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“Occasionally, he may go to the movies ‘to take the pulse of contemporary American culture so that he can immediately know the kinds of things that American audiences respond to in the here and now’ (Booker and Batchelor 2016, 92)…. [But] Don likes La Notte because it sustains him in two contradictory yet connected ways. On the one hand, it offers refuge from advertising’s repetitive, cliched stories that deny and silence stories like his… Don captivates because his professional success and this personal desire are always at odds. The more slickly proficient he becomes at crafting simple, affirming stories advertising requires, the more the risk of him losing the ability to subvert those narrative conventions as well as maintain contact with the truth of his own story increases… These less acceptable/conventional stories become temporary and unfulfilling substitutes for the story he cannot tell about himself.”