmakers who excite you?
I just saw a short film called Code 8 by Jeff Chan. You should watch it. It's got a great mixture of exactly what's going on today, and you can feel the characters—but there's this sci-fi, near-future world that we're living in too.

How do you think Trump will affect film culture?
I was on a panel when we did Inglorious Bastards, and a lot of the movies that were on the panel were movies that had a kind of social relevance. When it came around to me, I said, "Look, you know, honestly, as a filmmaker, you don't have to make a movie that has a kind of social relevance. We're making movies to be entertaining also, and if they happen to do something [that has social relevance], that's great, but you can also make a movie that has nothing to do with what's going on today."

Movies that have social impact are gonna be more and more important. Every once in a while you do have a movie that can affect things. When we did An Inconvenient Truth, it did have an effect. Everything is so upside down right now. There's so many things going on in the world right now, it's so hard to know. Clearly with climate change, every one of the things [Trump's] done has been really upsetting and has a negative impact, so I think there will be a lot of filmmakers motivated by that—but it takes time to come up with great stories, great writing, and great movies.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

We're nearly one month into President Donald Trump's 120-day ban on all refugee claims, and already hundreds of people have fled the US into Canada, many of them on foot in waist-high snow.

There has since been disagreement about what it means for Canada to have so many refugees coming in outside ports of entry. Is it illegal? Are they "skipping the queue"? And what exactly are the "legal, safe ways of entering Canada" that our Conservative immigration critic is talking about?

Felicia* and Marco*, Guatemalan parents of three kids, learned the hard way that the US-Canada border is not a legal or safe place to make a refugee claim last year. The much-debated "safe third country" agreement between Canada and the US deemed their plea inadmissible before any mention of kidnapping or murder. They say it was out of an effort to come to Canada the "right" way that they may now be sent back to the violence they fled.

Their story begins in Guatemala, where Felicia and Marco say they were outspoken critics of political corruption. They told VICE one politician they complained about sent them death threats, and his associates attempted to kidnap Felicia and her kids.

The couple said they knew they were being followed, too, but still did not feel safe reporting to police. Marco said his brother-in-law was killed by drunk police, and that Felicia's sister was kidnapped, raped and tortured as a student activist decades before. One night in June 2016, while driving with their eight-year-old daughter in the back seat, the parents say they were chased. Marco said he remembered five gunshots fired at their car.

"Then I said OK, it's over. We need to get out," Felicia told VICE. "One day more there, and maybe we wouldn't be alive today."

They didn't waste any time leaving the country. Felicia said they had friends drive their family across the border to El Salvador, because they feared authorities may be waiting for them at the airport. They had no time to form plan, only a couple hastily-packed bags and a few hundred dollars in cash, Marco told VICE.

Marco and Felicia managed to get on a red eye flight to Dallas, the first leg of a two-day journey to Canada. With talk of building a wall to keep out "bad hombres" heating up ahead of the 2016 election, they decided Texas was "not a good place for us."

They arrived at the US-Canada border between Blaine, Washington and White Rock, BC in the middle of the night, and told border guards that they were seeking asylum right away. At the time, Marco says his English wasn't very good, and they weren't immediately offered a translator. "We were just like, 'We run, boom boom.'"

Read More: Just How Much Are Refugees Risking to Illegally Cross into Canada?

Marco and Felicia say they had plenty of documentation of threats and incidents back home, but that wouldn't matter that night. The family was detained at the border for nearly 24 hours, but never allowed to complete refugee applications. Officers told them about the safe third country agreement, that they were inadmissible to Canada because they traveled through the US. They would not be allowed to apply again.

Marco said he and Felicia had no idea—they only wanted to follow the rules. "I said there is no direct flight from Guatemala to Canada. There is no ship, no train, no nothing," he told VICE. "He said to me that's not my problem."

The family walked back to the US at 1 AM in pouring rain, where they were told their attempt to seek asylum in Canada would likely disqualify them from applying as refugees in the US as well. This is what would be in store for most of the hundreds of refugees that have been crossing into Canada, if they decided to declare themselves at a regular border.

At this point, Felicia and Marco say they were desperate. They didn't have money left, and they still hoped to reach a friend of Marco's that lived in the Vancouver area. They decided to leave their bags and belongings behind, and walk across into Canada, passing police cruisers and heat-detecting sensors along the way. After arriving at a White Rock golf course, they managed to pay for a cab ride to a transit line with Marco's watch.

The family declared themselves to the Canadian Border Services Agency when they arrived, and have been fighting deportation through a process called pre-removal risk assessment. Because they face danger at home, Marco and Felicia hope the government will let them stay on compassionate grounds. More likely they will be deported back to the country they fled.

"CBSA said we are criminals, they remind us every time we have a meeting with them," Marco told VICE.

According to Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Laura Best, about five percent of cases like these successfully halt deportation, compared with about 50 percent of general refugee claims that are accepted. If they had crossed on foot first, Felicia and Marco's chances of staying would be closer to 50-50. 

"It's an interesting agreement in that it actively encourages people to come by not not appearing at a port of entry," Best told VICE. "They know they can't come to the border and present themselves in an orderly fashion."

