The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine That Warped America's Brain!

A rogue Air Force general triggers an unrecallable nuclear strike on the USSR, and the War Room scrambles — bureaucratically, absurdly — to stop the end of the world.

Why it’s here: The original 'laugh so you don't scream' text — mutually assured destruction played entirely for farce, and the farce is the argument: absurdity is what nuclear brinkmanship actually looks like from the inside.

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.