Caleb Lee

We often like to point out other people’s biases, but why don’t we examine our own? In the mercurial You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim explore this question through a mind-bending kaleidoscope of perspectives, semantics, and doubt. By the end, the most unsettling subject isn’t Elizabeth Holmes but the documentarian himself, and the audience, who, like Fielder, tend to hear exactly what we need to.

In this article, Caleb Lee highlights how Kenneth Lonergan’s screenwriting lets his films masterfully capture the humiliating scale of grief through pedestrian details and ultrarealistic dialogue. Lonergan’s insistence on showing the messy and uncinematic side of everyday life creates a through line for his work to emphasize the irreparable nature of trauma.

Why are so many audiences nowadays laughing at scenes that are meant to be uncomfortable? In this piece, Caleb Lee argues that the rise of inappropriate and performative laughter is a reflection of a more disturbing social trend that prevents us from dealing with sincerity in our everyday lives.

Why are people so toxic about the movie Sinners on social media? Various online behaviors such as virtue signaling, aggressive opinions, and performative media literacy all stem from a common place of wanting to belong, and nowhere is this more clear than in the Instagram and Reddit comment sections of Ryan Coogler’s racially-charged blockbuster. In this piece, Caleb Lee uses the online discourse surrounding a particular film to point out a growing failure to engage meaningfully with the world a