The Brutal Cynicism of <em>Lost in America</em> Still Resonates
Albert Brooks’s 1985 satire of two upper-middle-class Californians trying to find themselves is as cutting as ever in its Criterion rerelease.
This might sound hard to believe, but the notion that Americans all live in hermetic, deluded bubbles defined by their own narrow experiences existed long before anyone ever heard of social media. In the final act of the 1985 comedy , a beleaguered yuppie named David Howard (Albert Brooks) finally gives up on his dream of quitting his job and traveling the country free of responsibilities, and walks over to the local employment office of Safford, Arizona, the sparsely populated town he’s found himself in. He defends his decision to walk away from his previous job (advertising
