It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film

and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here again with...

Genevieve Kosky.

Scott Tobias.

And Tasha Robinson.

In our last episode, we looked back at Peter Brooks' 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies, an almost-verite film

featuring a largely non-professional cast playing out William Golden's story of boys run amok

after making some stabs at forming a government on a desert island. The new documentary Boy State

looks at a real-world event with some echoes of that film and the current political climate. Directed by Jesse

Moss and Amanda McBlain, it was shot at the 2018 Texas Boys State, an American Legion-sponsored

event in which 1100-plus high school boys gather in form a government. Girl state, its female

equivalent, also exists but remains unseen in the film. McBlain and Moss focus on only

a handful of those boys, among them Robert, a popular charmer, which our friend Alison Wilmore

accurately describes as having, quote, a luxuriant mane of a Richard Linklater protagonist,

Ben, a staunchly conservative amputee who treasures a Ronald Reagan action figure and takes a hard line on personal responsibility.

Stephen, an unabashed progressive, whose story includes growing up in a struggling household headed by an undocumented mother.

And Renee, a black Chicago transplant whose views put him out of step with a conservative majority,

but whose savvy and oratorical skills make him a formidable

...