Fiction and film — candidate list

Candidates, not selections. The premise of this list is that a collective action problem has to be felt before the formalism means anything, and narrative does that faster than a treaty summary. Four minutes of a film can put a room inside a dilemma that a payoff matrix only describes afterwards.

The benchmark is If a Tree Falls, already set as prep viewing for Session 1: people who did something genuinely hard together for years, then informed on each other within weeks. Not argued for again here. What a candidate has to match is that quality — the structure visible in the behavior, with no villain required.

Organised by structure rather than genre, because the structures are what the course teaches. Coverage is deliberately wide on the interrogation, holdout, strike and coordination families, thinner on commons-as-plot, which fiction handles less often than one would expect.

The standalone question is the operative one. A 90-minute session can afford perhaps two clips. An entry that needs ten minutes of plot setup before the structure is legible is not usable, however good the work is, and that is said plainly in each entry.

Every film, book, year and director here has been checked. Where a reading is contested or the fit is weak, the entry says so.

Betrayal under interrogation

Goodfellas (1990, Martin Scorsese)

The story, briefly: Henry Hill rises through a New York crew from boyhood to middle-aged cocaine dealer, and the film tracks the slow degradation of the rules the crew lives by. Arrested and facing a long sentence with his associates already killing witnesses, he becomes a government informant and testifies against the men he grew up with. He ends in witness protection, complaining about the food.
What structure it instantiates: The prisoner's dilemma in its original costume, with the detail the textbook leaves out — the payoff structure changes before the arrest does. Omertà is a cooperative equilibrium sustained by the certainty of retaliation and the expectation of a continuing relationship. Once Jimmy starts killing the people who might talk, the future payoff from silence goes to zero and the dominant strategy flips. The bite is not the interrogation room. It is the arithmetic Henry does beforehand.
The scene: The final stretch, after the Lufthansa heist bodies start appearing and Henry is arrested. Two candidates: the sequence where Henry realizes Jimmy is arranging his death, and the courtroom testimony that follows, in which he addresses the camera directly. Roughly 5-7 minutes if taken together, less if just the testimony.
Does the clip stand alone? Partly. The testimony works cold as an image of defection, but the reason he defects — the collapse of the enforcement mechanism that held silence in place — is carried by the preceding twenty minutes. Showing it without setup gets you "gangster turns rat", which is the uninteresting reading. Two sentences of framing fixes it.
Could serve: Session 2, The games (prisoner's dilemma proper). Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem — this is the folk theorem failing, and the mechanism of its failure is visible.
Source: the film. Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi, Wiseguy (1985).

The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo)

The story, briefly: The FLN builds an urban insurgent network in the Casbah of Algiers between 1954 and 1957; French paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu dismantle it. The film follows both the construction of the network and its systematic unravelling under interrogation, with neither side given a sentimental pass.
What structure it instantiates: Two structures, and they are separable. First, organisational design against defection: the FLN cell is a pyramid in which each member knows only three others, which is an explicit engineering response to the certainty that anyone can be broken. It is a mechanism for limiting the damage a defector can do rather than preventing defection — an unusually clear case of designing around a game you know you will lose locally. Second, information extraction as forced defection: Mathieu's method works precisely because it changes each individual's payoff without needing to change anyone's loyalty.
The scene: The explanation of the cell structure, with the pyramid drawn out, comes in the first third and runs about 3 minutes. Mathieu's press conference, in which he lays out the logic of interrogation to journalists in flat administrative language, comes in the latter half and runs 4-5 minutes. The pyramid scene is the more useful one for this course.
Does the clip stand alone? The pyramid sequence, yes — completely. It is diagrammatic, almost lecture-like, and the structure is on screen literally. The press conference needs more context to land.
Could serve: Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (what you build when you cannot rely on observation). Session 4, Coercion. Session 1, War.
Source: the film.

Reservoir Dogs (1992, Quentin Tarantino)

The story, briefly: Six criminals who have never met are assembled for a diamond robbery by an organiser who forbids them to learn each other's real names. The heist goes wrong, the survivors regroup in a warehouse, and the film is mostly the argument about which of them informed.
What structure it instantiates: Cooperation without a contract, under deliberately engineered anonymity. The colour-coded aliases are the same design move as the FLN pyramid — limiting what a defector can give away — but here they also destroy the thing that would have made cooperation stable, which is reputation. No repeated play, no shared history, no way to verify anyone: the diagnostic answers "no" to questions 2, 3 and 4 simultaneously. The warehouse argument is what a group does when it has no instrument for detecting defection and knows it.
The scene: The warehouse confrontation as the suspicion hardens, in the middle third, roughly 5 minutes. The earlier scene in which the organiser hands out the aliases and refuses to let them exchange information is shorter, about 3 minutes, and is the cleaner teaching object.
Does the clip stand alone? The alias scene, yes. The warehouse argument, no — it depends on knowing who actually informed, and the film withholds and then reveals that deliberately. Considerable violence in both; worth flagging to a group.
Could serve: Session 2, The games. Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (as the negative case — what removing repetition does).
Source: the film.