Best says refugees therefore often act on "very bad advice" from smugglers, sometimes destroying all their original identity documents—a move that can result in extended jail time while authorities figure out who they are. "By not allowing people to enter in an orderly fashion, we're pushing them to get the advice of people who are not operating within the same sort of normal legal and moral constraints."

Best says that the numbers coming in on foot aren't "unprecedented" or out of step with Canada's history of granting asylum. "It's still very low—far below the thousands making refugee claims in Canada even a couple years ago," she said. For a sense of the range: we took in about 33,000 refugees in 2009, and 16,000 in 2015. "If there are extra hundreds, maybe thousands who will walk, it's still not the highest refugee flows Canada has seen."

Read More: At the Manitoba Border as More Refugees Flee Donald Trump's America

Marco and Felicia say it's been surreal watching the US struggle with a 120-day hold on all refugees, and a ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. Those developments have only deepened their resolve that they made the right decision and followed rules the best they could. "The kids are the main reason we came, and the kids are the reason we are doing everything by the law," Felicia said.

Marco says he was disturbed to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweet a welcoming message to refugees after Trump's executive orders. He said it was like a knife in the backs of people fleeing persecution, to say one thing but leave the rules unchanged.

Marco and Felicia have now been in Canada just over six months. Marco has been able to get a temporary work permit, their daughter has been able to attend elementary school, and they're both learning English. "We've had enough time to connect with people, to volunteer in many places," Felicia told VICE. "We want to demonstrate that we need the protection and we will be useful for the country too."

Felicia says she tries not to think about what would happen if the Canadian government does choose to deport her family back to Guatemala. "They are going to kill us. They are looking for us. Now they are texting my mother in law and my brother, saying they will find us."

"We live with that fear, because we can't go back."

*Names have been changed to protect from threats.

Lead image of the Peace Arch border crossing by Darryl Dyck

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

In less than three years, a honeymoon between Brazil and Uber, fueled by complimentary mints and bottled water in the back seats of luxury sedans, turned into a turbulent, unsafe relationship, with some rides ending in kidnapping, robbery, and murder.

Several drivers and passengers interviewed by Motherboard described their dangerous and harrowing experiences using the ridesharing service, and there's no shortage of customer complaints on social media. And while Uber has committed to investing more money to support drivers and passengers in Brazil, critics say the company is doing too little too late.

Uber arrived in São Paulo in 2014 with its best service, UberBlack, and locals were amazed by the opportunity to hail black sedans from the company's app. Taxi drivers didn't like the idea and retaliated violently against Uber and its drivers, but their behavior only ended up turning into a free advertisement campaign for the multi-billion dollar company, giving it a legion of loyal supporters across the country.

Less than three years after its national launch, the app is available in more than 40 Brazilian cities, and UberX started to accept drivers with cars manufactured in 2008 or later. In the city of São Paulo alone, the local government claims that more than 50,000 cars registered in ride-sharing apps (it is believed that Uber accounts for 90 percent of them) compared to 38,000 taxi drivers.

With the increasing number of new users and the enrollment of drivers whose only training was watching a YouTube video about how Uber works, the consequences were inevitable: Uber's relationship with both passengers and drivers started showing signs of strain.

Read the rest on Motherboard.

Malaysian authorities said Friday that Kim Jong Un's half brother was assassinated with a nerve agent called VX, which is classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction.

Two women allegedly used the odorless and tasteless nerve agent to attack Kim Jong Nam, the eldest son of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, at Kuala Lumpur airport almost two weeks ago. After results from the first autopsy on Kim Jong Nam proved inconclusive, a second round of testing revealed the presence of the highly-toxic chemical.

The North Korean government has not responded to the latest developments in the case but has previously said it would reject the findings of any autopsy, calling it a violation of the victim's human rights.

Khalid Abu Bakar, Malaysia's inspector general, told reporters on Friday that the findings came from swabs taken from the victim's face and eyes. Because VX does not evaporate quickly and can remain toxic for some time, Khalid said the airport would be decontaminated.

Khalid revealed that an investigation is underway into how the nerve agent was brought into the country, but the substance—typically an oily, amber-colored liquid—is lethal at extremely low doses, meaning it could have easily been concealed for smuggling.

Read more on VICE News

(Top image: Screen shot from the trailer for 'Catfish' / Universal Pictures)

Since the early days of the internet, people have been tricked into falling in love with someone who turns out to be someone else entirely. Whether it's through dating sites, Tinder or Neopets, it turns out it's very easy to set up a profile with a photo you've found online, before stringing along some poor person looking for love. A term for this, "catfish", was coined and popularized in 2010 by Nev Schulman—director of the documentary Catfish and creator of a subsequent TV series, also named Catfish—and since then catfishing cases have seemingly popped up every day.

Canterbury woman Anna Rowe is the latest high profile victim. She says she was lured into a 14-month relationship with a married father and is now demanding a change in the law to make catfishing illegal. Anna is "heartbroken" after learning that someone she had spent months investing in both online and IRL lied about his life, was actually a giant cheat and was using a photo of a Bollywood actor for his Tinder profile. Unlike most catfish victims, Anna spent several nights a week with "Antony," but didn't realize that he wasn't quite who he said he was, and is now calling on Theresa May, via a petition, to change the law and make catfishing a crime.

