LONDON—Fathers who are bastards yet lovable and soon to die; mothers who are distant yet caring, if not dead, in which case they died caring, we’re sure of that; children who are prematurely mature, with grievances; romanticized visions of the moment before puberty; chase scenes; sets like dollhouses; soundtracks consisting of sophisticated pop music or basic classical music; nested framing devices, usually an old book or a playbill, or a playbill inside an old book found in a shoebox and opened on a talk show; obvious cultural precursors whose homage-paid spirits are soon subordinated to [see tropes above and below]; genres indulged in at the expense of rather than for the sake of the pleasures they can usually be relied on to provide; cartoons made to seem like real life through great exertion or live-action pictures whose compositions look more like the panels of comic-books than any currently produced comic book pictures; a trickle of sexual innuendo dripping through a matrix of innocence because after all we were all once children here, even the children themselves; juxtapositions of immense yet precarious wealth and genteel as if hard-won poverty united by a common scrappiness; eccentric Americans in exotic locales or foreigners in American zones, though everybody seems like one of those kids Joan Didion hung out with in drug store parking lots as a teen who didn’t end up running one of the two major political parties by 1988; acting that’s deadpan in the service of expressing sadness or antic in the hopes of covering it up performed by an array of celebrities deployed like action figures playing against type with funny accents and costumes somewhere between the chic end of kitsch and the kitsch end of chic; fonts. Daddy, can you still hear me?