The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)

The story, briefly: The Joker rigs two evacuating ferries with explosives, one carrying civilians and one carrying prisoners, and gives each boat the detonator for the other. If neither detonates by midnight he destroys both. The passengers on each boat debate, vote, and in the end neither pushes the button.
What structure it instantiates: A one-shot two-player prisoner's dilemma with the payoff matrix stated out loud by the antagonist, which is rare and useful. It is worth being precise that the structure is not quite a prisoner's dilemma — defection here is not merely self-interested, it is lethal to the other party, so the payoffs are closer to a mutual-deterrence game with a deadline. The genuinely interesting parts are the ones nobody notices: the civilian boat holds a vote and then cannot bring itself to execute the vote's outcome, and on the prisoner boat one man resolves the problem by removing the option. That is a commitment device, and it is the Schelling move.
The scene: The ferry sequence, in the final act, intercut with other action. Roughly 6 minutes of screen time for the ferry material, but it is spread across a longer stretch and needs either careful editing or accepting the intercuts.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes, better than almost anything else on this list. The premise is explained inside the scene by the Joker, the stakes are visible, and nothing earlier in the film is required. The most reliable cold open available.
Could serve: Session 1, Introduction to collective action. Session 2, The games and The reframe. Session 4, Schelling (the destroyed detonator).
Source: the film.

The holdout, and the group that will not act

Twelve Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)

The story, briefly: Twelve jurors retire to decide a murder case that everyone but one of them regards as obvious. The first ballot is eleven to one for conviction. Over 90 minutes in a single hot room, the holdout converts the others, one at a time and in a particular order.
What structure it instantiates: Two things at once, and separating them is the teaching value. The opening ballot is an information cascade — several jurors vote guilty because the early voters did, not because of the evidence, so private information never enters the room. The conversion is a threshold model in Granovetter's sense: each juror has a different number of defections he needs to see before he switches, and the sequence of conversions is ordered by those thresholds rather than by the strength of the arguments. The film is, structurally, a demonstration that the equilibrium was never stable — it only looked stable because nobody went first.
The scene: The first ballot and the immediate reaction, about 5 minutes in, running 4-5 minutes. Or the second ballot, taken by secret vote at the holdout's suggestion, where the anonymity is the whole point — a mechanism designed to break a cascade. That is roughly a third of the way in and runs about 4 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes. The setup is a jury room, which needs no explanation, and the secret-ballot scene in particular carries its own logic entirely. The best single-scene candidate on this list for threshold effects.
Could serve: Session 1, Introduction to collective action. Session 3, Why this gets harder at scale (small-N observation and pressure). Session 2, The games — though note it is not a dilemma, and using it there risks blurring the distinction the module exists to protect.
Source: the film. Reginald Rose's teleplay (1954) and stage version are substantially the same.

Antigone (Sophocles, c. 441 BCE)

The story, briefly: Creon forbids the burial of Polynices on pain of death. Antigone buries him anyway. Her sister Ismene refuses to help, then tries to share the punishment afterwards and is refused. The chorus of Theban elders agrees with Antigone throughout and says nothing useful until far too late.
What structure it instantiates: The purest available statement of the volunteer's dilemma with no second volunteer. Antigone bears the entire cost of an act whose benefit — the norm that the dead are buried, and the limit on the ruler's writ — is a public good for everyone in Thebes. Ismene's refusal is the more instructive half and is usually read as cowardice rather than as what it is: an accurate assessment that one additional participant does not change the outcome and doubles the losses. The chorus is the bystander problem in its oldest form — private agreement, public silence, and no mechanism for converting the first into the second.
The scene: The opening dialogue between the two sisters, the first 100 lines or so, which is the recruitment attempt and the refusal. Roughly 5-8 minutes in most staged versions. Available in numerous filmed productions and audio recordings; the text itself reads aloud well.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes, with one sentence of setup on the burial ban. The scene is two people arguing about whether to act, which is self-explaining.
Could serve: Session 1, Introduction to collective action. Session 3, The cooperative ape (as counterpoint). Session 5, The bill — the norm being defended is a kin norm, and Creon's is a civic one, which is the whole Henrich argument compressed into a quarrel.
Source: the play. On the political reading, Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993), which is where the reading gets contested — the older Hegelian framing as a collision of two equally valid claims is not the same as the collective action reading, and the difference matters if the text is discussed rather than just shown.