But is that possible? And is what happened to Anna even catfishing, considering her and "Antony" spent so much time together? I asked Zarek Rahman, a technology lawyer, to answer all of my burning questions.

VICE: Hi Zarek. Legally, does what happened to Anna count as "catfishing"?
Zarek Rahman: Catfishing is not a legally defined term in the UK. The term usually refers to situations where a person creates a fake social media profile in extreme detail using pictures of a totally different person in order to carry out online relationships with other unsuspecting social media users. Since Miss Rowe and "Antony" actually met on several occasions before he disappeared—and she hired a private investigator who eventually found out that he was actually married while seeing her—it seems that this was really a case of a cheating husband and a naive woman. Nothing new there.

Would it be legally possible to make what she's asking for happen?
Miss Rowe is asking for a new law to be passed which would criminalize the creation of a fake online profile with the intent to use that profile to obtain sex. That's unlikely to happen, as the House of Lords have already conducted a thorough inquiry into social media and criminal offences in 2014, coming to the conclusion that "criminal law in this area, almost entirely enacted before the invention of social media, is generally appropriate for the prosecution of offences committed using social media." Furthermore, the European Convention on Human Rights provide that every person—including "Antony"—has the right to freedom of expression, and so any proposed law which attempts to limit this is unlikely to be passed.

"Simply dragging the picture of 'Antony' into Google's search by image tool would have quickly made it clear to Miss Rowe that it was actually a photo of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan."

Is there any precedent? Does she have any other legal options?
Not for what she has experienced, although there is legislation and guidance in place for other crimes that can be committed over social media. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has categorized four different types of communications as criminal offences. One: Communications which constitute threats of violence to a person or damage to property. Two: Communications which specifically target an individual or individuals and which may constitute harassment or stalking, controlling or coercive behaviour, disclosing private sexual images without consent. Three: communications which may amount to a breach of a court order or a statutory prohibition, and four: communications which do not fall into any of the categories above fall to be considered separately, i.e. those which may be considered grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false.

For example, the Protection of Harassment Act 1997 applies equally to bullying that takes place on and offline, while the Malicious Communications Act 1988 makes it an offence to send a "grossly offensive" communication that has the purpose of causing distress or anxiety. Most recently, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 made the posting of revenge porn an offence, so if Miss Rowe had sent "Antony" a private sexual photo or film which he then made public without her consent and with the intention to cause her distress, that would be a criminal offence. If she could identify "Antony" in real life, and if she can demonstrate that she suffered an actual financial loss on her part or he made an actual financial gain on his part as a result of his actions, this may constitute an offence under the Fraud Act 2006. Whether the CPS would ever actually pursue such a case is questionable.

Say a law was established, how do you think it would be enforced?
If such a law was passed, the crime would need to be reported to the police, who would then decide whether the case is worth pursuing. If so – and if there is sufficient evidence available—the CPS would prosecute the case. I'll leave it to you to assess how many of these cases would actually make it to trial.

What options do people currently have to protect themselves in cases like this?
Act with vigilance and caution online. Fake social media profiles are rarely flawless. There are a number of tools available online which can be used to check if someone is genuine; for example, simply dragging the picture of "Antony" into Google's search by image tool would have quickly made it clear to Miss Rowe that it was actually a photo of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan. As with most things in life, common sense should prevail.

Have you ever dealt with a catfishing case yourself?
I don't advise individuals who have been victims of catfish cases, but I do advise startups and technology companies which operate social media platforms. One of the key ways for a platform to protect itself from any liability is to make it very clear that they take no responsibility for what users post, but at the same time if an account is clearly fake, has posted abusive or offensive material and is reported, the platform will usually respond quickly by disabling the account, but it's extremely unlikely that either the platform—or the owner of the fake account—is going to have any liability to you for any loss or emotional distress you've suffered as a result of using their service.

@marianne_eloise

More on VICE:

Someone's Been Using My Facebook Photos to 'Catfish' People for Nearly a Decade

Confessions of a Teenage Catfishing Addict

The VICE Interview: Nev Schulman from MTV's 'Catfish'

A civil trial alleging that Vancouver police wrongfully and violently arrested a Nigerian refugee with mental illness wrapped on Friday, and testimony by several cops paint a bizarre and brutal picture.

The BC Supreme Court heard that Solomon Akintoye was on his way to a job interview in 2011 when an officer mistook him for a fraud suspect who was also black. The cops asked him for ID, so he handed over his health card.

The interaction probably could have ended there—you know, since it was the wrong guy—but the two cops detained him. Then an argument started about Akintoye's left hand, which was in his pocket. Akintoye claims he was holding his pants up, and asked to keep it there.

Officer Jeremiah Birnbaum testified that he said, "If you want to act like an asshole, you'll get treated as one," before he slammed Akintoye against the hood of his cruiser. The other officer testified that Akintoye resisted an attempt to put on handcuffs. The cops kneed him and dragged him to the ground, and then four more officers were called in as backup.

