There’s a shot in John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place that’s too, too lovely. In it, Emily Blunt appears with hair in a messy braid, Fair Isle sweater and overalls, framed in front of some homegrown flowers and a braid of drying garlic. I’m not going to fault Blunt for having achieved peak wedding hair, but there’s more than one thing about the scene — and the movie — that troubles me. It’s not just the aesthetics of womanly sacrifice and resolve, though, certainly, it is also that. What really gets me about the film, and its embrace by the indie elite, is how narcissistic aesthetic practice puts such a pretty filter over ugly narcissistic politics.

The Anglophile’s imaginary England is a kind of mirror world. Like a grandfather—a relative in whom we see resemblance, but who clearly hails from another time. We feel affectionate toward him and maybe a little superior. Watching Downton, it’s lovely to see a plot in which the patriarch gets drunk, and rather than starting a brawl or bedding a scullery maid, he begins an awkward toast—a potential embarrassment that quick-witted chauffeur-turned-son-in-law Tom covers over by leading the household in rounds of “for he’s a jolly good fellow.” And the “good” characters’ foibles are so soft that it’s easy to feel a little wiser than those Granthams while also envying their outdated lifestyle.

I’ve always seen stage mothers as among the most loathsome of women, with their venal attachments to their child’s successes, their daughters’ loveliness becoming a marker of their own failures clouded by an air of has-been beauty. And yet, as a new mother of a sweet little girl, I see the temptation. I find myself doting over the elegance in my infant's cheeks, thinking about the kind of life implied by beauty—or its absence.

There’s a messiness to the story arcs of most seasons of American Horror Story that makes it a perfect document for tracing our sometimes incoherent ways of parsing a divided nation. Watching pundits attempt to explain what happened when Americans went to the polls in November, I’ve been frustrated by a kind of intellectual and explanatory stuttering. There’s been a popular narrative about the Trump voter: the forgotten poor white man in rural America raging at the neglect of and disrespect shown to his culture.

In Hereditary, we see three generations of women who are craftswomen and artists, and the effect of their art is to make their family members miserable. There’s an ominous note Annie discovers when going through her deceased mother’s possessions. It reads “Our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards.” Coming from a witch who also made embroidered pillows, it can be read as an artist’s statement of sorts, one that makes explicit the monstrosity of women who might harm their families in pursuit of their craft.

Against the backdrop of anti-vaxxers and Black Lives Matter, health and life morph, appearing disconcertingly like commodities that only some have the right currency to purchase.