High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)

The story, briefly: A marshal on his wedding day learns that a man he convicted is arriving on the noon train with three associates to kill him. He spends the intervening 85 minutes — the film runs close to real time — asking the townspeople to stand with him. Every one of them finds a reason not to. He faces the four alone.
What structure it instantiates: The inverse holdout, and the best example in cinema of a public good that nobody will contribute to because everyone reasons correctly about their private return. Law and order in the town is non-excludable; the marshal's survival benefits everyone; and each individual's contribution is both risky and, on its own, non-decisive. The refusals are not written as cowardice — each is a locally sound argument, which is exactly the course's point that defection requires no villain. The church scene is Olson's latent group with dialogue.
The scene: The church meeting, roughly the midpoint, running 7-8 minutes. A succession of townspeople offer reasons why collective action is somebody else's job, including the argument that the marshal leaving would solve the problem more cheaply. It can be cut to 4 minutes without losing the structure.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes. A room full of people deciding whether to help, with the stakes stated inside the scene. Some setup helps but two sentences is enough.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson — the strongest single illustration of the latent group available. Session 1, Introduction to collective action. Session 4, Coercion (the state as an institution one person cannot be).
Source: the film.

An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen, 1882)

The story, briefly: A doctor discovers that the baths his town's new prosperity depends on are contaminated by a tannery upstream. He expects to be thanked. Instead his brother the mayor, the newspaper, the property owners' association and eventually a public meeting all conclude that the finding must be suppressed, because the repairs would close the baths for two years and ruin everyone. The meeting declares him an enemy of the people.
What structure it instantiates: An externality problem where the polluter and the victim are the same town, and the town votes to poison itself. The structure is a collective decision under a shared short-term interest against a shared long-term one — closer to an intertemporal commons than to a prisoner's dilemma, since there is no defection to detect, only a discounting problem that everyone solves the same way. The mayor's argument is worth taking seriously rather than treating as villainy: the costs are certain, immediate and local, the benefits diffuse and deferred, and this is the exact shape of every failed climate vote since.
The scene: Act IV, the public meeting, which is most of the act — roughly 20-25 minutes staged. The portion where the mayor lays out the costs and the assembly turns can be cut to about 6 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? With setup, yes: one sentence on the contamination and one on the town's dependence on the baths. Without it, no — the meeting assumes the audience knows what is being voted on. Many filmed productions exist; quality varies considerably.
Could serve: Session 1, Why this matters so much now. Session 4, Changing the payoffs and Did it ever work?. Session 3, Ostrom and the commons (as the failure case against the governed ones).
Source: the play.

The line that holds and the line that breaks

Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)

The story, briefly: A French general orders a suicidal attack on a German position in 1916. The attack fails; part of the regiment never leaves the trench. The general demands that his own artillery fire on the trench, is refused, and instead has three men chosen arbitrarily and shot for cowardice to restore the others' willingness to advance.
What structure it instantiates: An assault is a threshold public good — it succeeds only if enough people go over the top, and the individual who goes when others do not simply dies. The men who stay in the trench are at the equilibrium. The film's second half is then about punishment as the instrument for shifting that equilibrium, and specifically about punishment that is deliberately arbitrary: the three condemned men are selected by lot and by grudge, not by conduct, because what the general needs is not justice but a credible expected cost attached to not advancing. This is the coercion module with the mask off.
The scene: The attack itself, in the first half, roughly 6 minutes — a long lateral tracking shot through the trench and across no man's land, where the thinning of the line is visible on screen. The court-martial that follows runs about 10 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? The attack sequence, yes, though it reads as a war scene rather than a structure unless framed as threshold. The court-martial needs the attack first. Pairing them costs 15 minutes, which is too much for a 90-minute session; pick one.
Could serve: Session 4, Coercion — the sharpest available statement of what coercion actually is when stripped of legitimacy. Session 1, War. Session 2, The games (threshold goods).
Source: the film. Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, and behind it the 1915 Souain executions.

Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)

The story, briefly: Sailors on a Russian battleship in 1905 refuse to eat maggot-infested meat. The officers order the ringleaders shot; the firing squad is assembled, a sailor appeals to it, and the squad lowers its rifles. The mutiny succeeds and spreads to the port of Odessa.
What structure it instantiates: The cleanest threshold cascade on film. Everyone in the firing squad would prefer not to shoot; each of them knows that lowering his rifle alone is fatal; and the equilibrium holds until one appeal makes the shared preference common knowledge. What changes is not anyone's values but their beliefs about everyone else's — which is exactly the distinction the course needs between a dilemma, where the payoffs are the problem, and a coordination failure, where the beliefs are.
The scene: The tarpaulin and the firing squad, in the second part of the film. Roughly 4 minutes. Silent, intertitled, and in the public domain in most jurisdictions, which makes it unusually easy to use.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes. The visual grammar does the explaining — the covered men, the raised rifles, the hesitation, the lowering. No dialogue to follow. It plays cold to an audience that has never heard of 1905. One caveat: it is propaganda and should be named as such, though the structure it depicts does not depend on the politics.
Could serve: Session 2, The games (the assurance/coordination half). Session 3, The cooperative ape. Session 1, Introduction to collective action.
Source: the film.