Akintoye described being punched and kicked, his head smashed into the ground. One of the cops testified that he hit Akintoye in the ribs as hard as he could. Officer Birnbaum, however, claimed he did not punch or kick the man when he was down.

The Vancouver police say they violently arrested Akintoye in the interest of "officer safety." They said it was Akintoye who was argumentative, and that they did not use excessive force.

Akintoye's lawyers say the arrest and beating "reveals a troublesome pattern beneath the surface of so many police encounters with black people in Canada," drawing comparison to carding cases in Ontario. Vancouver's Pivot Legal Society say Akintoye's mental illness worsened after the confrontation. They said a pat-down could have prevented the incident.

This is not the first time Akintoye has gone after the Vancouver cops. In 2013, he filed a human rights complaint alleging racial profiling, which was dismissed. The verdict on the civil case will be delivered later this year.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

For more of Jana Vasilijevic's work, check out her website.

When I arrive at Dr. Alexandra Stein's house in North London, she's on the phone. "Your number one job is to stay in contact with them," she says empathically into the receiver, giving advice on how to help someone who is getting sucked into a cult. She takes a lot of these calls from concerned family members because she is, after all she's been through, an authority on cults.

For a decade, Dr Stein was a member of a leftist political cult known as The O. Once she escaped, she wrote a book and a PhD on the topic, and became one of the leading academic experts in the field. She has just published her second book, Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems . On a cold, gray Tuesday, we talk about her experiences, the definition of a cult, and whether the leader of the free world is, in fact, a cult leader.

"People don't think of political groups as cults," Stein tells me, over a mug of hot tea. "But they can be. There are zillions of political cults around the world." She would know. Stein grew up in London to South African parents, and they were heavily political as a family. "Politics was in my bones from a very early age."

Read the rest on Broadly.

This article originally appeared on VICE Serbia

Over the last 25 years, Serbian photographer Srđan Veljović has been documenting the social changes that have taken place in Serbia. Whether for the summers in the socialist-built housing blocks in the New Belgrade district, to mourn over the victims the massacre in Srebrenica or the heyday of Serbian rap group Sunshine – Srđan was there, and his camera was too.

His new exhibition – 1990s – focuses on works he created during the rule of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević. It's a look at life in the army and outside it in the years between Milošević's rise to power in 1987 and his ousting in 2000. I spoke with Srđan ahead of his exhibition in the ARTGET Gallery in Belgrade, about the photos he thinks best represent this Serbian decade, a decade that started with war and ended with war.

VICE: The black and white photos from the end of the 1980s – where did you take them and how do you think they represent 1990s Serbia?
Srđan Veljović: They were taken during my obligatory stint in the Yugoslav army in 1987 and 1988. I was stationed in the Divulje barracks on the Adriatic coast – which is now in Croatia. At first glance, they might not seem connected to photos I took in the 90s, but they strongly show what preceded that decade of war. They show the spot from where we all jumped straight into the 1990s, they show what was lost. There's a photo I have of two soldiers, friends of mine, who I asked to kiss each other in front of my camera, just for fun. Everything was so innocent.

Divulje/Split, the Yugoslav Army, 1988. All photos by Srđan Veljović

If you look at those scenes now, how do you feel about them, knowing what happened after?
When I took the photos, I didn't think of what they would mean one day and they didn't have that meaning yet. My exhibition shows two views on army life – the pre-war times in the military in 1987 and 1988, and during the NATO bombings in Serbia in 1999. And then there's a third section, made up of photos that show social and political life between those two frameworks.

What was social life in Serbia like during the 1990s?
The photos I have of those times show scenes from Belgrade techno-rave club Industrija, from turbo-folk parties on riverboats and folk dances in Belgrade park Kalemegdan. I think they show all these things people were trying to do in order to get on with their life, but it's all symbolic because no one was actually able to get on with anything because of the war.

Divulje/Split, the Yugoslav Army, 1988

Where did you celebrate the end of the NATO bombings?
I was mobilised, so I took part in it. We were stationed in Srem, some 13 miles from Belgrade. I think the first pictures from the military in 1987 and 1988 are almost pure. You see that there's no danger, the scenes are almost romantic. The ones from 1999 are grimier, you see that time has passed and the years have not been kind.

When we heard the bombings were over, we had a party in a shitty bar in Srem. At that messy party, I took another picture that had soldiers grinding on each other. I staged the one of soldiers kissing in 1988, but this moment 11 years later was a totally spontaneous scene. So much had changed.

Thank you, Srđan!

After the NATO bombings in 1999

Divulje/Split, the Yugoslav Army, 1988

Club Industrija in the 1990s

Belgrade, September 1997. Artist Saša Marković Mikrob walks with masks at a festival called "Lust for Life, Wilhelm Reich"

Divulje/Split, the Yugoslav Army, 1988

Belgrade in the 90s

During the NATO bombings in 1999

During the NATO bombings in 1999

During the NATO bombings in 1999

Belgrade in September 1999

I recently met a cute boy at the bar where I work in Los Angeles. He had just moved here from San Francisco, and it wasn't long before we were making out while I played with his butt. At the end of the night, I asked for his number.

