HE reply: If one could capture the subjective experience of Joe Biden over the last couple of years of his term…

Andy Griffith’s initially joyful or even imbued portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (‘57).

In a certain light, Richard Burton’s performance as Thomas Becket in 1964’s Becket is an admiring portrait of a noble form of dementia.

The gradual falling away of practical, strategic, warts-and-all rationality on one hand, and on the other hand a gradual submission to a form of inner, self-deluding grandeur…the “holy” kind that we were all once taught to admire.

“Are you demented? You’re chancellor of England! You’re mine!” — Peter O’Toole’s Henry II to Burton’s Becket.

Otherwise Michael Haneke’s Amour, which I’ve always regarded as a kind of horror film, the kind that only a wife or a husband or a devoted caregiver can know on a daily, drip-drip basis.