Spartacus (1960, Stanley Kubrick)

The story, briefly: A slave revolt is defeated. Crassus offers the surviving rebels their lives if they identify Spartacus. Spartacus stands; then every other man on the field stands and claims the name; Crassus crucifies them all.
What structure it instantiates: A costly signal that works by making identification impossible — each man's claim is individually irrational and fatal, and collectively it denies Crassus the thing he wants. It is also a clean focal-point case: nobody coordinates, nobody speaks first except Spartacus, and the convention propagates instantly because the right move is obvious once one person makes it. Two minutes, and it contains both a costly signal and a cascade.
The scene: Near the end, after the final battle. Roughly 2 minutes. Among the most famous scenes in American cinema, which is both an advantage — most of the room will recognise it — and a risk, since familiarity can make people stop looking at it.
Does the clip stand alone? Completely. The offer is made inside the scene and the response follows immediately. Nothing about the preceding three hours is needed.
Could serve: Session 4, Schelling (focal points). Session 5, Costly signals and Big Gods. Session 2, The reframe.
Source: the film. Historically invented; the scene has no basis in Appian or Plutarch, and saying so is itself a useful move.

Xenophon, Anabasis (c. 370 BCE)

The story, briefly: Ten thousand Greek mercenaries are stranded deep in Persian territory after the man who hired them is killed at Cunaxa. Their generals are then invited to a parley and murdered. Leaderless, surrounded, and 1,500 miles from the sea, they hold an assembly overnight, elect new commanders, and march out.
What structure it instantiates: An army that loses its command structure in a single night should dissolve — each man's best move is to negotiate his own terms or slip away, and the collective good of a cohesive march has no provider. It does not dissolve. What replaces the generals is an assembly, an election, and a set of agreed marching rules, which is as direct a demonstration as exists that institutions are the thing being supplied, not leadership. The recurring problem in the later books — units voting on route, plunder and discipline while under attack — is polycentric governance under the worst conditions imaginable.
The scene: Book III, chapters 1-2: the night after the generals are killed, Xenophon's dream, his address to the surviving officers, and the assembly. A reading of 6-8 minutes covers it. There is no adequate film version.
Does the clip stand alone? As a read-aloud passage, yes, with two sentences of setup. It is a text rather than a clip, which makes it prep reading or a spoken summary rather than a screen moment. Honest assessment: better as a short reading circulated before Session 4 than as in-session material.
Could serve: Session 4, Polycentricity and Coercion. Session 3, Olson (a very large group that nonetheless acted — worth asking why, given the theory says it should not have).
Source: Xenophon, Anabasis. The Rex Warner or Robin Waterfield translations read best aloud.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (c. 400 BCE)

The story, briefly: Two passages. In Book II, plague reaches Athens under siege and the observance of law, burial custom and restraint collapses together, because the expectation of a future in which reputation matters disappears. In Book III, civil war at Corcyra turns every cooperative convention — oaths, truces, sanctuary, the meaning of words — into an opportunity for whoever moves first.
What structure it instantiates: The shadow of the future removed, twice, by different mechanisms. In the plague, the discount rate goes to infinity because people expect to be dead. At Corcyra, repeated play is destroyed because each faction expects the other to defect and moving first is decisive — a security dilemma inside a single city. Thucydides' observation that the words for virtues changed their meanings is the most precise ancient statement of norm collapse, and it maps exactly onto the folk theorem's conditions failing.
The scene: Book II, 52-53 (the plague and its effect on conduct) is about two pages, 3-4 minutes read aloud. Book III, 82-83 (the Corcyran stasis) is roughly three pages, 5 minutes. Either works; the Corcyra passage is the more analytically loaded and the harder to follow cold.
Does the clip stand alone? The plague passage does, essentially without setup. Corcyra needs a sentence about who is fighting whom, and the prose in most translations is dense enough that it should be circulated in writing rather than only spoken.
Could serve: Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (the conditions failing). Session 1, The pattern beneath the metacrisis.
Source: Thucydides. The Hobbes translation is the most quotable and the least accessible; Hammond's for the Oxford World's Classics is the clearest.

