Deadwood's profanity gets the attention. Its structure is the more radical thing: a camp that becomes a polity because people keep talking their way into agreements.
Scorsese filmed The Band's farewell as a eulogy. The group it buried kept arguing about the funeral for decades.
The Zodiac killer is the least present figure in Zodiac. What the film dramatises instead is how knowledge fails to travel between desks, counties and decades.
Event Horizon lost money in 1997 and has been defended ever since, usually for the wrong reasons. The film that survived is a haunted house with a gravity drive for a cellar.
Dredd lost money in 2012 and has been winning arguments ever since. The film that failed and the film that lasted are the same film, and the reason is one tower block.
HBO's The Leftovers began with a mystery and spent three seasons refusing to solve it. That refusal was the argument, and the finale is the only ending it could have had.
Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film is remembered as a romance of restraint. It is better understood as a film about frames: doorways, corridors and apertures that do the work the lovers will not.
John Carpenter's The Thing earned back its budget and was savaged anyway. The record says the film was not the problem. The poster, the tagline and the weekend it opened were.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's three-hour adaptation is usually described as a film about grief. It is closer to a film about who is permitted to drive, and what a man gives up when he finally hands over the keys.
Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's five hours of television are remembered for the reactor. Their real subject, and their real structure, is a trial, and the audience is seated in the jury box before it knows it.
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