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but more like an adaptation of The Sportswriter or Independence Day, with real, complicated characters, but one in which they just happened to have wandered into a crime story because of their flaws and because of circumstance and because you kind of need a plot like that if you're going to win any Oscars whilst dropping anvils about important social issues and satirising nostalgia and contemporary American living. Danno talks, a lot, and doesn't much pause for breath. He says Kevin Spacey, sorry, Lester Burnham, dying, is like a metaphor for the death of his childhood, but it releases him to see life with a larger perspective of what really matters, and he wants to share that epiphany with the audience, sorry, the, erm, detectives, so they won't be afraid to follow him to the other side, because sometimes we have to let go of our illusions of how the world is, and that the occasion for this was his worry that his daughter hadn't got much to look forward to as she passes from being a teenager into adult American life, but he understands now that he was wrong, but he was a good parent for caring, who just needed to show that in a more responsible way, because he went through the same transition a long time ago, but he forgets that sometimes, and now he's relived it from the perspective of a father, he's free of all the complexes and misguided values that are stultifying good people in the rat-race around him, and everybody understands this in the end. So I ask Danno, because he seems like he would know, was Lester Burnham really doing that cheerleader?

Danno has been watching the videos while I talked to the cheerleader and the wife. He says he found one that was just this empty, wrinkled, white plastic bag fluttering in the autumn leaves in a vacant parking lot, circling in the wind, sometimes whipping violently without warning and soaring skyward, then floating down, gracefully, like a balloon. He says: "it was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take

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