Free riding, strikes and collective bargaining

Germinal (Émile Zola, 1885)

The story, briefly: Étienne Lantier arrives at a northern French coal mining village, is radicalized, and leads a strike against a wage cut. The strike holds for months at enormous cost, breaks when hunger and internal division set in, and ends with a pit flooded by sabotage and the survivors going back on worse terms than they started.
What structure it instantiates: Olson's problem in full, with all its parts on the page. A won strike is a public good across the workforce; the cost falls entirely on whoever strikes; the provident fund is the selective incentive and it is nowhere near large enough; and the men who keep working are free riders whose reasoning is given sympathetically rather than dismissed. Zola also has the enforcement half — the marching crowd that goes pit to pit to shut down the men still working is peer punishment as the substitute for an absent institution, and the novel is clear that it is violent, effective, and the reason the strike held as long as it did.
The scene: The crowd's march across the coalfield in Part V, where the strikers move from pit to pit forcing the working men out. Roughly 15 pages. Claude Berri's 1993 film adaptation covers it in about 8 minutes and is usable. The forest assembly earlier, where the strike is voted, is the better short excerpt at 4-5 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? The forest assembly, with setup on the wage cut, yes. The march, less so — without knowing that the men being forced out are fellow miners rather than company men, it reads as a riot.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson — the single best literary illustration of selective incentives being insufficient. Session 4, Coercion. Session 2, The games.
Source: the novel. Berri's Germinal (1993) for the footage.

Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt)

The story, briefly: A textile mill worker in a small Southern town is recruited by a union organiser, becomes the visible local face of the drive, and is fired for it. The mill wins the vote anyway.
What structure it instantiates: A threshold problem solved by a visible first mover. The union election requires a majority; every individual who signs risks their job; and the film's mechanism for breaking the deadlock is making one person's commitment unmissable, which converts a private decision into an observable one. The famous scene is a demonstration that in threshold problems the binding constraint is often not preference but the inability to see what others prefer.
The scene: Near the end: Norma Rae is fired, writes the word UNION on a piece of cardboard, stands on a work table and holds it up until the machines are switched off one by one down the length of the floor. Roughly 3 minutes, with no dialogue in the crucial portion.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes, almost entirely — the machines going quiet one at a time is a cascade rendered in sound, and it needs only the information that this is a union drive. One of the three best cold-open candidates on this list.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson. Session 2, The reframe — this is a collective action problem being solved, and the course needs successes early. Session 1, Introduction to collective action.
Source: the film. Based on Crystal Lee Sutton's organising at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids.

Matewan (1987, John Sayles)

The story, briefly: A union organiser arrives in a West Virginia coal town in 1920 where the company has cut wages and imported Black and Italian workers to break the strike. He persuades the three groups — local white miners, the imported Black miners, the Italian immigrants — that they are one bargaining unit rather than three, over the company's determined efforts to keep them apart. It ends in the Matewan massacre.
What structure it instantiates: Coalition formation as the actual problem, which the strike literature usually skips. The company's strategy is not to defeat the union but to ensure the relevant group is never defined as one group, which is a much cheaper intervention. The structure is closest to a stag hunt with an identity problem attached: cooperation pays if everyone cooperates, but the boundary of "everyone" is exactly what is in dispute, and each faction's belief that the others will hunt rabbit is self-fulfilling. Useful precisely because the course's later sessions argue that in-group formation is the mechanism of cooperation at scale — here it is being manufactured in real time, and the bill for it is visible.
The scene: The scene where the striking miners encounter the imported Black workers at the camp, and the organiser argues that both groups are being used against each other. Mid-film, roughly 5-6 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? Needs setup on who has been brought in and why — perhaps three sentences. With that, the argument inside the scene is self-contained.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson. Session 5, Multi-level selection and The bill — group boundaries being drawn, with the consequences visible. Session 4, Did it ever work?.
Source: the film. The historical Battle of Matewan, 19 May 1920.

Lysistrata (Aristophanes, 411 BCE)

The story, briefly: The women of the Greek cities agree to withhold sex from their husbands until the men end the Peloponnesian War. They also seize the treasury on the Acropolis, which funds it. The agreement nearly collapses immediately when several of them invent reasons to go home.
What structure it instantiates: A cartel, and Aristophanes is unusually rigorous about it. The collective benefit requires universal compliance; each individual's defection is privately advantageous and hard for the others to observe; so the play's central problem is enforcement, not persuasion. The oath scene exists because a promise is insufficient. The scenes where women manufacture excuses to leave are free riding written 2,400 years ago, and they are funnier and more precise than most modern treatments. The seizure of the treasury is the selective incentive — the one thing that gives the coalition leverage independent of individual compliance.
The scene: The oath over the wine bowl, early in the play — 4-5 minutes staged. Or the sequence of attempted desertions, roughly the middle, which is the free-riding material proper and runs about 5 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes, with a sentence of setup. It is broad comedy, translations vary enormously in explicitness, and a group should be told what they are getting. Many filmed and audio productions; the text is more reliable than most of them.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson (selective incentives, and the monitoring problem). Session 2, The games. Session 4, Changing the payoffs.
Source: the play. Translations differ substantially in tone; Jeffrey Henderson's is the standard scholarly one.

