On Sunday morning, I woke up to a text from a filmmaker friend in Los Angeles who shared a recent essay from The New Yorker, “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies.” The writer, Namwali Serpell, argued in the piece that most contemporary cinema—including many of the films that won Academy Awards last week—was “on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse.” Serpell didn’t quite bother to explain how this had happened, but she did observe that the literalist approach was pervading other parts of our culture. Fashion, she argued, “capitalizes on a long tail of generic looks” that are decontextualized and endlessly recycled. (“We all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth,” she wrote.)