When you happen to watch 2 movies in a row and see a common theme.

There are a million things you might perceive in a movie. So when you see 2 movies in a row, your brain is going to match things up, and then something looks interesting and you go running down that road.

Let me tell you about the 2 movies we happened to watch this week. Because we almost never watch movies, 2 recently watched movies are going to suggest a lot of connections with each other, even when they have little in common.

1. "Magic Trip/Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place." This is a documentary about Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters driving a gaudily painted bus from San Francisco to the New York World's Fair in 1964. A man who's written a very successful novel ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and discovered LSD (by volunteering for a CIA-financed study) lets a speed freak (Neal Cassady) drive him and his friends across America. They take many, many reels of poorly shot film, and 50 years later, some talented filmmakers figure out how to base a watchable documentary on that sprawling footage. Highlights of the film: Kesey on his CIA/LSD trip, painting the bus, going to a blacks-only beach on Lake Pontchartrain (and not being welcomed as integrators), visiting Timothy Leary at his Milbrook Estate (and getting snubbed and looked down on), partying with Jack Kerouac (who wasn't On-The-Road Kerouac anymore, but a boring drunk), and making it back home where LSD really worked better, staying in one place and partying with the Grateful Dead as the house band.

2. "Get Out." This is a 2017 movie, by a black writer-director (Jordan Peele, who came from the world of sketch comedy), about a black man going on a short, strange trip with his white girlfriend to visit her parents, who turn out to be a real horrorshow. I recommend seeing this movie without knowing what's going to happen, so please stop now and come back later if you haven't seen it yet. It came out last winter, but maybe you're like me and you don't get excited about movies because they happen to be new. You might be noticing this movie now because it's on various year-end lists and getting nominated for awards. It's on HBO on Demand, where we watched it. Anyway, the man character — Chris Washington — feels uneasy being around so many white people and takes heart whenever he encounters a black person, but the black people there are very weird, for a reason we eventually learn: They are really white people who got surgically inserted into the black person's head. The black person is still in there, riding along, observing but unable to speak or act. The evil white people are systematically bringing black people to this place, one by one, lured by Allison Williams (of all people), and using them as shells for the aging white people to gain a new life. It's not just a way to avoid aging and death, but a way to experience life as a black person. That's something they all really want, these people who like to tell Chris about as soon as they meet him that they voted for Obama and would vote for him for a third term if they could.

Now, what are the connections I'm seeing between these 2 movies I happened to encounter in sequence?

In both, you've got a group of white people who see ordinary life as a white person in America as a predicament in need of transcendence by radical means. They take drastic, dangerous actions to break out of themselves and get somewhere else entirely. So involved and entranced with their own journey, they impose on everybody else.

"I called Lena Dunham... She said, 'Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive. You’re going to be in drag.'"

Said Allison Williams, who plays a character on Dunham's "Girls" and who got cast in the role of Peter Pan. Quoted in "The Cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ Knows You Hatewatched ‘The Sound of Music’/Allison Williams, Christopher Walken, and the cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ talk about bracing themselves for hate-tweets and our collective PTSD from last year’s ‘Sound of Music.’"

“I have full faith that this will happen.... People will hear the opening strings of music that they know deep, deep down in their heart, and it will make them nostalgic again. And they’ll crumble. And they might get one hate-tweet out really quickly, and then we won’t hear from them for a while—because they’ll have been sucked into the sense memory that hopefully will be Peter Pan.”

Is it "cool" to watch "Peter Pan Live!" on the theory that you are "hate-watching"? Or is the message that it's "cool" — that you're only hate-watching to snark and follow tweets — a device put out there by the network to overcome the defenses of those who really actually want to watch it because deep down somewhere they love the musical "Peter Pan" and they feel like rooting for the earnest efforts of actors performing it live on television but they're afraid it might be uncool? Well, you know, it's not cool to try to be cool or to think about being cool and there's always the old theory that the coolest thing is the straightforward, sincere embrace of something requires disdain from people who are insecure in their sense of personal coolness.

Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive....

What does "it" refer to?

ADDED: The relevant meaning of "subversive" in the OED is "hat challenges and undermines a conventional idea, form, genre, etc., esp. by using or presenting it in a new or unorthodox way." Example:

2007   Guardian 16 June (Guide Suppl.) 23/3   Enjoying commercial success with herky-jerky pop based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Thomas Pynchon,.. Devo were the most subversive band to ever crack the mainstream.