Commons, resources and externalities

Wolf Totem (Jiang Rong, 2004)

The story, briefly: A Beijing student is sent to the Inner Mongolian grassland during the Cultural Revolution and is taught the local ecology by an old herdsman. Han settlement policy brings wolf extermination and arable farming; the wolves go, gazelle and rat populations change, the grassland is ploughed, and within a generation the Olonbulag is turning to dust.
What structure it instantiates: A subtractable commons destroyed by the replacement of one governance regime with another, which is a more accurate description of most real commons failures than "open access". The Mongol system has rules — which pastures, when, and an explicit tolerance of wolves as the mechanism that keeps grazers moving. The incoming regime has production targets. Nobody in the novel is stupid and nobody is greedy in the cartoon sense; the failure is that a set of local rules with no formal standing is overridden by a planner who cannot see what they were for. That is the Ostrom argument told from inside.
The scene: The gazelle hunt on the frozen lake, roughly a third in — the herdsmen take part of the wolves' cached kill and deliberately leave the rest, and the reasoning for the restraint is stated. About 10 pages. Jean-Jacques Annaud's 2015 film covers the equivalent material in about 8 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? The film version needs setup — without knowing the quota policy, the restraint looks like superstition rather than a rule. The book passage reads better but is long. Honest assessment: this is prep reading or a two-minute told summary, not a cold clip.
Could serve: Session 3, Ostrom and the commons — the strongest non-Western narrative case available for local rules doing real work. Session 5, Multi-level selection. Session 4, Polycentricity.
Source: the novel, translated by Howard Goldblatt (2008). Note: the novel's broader argument — about national character and the superiority of "wolf" cultures — is contested and unpleasant, and is separable from the ecological material. Say so if you use it.

Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)

The story, briefly: A shark kills a swimmer at a New England resort town days before the Fourth of July. The police chief wants the beaches closed; the mayor and the business owners do not, because the town's entire annual income arrives in that fortnight. The beaches stay open and more people die.
What structure it instantiates: An externality and a coordination problem with a first-mover penalty, though the fit is looser than the film's reputation suggests. The mayor is not free riding — he is making a distributional calculation about certain economic ruin versus probabilistic death, and the town's position would be different if any single business could close without losing to the others. Worth including because the argument is so familiar: the costs of precaution are certain, immediate and concentrated, the benefits uncertain, deferred and diffuse. That is the climate vote again.
The scene: The town council meeting where the chief's beach closure is overruled, early in the film, about 4 minutes. Or the exchange on the beach before the Fourth, shorter.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes. Everyone knows what the film is, the meeting scene explains its own stakes, and it takes four minutes.
Does the reading hold? Partly. This is a straightforward cost-benefit-under-uncertainty problem with a bad decision at the end of it, and calling it a collective action problem is a stretch — there is no defection and no free riding, just an official weighing concentrated losses against diffuse ones. Use it as the shape of a climate argument rather than as a game.
Could serve: Session 1, Why this matters so much now. Session 4, Changing the payoffs.
Source: the film.

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

The story, briefly: Okonkwo is a prominent man in an Igbo village in the 1890s. Missionaries arrive, converts begin to accumulate, and the village's ability to enforce any of its own rules erodes — first at the margins, then entirely. The novel ends with Okonkwo's suicide and the village unable to act even in its own defence.
What structure it instantiates: Norm enforcement collapsing once exit becomes available. Every rule in the village is sustained by the certainty of collective sanction — ostracism, fines, the egwugwu's judgment — and all of those depend on there being nowhere else to go. The mission provides an outside option, and from that point each individual's cost of violating a norm falls, which lowers the cost for the next person, and the equilibrium unwinds. Achebe is precise about the sequence: the first converts are people who were already marginal and had least to lose, which is exactly the threshold model's prediction about who moves first.
The scene: The killing of the sacred python and the village's response, in the final third — roughly 6 pages. The village debates its options, finds that the usual sanction no longer bites, and settles on an ostracism that the converts can simply absorb. Reads aloud in about 6 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? As a reading, with setup on what the python means and who the converts are, yes. There is no good film version. Prep reading rather than in-session material.
Could serve: Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem (punishment losing its force). Session 5, Costly signals and Big Gods, and The bill. Session 6, What modernity already did — the enlargement seen from the receiving end.
Source: the novel.