"Just so you know, if we're gonna hang out, I do drag," he said while typing into my phone. His tone was almost apologetic, as if admitting something shameful.

"Does that mean I can't play with your butt?" I asked, trying to be playful.

He laughed. "I just know how you guys are."

"What guys?"

"You know, muscle bears," he responded. "I know bears are usually only into masculine guys, and I'm not always masculine in that way."

I've never identified as a "bear" (gay slang for a bigger, typically hairier guy), let alone a muscle bear. I don't even identify as "masculine," really. Those are things others define me as.

"All I care about is that we get to hang out, and I get to make out with you and play with your butt," I said. "If you're in a dress while I do it, I don't really care." It surprised me that he felt he had to say that, to apologize for who he was.

His feelings echoed something that happened to a friend of mine recently, Fifi LaFille. I've known and worked with Fifi over the past four years; she's a well-known drag queen in the LA club scene. In November, Fifi won the Mr. Precinct Leather 2017 title, a leather pageant at a downtown LA gay bar, which qualified her to run for the larger Mr. LA Leather competition this March.

The leather scene is dominated by masculine stereotypes and steeped in tradition. While many within it have embraced Fifi and stepped up to show their support, it wasn't long before there were whispers of disapproval and controversythat a drag queen—someone who didn't fit the standards of those ultra-masculine tropes—would be running for a Mr. Leather competition. She said people were worried at first that by competing, she was mocking leather culture and didn't think she was "leather" or "masculine" enough to run. And eventually, some openly told her she should run as a boy in Mr. LA Leather, rather than in drag, and community leaders held discussions about whether she should be allowed to participate at all. Others spoke up for her right to participate, and it was quickly decided she should be allowed. FiFi isn't even the first drag queen to win a leather title, which shows just how "controversial" this all is.

"It's important to remember that masculinity doesn't need to be defined by the heteronormative archetypes we grew up with," FiFi told me. "I'm hoping that by competing the community will see that leather and kink aren't exclusive to their idea of what a leatherman is. It's fluid. The ideal of hyper-masculinity enshrined in the leather, bear, and kink community is based on internalized homophobia, I think, stemming from the fact that most of us were that little boy crying in the school bathroom for being called a faggot, a queer, a cocksucker." She noted that the younger LGBTQ generation is beginning to grasp masculinity differently—she sees "skinny guys in harnesses and chaps and mascara, muscle queens in dresses, straight girls in full leather looks" at parties all the time.

People like FiFi are heroes to me, those with the courage to step outside the norms of masculinity and sexuality and force us to question what those ideas mean.

You see it a lot in the gay community, the premium we put on "masculinity," to the point where we use dangerous amounts of steroids to get buffer, restrict the way we dress and act to meet masculine ideals, and disavow anything or anyone feminine in our culture. And I can't help but think that maybe FiFi is right, that it all stems back to when some of us were called "faggots" as kids.

When I was in elementary school, I was tormented by a bully who called me Tinker Bell. I had no idea how he knew, how he could see the thing inside me that I was terrified of. But instead of allowing myself to be defined by some other man's ideas of who I am and how I should behave, and instead of letting society define my worthiness based on my "masculinity," I can just be comfortable with who I am—a faggot who really likes to suck other dudes' dicks. That's exactly what that bully used to call me: "Tinker Bell" and "cocksucker." So fine—I'm a cocksucking fairy.

There are a thousand ways the LGBTQ community divides, defines, limits, and separates ourselves. Masculine and feminine, bears and otters, bottoms and tops, muscle and chubs and cubs and twinks, femme and butch. But these are things that also make us unique and amazing, all the ways that we are strong and queer.

This week, the Trump administration rescinded federal guidance issued under President Obama advising schools to allow trans and gender nonconforming students to use the bathroom of the gender they identify as. There are about 150,000 transgender teens nationwide between the ages of 13 and 17 that Trump proclaimed aren't worthy of our society's respect in one fell swoop this week.

Gender and sexuality, when it comes to acts of cruelty like that, become political. And the way we act toward one another as a queer community is more important now than ever. "Being visible is important right now," as FiFi put it. And she's right.

Being visible and unified as a community is all that matters over the next four years. Be as masculine or effeminate as you want. Be queer as fuck. Be the boy top and the big daddy bottom. Be whatever the fuck you want. But make sure you're better than they say we are.

And don't believe them when they say the fight is over, that Trump and his administration aren't going after the LGBTQ community. Because that's a lie. This week, they came for us, and what happened has everything to do with who I am as a gay man as much as it has to do with anyone else who's L, G, B, T, or Q.

It takes courage to stand up in drag on those leather contest stages. It takes courage to reach inside yourself and discover who you really are. Can you imagine the strength it must take to be a 15-year-old trans boy? It takes courage to be a faggot or a dyke. It takes courage to be a cocksucking fairy.

Nobody gets to define who I am as a man. It can't be defined by who or how I fuck, how I act or what clothes I wear; who I am is defined by my actions, my courage, and my strength.

