COLIN: When I bumped into a friend this morning, I found him advocating nihilism. Not that I agreed with him, but I could understand how he felt: I woke up today, and the first thing I thought was ‘I want to see blood.’ But then I realized it was just one of the seven stages.

BEN: That’s exactly what it is: It’s like mourning. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way. It had to be right after my grandfather died. The difference is that our nation died this time.

COLIN: The nation isn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. We’ve just watched a close friend make a stupid, ultimately self-destructive decision, like dabbling in heroin. The country is in deep trouble right now: the neo-cons have essentially taken it over, and the left is in shambles.

BEN: I had a friend who overdosed on heroin three times, and he’s still alive. His younger brother just shot himself in the head—this is a true story—and he’s still alive, too. When the bullet goes through the temple in a certain way, it just severs the optic nerve. He’ll be blind for life, but he’s alive.

COLIN: I see the end of the American empire, and it is imminent.

BEN: Which is one reason to offer a list of films to watch in light of recent events. I’m sure there will soon be people shouting, “Meet me at the book burning,” and they’ll only make me want to find solace in art even more. In the cinema, we are free.

COLIN: It’s a gift of its humanism. We forget this in the U.S. because the right co-opted the language of humanism around Nixon. If you’re not in the moral majority, you begin to feel ashamed of sounding moral.

BEN: There isn’t a lot of humanism left in politics, period.

COLIN: We’re not going to recommend any of the recent left-leaning documentaries, are we?

BEN: No.

COLIN: Good. I can appreciate a film if its aim is to get Bush out of office—all is fair in love and war—but that doesn’t make it good art. Part of the problem is that we’ve confused political with polemical.

BEN: Only Chaplin could pull it off, in The Great Dictator. But there will never be another Chaplin, someone who was universally beloved before he delivered his first polemic.

COLIN: And his film didn’t become useless after Hitler was defeated.

BEN: They opened it in Poland after the war ended. It was more vital to the Poles than any other piece of international aid.

“The Battle of Algiers” (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)

“The Candidate” (Michael Ritchie, 1972)

“Code Unknown” (Michael Haneke, 2000)

“The Great Dictator” (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

“The Hole” (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998)

“The Sacrifice” (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)

“The Scarecrow” (Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, 1920)

“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (John Ford, 1949)

“Showgirls” (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

“Werckmeister Harmonies” (Bela Tarr, 2000)