Queens like FiFi who get up on those stages to entertain us, those students fighting for the right to use the bathroom they need to, those who fought for our right to marry and be whoever we want? They're heroes. And we, too, are heroes. Maybe it's time we started treating one another as such.

On the night of (and the morning after) the 2017 Golden Globes, a liberal movie star and a conservative commentator engaged in two time-honored rituals: the impassioned cause-driven acceptance speech, followed by the withering ad hominem dismissal. The star in this case was Meryl Streep; the commentator was the then President-Elect of the United States.

The whole episode reinforced a classic narrative about Hollywood and politics. Earlier in the awards ceremony, Hugh Laurie quipped that it would be the last-ever Golden Globes: "I don't mean to be gloomy, it's just that it has the words 'Hollywood,' 'foreign,' and 'press' in the title." (The Golden Globes are put on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization that disseminates US entertainment news abroad.) Streep picked up his thread, and in her widely-shared speech she claimed that the members of the film community at the Golden Globes "belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now: Hollywood, foreigners, and the press."

And vilified she was—specifically, the next morning, on Twitter, by Donald Trump. He tweeted: "Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn't know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big." Later, he told the New York Times that he was "not surprised" that he had been criticized by "liberal movie people."

He stopped short of saying she should "stick to acting," but that's the common refrain from conservatives around awards season. Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham wrote a whole book on the subject: 2003's Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America. The refrain conservatives return to on the subject hasn't changed much in the intervening years: it's the business of entertainers to entertain (what is Hollywood, after all, if not a business), but they insist on using their platform to push a political agenda.

Comparatively, far-right sites lit up with praise in the wake of Lady Gaga's seemingly apolitical Super Bowl halftime performance earlier this month: Tomi Lahren called it "a lesson in political modesty" that Streep should learn something from; on Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" vertical, Daniel Nussbaum announced that "Lady Gaga shocked the world simply by entertaining it," favorably comparing the show to Beyonce's explicitly political performance at the 2016 Super Bowl, claiming that "Pop songs are by definition catchy baubles meant to entertain."

"Big Hollywood" is one of Breitbart's key areas of coverage; it sits alongside "Big Government" and "Big Journalism." Andrew Breitbart launched Big Hollywood as its own site in 2008, after failing to convince Hollywood conservative group Friends of Abe to launch a website targeting liberal excesses in the industry. Scroll through Big Hollywood, and you'll see story after story about celebrity activism and liberal advocacy—short reports of celebrity quotes clearly presented as chum for Breitbart's ravenous tank of commenters. Lena Dunham is a favorite Breitbart punching bag, as stories about her regularly score upwards of 3,000 comments.

Sometimes, Big Hollywood takes a break from trolling liberal stars to write glowing posts about more right-leaning celebrities: "Mark Wahlberg Tells 'Out of Touch' Celebs to Shut Up About Politics," "Matthew McConaughey to Hollywood: 'Embrace' Donald Trump," "Reba McEntire: Fans Don't Pay 'Hard Earned Money' to Hear My Political Opinions." Most of the site's positive stories feature celebrities telling other celebrities to, in one way or another, shut up and sing. Big Hollywood is decidedly celebrity-centric, its critiques are leveled at the famous people in movies rather than the movies themselves.

The name "Big Hollywood" itself presumes that there's a monolithic power that needs to be investigated and subverted—specifically, by intrepid conservatives. But there are critics on the left who speak of Hollywood in similar terms; Meryl Streep's speech was met with scorn from the National Review, but it also roused the ire of the left-wing Jacobin magazine.

Complaints about the state of Hollywood are plentiful on both the right and the left—but when we say that, which Hollywood are we talking about specifically? Are the left and the right critiquing the same one?

In these kinds of critiques, "Hollywood" is almost always used metonymically. The name of the neighborhood stands in for the name of the industry, but it also stands in for the idea of a certain coastal, urban, celebrity-adjacent culture. To say "Hollywood" is to evoke an establishment, a hegemony, an aesthetic: a glittering realm full of bodies made beautiful by means of eleven dollar green juices and hundred dollar hot yoga classes; souls made empty by constant networking in ceaseless summers; "Hollywood" conjures up a kingdom of applause and self-congratulation—of gowns, stars, and golden statues—and it stirs up a complex brew of envy and distaste in Americans across the political spectrum.

For many conservatives, the problems with Hollywood are on full display every year at the Golden Globes and the Oscars—and when the left complains about "Hollywood," they're also often talking about awards ceremonies. But their complaints are less about the particular actors and more about systemic issues in the industry—why aren't there more female directors? Why aren't there more opportunities for actors and filmmakers of color? Why does the LGBTQ community remain so underrepresented?

Liberals also focus critiques of Hollywood on the films themselves: whose stories are we telling, and whose stories are we applauding? How formally bold or experimental is a "mainstream" work allowed to be before it is relegated to the avant-garde? The primary Oscar narrative for this year's ceremony is that the Academy will inevitably award Best Picture to La La Land, the safe, white, nostalgic, establishment-approved musical, rather than to Moonlight, an indie coming-of-age story about a queer black boy. The left sees Hollywood as a bastion of safe, white, nostalgic, establishment-approved art.

***

We can agree, at least, that a lot ofmovie stars publicly espouse liberal politics, especially on social issues. They're #WithHer, they #StandwithPP; they give shout-outs to feminist and environmentalist and pro-LGBT causes in acceptance speeches—and the more visible these stars are, the more likely it is for their voices to be heard. But there may also be social pressure to drift left in Hollywood. "It's groupthink," says Erik Lokkesmoe. Lokkesmoe is the head of Aspiration Studios and Different Drummer, a PR firm that markets "smart films to soulful audiences" and focuses on "audiences and creators in the middle space"—or as Lokkesmoe puts it, markets that fall outside the focus of the current Hollywood marketing strategies "stuck in LA and NYC." "Any time you get the same people within the same geography watching the same shows and going to the same yoga studios and bars, that is going to create a monolithic perspective."

Concerns about a "monolithic" liberal culture in Hollywood have driven some conservatives to carve out spaces just for themselves. Friends of Abe, a private networking group for Hollywood conservatives, was founded in 2004 by actor Gary Sinise with the help of screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd. (Sinise declined our request for comment.) Its existence has never been a secret, but it carefully guards the names of its members. Chetwynd originally saw the group as a place for conservative advocacy, but Sinise wanted it to be a more of a private, supportive space; the former has described their stance as "Don't offer a spear, offer a seat."

Chetwynd stressed to me that Friends of Abe is merely a "fellowship" that has too often been sensationalized as a secret society. "[Friends of Abe] still exists, and there's a good reason for it to exist. In times like these, it's useful to have a place to go and not be concerned that something you say inadvertently … might give offense." He's hesitant to say that conservatives face discrimination, per se: "There's not really a blacklist. It's more of a whitelisting. People tend to hire in their own image—because they're simpatico. In any business, it's hard to swim against the tide."

But "swimming against the tide" can also have romantic, heroic, and even macho connotations. The branding of the Hollywood conservative as a rugged individualist has been used to great advantage by Hollywood's most famous conservatives, including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight, and Clint Eastwood. Conservatives see them as Hollywood's Dirty Harrys—at-times-literal gun-toting renegades who've defected from the liberal Hollywood establishment. It's easy for conservatives to project strength and honesty and toughness onto these figures; they're outnumbered and undaunted, like the Magnificent Seven or 300's Spartans. Reagan and Schwarzenegger leveraged this image into actual political power—and so, in his way, has Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a celebrity. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and his lavish lifestyle and relationship history have been chronicled in the tabloids for decades. Trump is as "Big Hollywood" as anyone else featured on the Breitbart vertical—or, as actor Robert Davi wrote for them, "Donald Trump is the John Wayne of Politics." ("Big Hollywood" loves to feature actors willing to talk to the site; Jon Voight announced his Trump endorsement there).

Last year, Clint Eastwood gave an interview to Esquire in which he sounded both entirely like himself and exactly like Trump: "Secretly everybody's getting tired of political correctness, kissing up." "We're really in a pussy generation." "When I grew up, those things weren't called racist." Trump has used the renegade-republican-in-Hollywood handbook to build his political career, and his proximity to liberal celebrity culture allows him to sell himself as a cowboy, a transgressive, a badass.

The man arguably responsible for catapulting Trump to cultural ubiquity is Mark Burnett, the president of MGM Television and Digital Group who produced The Apprentice. Burnett, who created Survivor, is a founding father of reality TV, and has produced some of the genre's biggest hits: The Voice, Shark Tank, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?. Burnett's shows combine family-friendly fun with capitalist-friendly competition; they have broad appeal, but they've been hits with conservative audiences in particular. Burnett and his wife Roma Downey, who once starred in Touched by an Angel, produced the smash-hit series The Bible for The History Channel, which launched them into the next phase of their careers: producing faith-based film and television. The couple plans to launch "Light TV" with Fox this year, a 24-hour network for "Faith and Family" programming. (Neither Burnett nor Downey could be reached for comment.)

Thanks in part to Burnett and Downey, it's harder than ever to tell where "faith-friendly" entertainment leaves off and "liberal Hollywood" begins. Sony now has a faith-based acquisitions arm, Affirm Films, which has released modest hits such as War Room, Risen, Heaven is For Real, and Miracles from Heaven. The Christian film industry has grown and thrived since the 2014 drama God's Not Dead, which made $60 million on a $2 million budget. Mainstream stars and studios alike have taken notice of the genre's profitability, politics be damned.

***

In an interview with the Washington Post, director Adam McKay (The Big Short, Anchorman) conceded that lots of people who work on films have liberal politics: "Yeah, you have a lot of artists, you have a lot of writers, directors, costume designers … and generally, that's going to skew a little more to to the left." But he also rejected the idea that Hollywood is comprised of artists alone. "As far as Hollywood being liberal, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Look, who owns the studios? Viacom, Comcast, Disney. They want to make money. … Sony has a faith-based division and they make movies for, generally, for the right wing. The movie that came out after The Big Short is the Benghazi movie [Michael Bay's 13 Hours]."

I spoke with Corby Pons, who founded Wit PR with partner Marshall Mitchell, about this tension between art and commerce. Wit PR does publicity aimed at "thoughtful, aspirational, spiritual audiences"— audiences that often defy political categorization, some of which undoubtedly lean right. Recent films Wit PR has marketed include A United Kingdom, Hidden Figures, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, and Patriots Day. Pons has a history in politics (he served as a legislative aide for Congressman Walter B. Jones), and he currently lives in LA where he has worked with most major studios. "I think America has a fixation on the artists, and it's like looking through a straw hole at the industry," he told me. "Studios, networks, labels, etc. are in the bottom line business. There is a tension between how far to push the envelope while not losing the consumer. It's the yin and yang of liberalism and conservatism daily."

Erik Lokkesmoe was a speechwriter for the George W. Bush administration who simultaneously held an executive position at Walden Media, and now markets films through Different Drummer that focus on the "in-betweeners"—or as he sometimes calls them, "The Christians Who Drink Beer Audience." Recent films Different Drummer worked on include Lion, Sully, and Fury; an in-betweener himself, Lokkesmoe rejects political labels and was an early advocate of the #NeverTrump movement.

When I asked him whether he thinks it's difficult to be a conservative in Hollywood, he responded, "Make great art that makes people money—it's a simple formula. Do that and no one will care about your politics. There is a tremendous amount of common ground, things that can be done for the common good. Is the orphan crisis liberal or conservative? Is civility liberal or conservative? Are heroic acts, astonishing generosity, sacrifice and beauty liberal or conservative? These are human, not political themes."

Because of his Friends of Abe association, one might expect Lionel Chetwynd to directly advocate for "conservative film," but he expressed similar sentiments to Lokkesmoe's. "Because of my reputation," he told me, "I am regularly approached by people who say, 'Hey, I'm a conservative, just like you, and I have this conservative film script that I'm trying to get out there, can you help me?' And I can't. Because if you're using your craft to push a political point of view … that is going to spoil the basic honesty of it."

Political stridency can doom a film to a short shelf life. But storytelling craft, Chetwynd argues, has staying power: "The great films, they often have an ambiguity. Look at the films that we admire. Take Citizen Kane. There's no doubt that Orson Welles detested Randolph Hearst. … But by the time you're through watching that film, you do understand the total complexity of Hearst. You still don't like what he did, and you still know in the end that he was not a good influence in society. But you do understand him, and his truth, and what happened to him, and why he became what he became. It's presented fairly."

And perhaps Chetwynd has a point: it's in the interest of studios to put out politically ambiguous films, because openly ideological films cut off access to a large portion of the potential audience. Film scholar David Bordwell has written about intentional ambiguity as a screenwriting strategy: "A Hollywood film tends to pose sharp moral polarities and then fuzz or fudge or rush past settling them. … The constitutive ambiguity of Hollywood movies helpfully disarms criticisms from interest groups … It also gives the film an air of moral seriousness."

In his book The Persistence of Hollywood, film theorist and historian Thomas Elsaesser traces the ideological ambiguity of Hollywood film back to the Hays code of 1934, which put strict limits on what was allowed to be shown on film: "Classical Hollywood excelled in creating movies that were ambivalent and even duplicitous, without becoming incoherent: a strategy of multiple entry-points that permitted different audiences to have 'access' to the film emotionally and intellectually." In the same passage, Elsaesser quotes Robert Zemeckis' answer to a question about the political position of Forrest Gump: "My film is a party to which everyone can bring a bottle."

This isn't to imply that ideological ambiguity in the movies is always a strategic decision: there are lots of reasons to make politically oblique or morally ambiguous films, and many of our richest, most rewarding pieces of art have endured precisely because they puzzle and challenge us. But political ambiguity opens a film up to a wider audience, and whether that wider audience is a perk or the primary objective is always up for debate.

***

Hollywood's conservative critics tend to go after the stars, while its liberal critics go after the system—but there's enough criticism coming from both sides of the spectrum to make one think that "Hollywood" and all that the word represents must contain multitudes. Its artistic and ideological goals are held in tension with its business goals, and the result is a popular cinema that is pretty equally agreeable and disagreeable, to viewers on both sides of the political spectrum. Hollywood is, perhaps intrinsically, centrist—as many businesses are.

Andrew Breitbart famously believed that "politics is downstream from culture," and I do think he had a point: When I spoke with Lokkesmoe, he called Washington the "city of power" and Hollywood the "city of influence," going on to say, "I would argue that the storytellers and songwriters have far more influence over society than any legislator." In the current political climate, when so much high-stakes legislation is up in the air, it's easy to feel inclined to challenge that statement even while agreeing with its essential principle. Art and culture have an immeasurable impact on the life of a country, but to attribute an inherent and partisan politics to Hollywood is to miss the point of the industry entirely. To be invested in the meaning of popular art is to be invested in the shaping of our collective imagination and our shared values. It is to care about the reservoir of stories and images that will inform our thinking, and the next generation's thinking, for years to come. Art can transcend the political, but it is never apolitical.

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