Trust without verification

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston)

The story, briefly: Three American drifters in 1920s Mexico prospect for gold together. They find it. The rest of the film is the three of them managing the fact that each now has a large and portable asset, no law within reach, and two partners who could take it.
What structure it instantiates: A sustained trust game with no enforcement, and the film's great move is showing the institutional improvisation. They divide the gold into three shares nightly and each man hides his own, which converts one large theft into three small ones and makes defection observable. They set a watch rota. They discuss, explicitly, what happens if one of them is hurt. All of this is Ostrom's design principles being invented from scratch by three men who have never heard of them — and then failing, because there is no mechanism at all for the case where one partner is left alone with the others' shares.
The scene: The scene where they agree on dividing and separately hiding the shares, roughly the midpoint, about 4 minutes. The later scene where one of them is alone with the full pile is the payoff and comes considerably later.
Does the clip stand alone? The division scene, yes — it is three men negotiating a rule and explaining why, which needs no context beyond "they found gold". Strong candidate.
Could serve: Session 3, Ostrom and the commons — rules being designed in real time, which is more vivid than the design principles as a list. Session 3, Repeated interaction and the folk theorem. Session 2, The games.
Source: the film. B. Traven's 1927 novel.

Lagaan (2001, Ashutosh Gowariker)

The story, briefly: A drought-stricken village in 1890s central India is told by the local British cantonment commander that it can have three years free of land tax if it beats his officers at cricket, and will owe triple if it loses. One farmer accepts on the village's behalf, without asking them. He then has to assemble eleven players from a village that has never seen the game, does not want the bet, and is divided by caste.
What structure it instantiates: Recruitment into a costly collective enterprise where the downside is shared whether or not you play — the tax falls on everyone — and the effort is voluntary. That is the free-rider structure exactly, and it runs for most of the film's middle hour. The caste material is the more interesting part: the team is short a player, the available player is an untouchable, and including him means the existing members bear a social cost to gain a collective benefit. Expanding the boundary of the cooperating group has a price, and someone has to pay it first. That is Session 5's argument in a single scene, and the film takes it seriously rather than resolving it cheaply.
The scene: The confrontation over including Kachra, the untouchable bowler — roughly the midpoint of a very long film (the whole thing runs close to four hours). About 6 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? Needs setup: the wager, and why one more player matters. Three sentences. Given that, the scene is a group arguing about who counts as one of us, which is legible anywhere.
Could serve: Session 5, The bill and Multi-level selection. Session 6, Enlarging the sphere of concern. Session 3, Olson (recruitment and free riding).
Source: the film.

Disaster, pandemic and the bystander

The Plague (Albert Camus, 1947)

The story, briefly: Plague closes the Algerian city of Oran. A doctor, a journalist trying to leave, a priest, a clerk and a smuggler each work out what they owe the city. Volunteer sanitary squads form and do dangerous, unglamorous work for months. Some people join, most do not, and the novel declines to make much of the difference.
What structure it instantiates: Voluntary provision of a public good under real personal risk, treated without heroics — Camus is explicit that joining the squads should not be admired excessively, because treating it as exceptional implies that not joining is the normal case. Tarrou's organisation of the squads is the mechanism: a specific, bounded, visible task that a person can be asked to do, which is how latent groups become active ones. Rambert's arc is the free rider's, fully argued rather than caricatured — he has a defensible case for leaving, and the novel does not defeat it so much as let him change his mind.
The scene: Part II, the formation of the sanitary squads and the narrator's refusal to over-praise them. Roughly 5 pages, 6-7 minutes read aloud. Rambert's argument with Rieux about whether he is entitled to leave is the sharper passage and about the same length.
Does the clip stand alone? As a reading, yes. No usable film version — the 1992 adaptation relocates the story and is not recommended. Prep reading.
Could serve: Session 3, The cooperative ape. Session 1, Introduction to collective action. Session 6, Enlarging the sphere of concern.
Source: the novel.

Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh)

The story, briefly: A novel respiratory virus spreads from Hong Kong worldwide. The film follows epidemiologists, a WHO investigator, a bereaved husband, and a blogger who promotes a fake cure while shorting the market. A vaccine arrives after a year and has to be allocated.
What structure it instantiates: Three distinct structures, which is why it is worth a slot despite being uneven. Free riding on a fear cascade — the blogger's forsythia sells because individuals rationally hedge, and the pharmacy run is the result. Insider defection — a CDC official warns his wife to leave Chicago before the quarantine is announced, which is a small private act that destroys the informational public good the announcement depends on. And allocation by focal rule — the vaccine is distributed by a televised lottery on date of birth, which is arbitrary, transparent, immune to influence, and therefore acceptable. That last one is a Schelling solution in a mainstream film and is not easy to find elsewhere.
The scene: The birthday lottery, in the closing 15 minutes, about 2 minutes. Or the CDC official's phone call to his wife, roughly two-thirds in, about 3 minutes — a man doing something indefensible for entirely comprehensible reasons, which is the course's thesis in miniature.
Does the clip stand alone? The lottery, yes, given one sentence. The phone call needs to know he is a CDC official under a communications embargo. Both are short enough to use together for under 6 minutes.
Could serve: Session 4, Schelling (the lottery as focal point). Session 1, Why this matters so much now. Session 2, The games.
Source: the film.

Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

The story, briefly: One very hot day on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant. A complaint about the photographs on the wall of the pizzeria escalates across the day, a police chokehold kills a neighbourhood man, and the crowd, after a pause, destroys the pizzeria.
What structure it instantiates: A threshold model of collective behaviour in Granovetter's sense, and the film is almost diagrammatic about it. The crowd holds for a measurable beat after the killing. Different people need different numbers of others to move before they move. The person with the lowest threshold acts alone, and the rest follows — and the film is careful that the first act is not the most enraged person but the one closest to the owner, which complicates any reading based on preference intensity. Also a bystander case earlier in the day: several people witness the escalation, each could defuse it, none does.
The scene: The sequence from the chokehold to the first thrown object, final act, roughly 5 minutes. The pause before the crowd moves is the part to point at.
Does the clip stand alone? No. It depends on the day the film has built and on knowing the relationships between the people in the street, and shown cold it is simply a riot. Honest assessment: a strong structure in a clip that does not travel. Usable as prep viewing, not as a 4-minute insert.
Could serve: Session 2, The games (threshold goods). Session 3, Why this gets harder at scale.
Source: the film. Mark Granovetter, "Threshold Models of Collective Behavior", AJS 83:6 (1978), for the model it instantiates.

Arms races

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)

The story, briefly: A US general orders a nuclear strike on the USSR outside the chain of command. In the War Room, the president and the Soviet ambassador try to recall the bombers, and the ambassador reveals that the USSR has built a doomsday machine which will detonate automatically if the country is attacked, and which cannot be switched off. One bomber gets through.
What structure it instantiates: The commitment device, and the precise reason a commitment device has to be both automatic and announced. The doomsday machine is Schelling's argument rendered as farce: deterrence works by removing your own ability to choose, since a threat you could decline to execute is not credible. The joke that carries the whole theory is that the Soviets built it and had not yet announced it, which makes it strategically worthless — and Strangelove says so in as many words. The film is also, more quietly, about delegation under an arms race: the authority to launch was pushed downward precisely because of the fear of a decapitating first strike, which is a security dilemma producing the accident it was designed to prevent.
The scene: The War Room sequence where the doomsday machine is revealed and explained, roughly two-thirds through. About 5 minutes, self-contained, mostly three people at a table talking.
Does the clip stand alone? Yes, with one sentence of setup ("a US general has launched an unauthorised strike and they cannot recall it"). The theory is explained inside the scene by the characters, which is the rarest property on this list. Among the three best cold clips here.
Could serve: Session 4, Schelling — the anchor clip for the module, and given the module's importance to the AI audience, probably the single highest- value clip in the course. Session 1, War and The pattern beneath the metacrisis.
Source: the film. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960), for the mechanism — the doomsday machine derives from the same discussions Schelling was part of, and pairing the two is honest rather than a stretch. Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964) tells a near-identical story straight, and is the better choice for a group that will not take the satire seriously.

Coordination, and one famous case that does not work

Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)

The story, briefly: A farming village that expects to be raided after the harvest decides to hire masterless samurai, paying in rice it can barely spare. Seven are recruited. They fortify the village, train the farmers, and fight off forty bandits at heavy cost.
What structure it instantiates: Defence is a threshold public good and the film works through its provision problem in order. The village debate is whether to act at all; the recruitment is a bargaining problem with nothing to offer; the fortification requires abandoning three outlying houses, which the three families object to, and Kambei's answer — that the village cannot defend everything and those who will not accept the sacrifice will be cut loose — is the clearest statement anywhere of why a group defending a perimeter must first define the perimeter. The farmers' concealed weapons and hidden food are the free-riding subplot: the village has been defecting on its own defenders in advance.
The scene: The village council near the opening — whether to fight, flee, or appeal to the magistrate, and the old man's decision. Roughly 6 minutes. Or the abandonment of the outlying houses, about a third in, roughly 4 minutes, which is the sharper structural scene.
Does the clip stand alone? The council scene, yes, with a sentence on the bandits. The film runs 3.5 hours, so nobody will have watched it as prep; choose a scene that self-explains.
Could serve: Session 3, Olson and The cooperative ape. Session 4, Coercion (hiring violence as a service is a state in embryo). Session 5, War as ratchet.
Source: the film.

A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard)

The story, briefly: A biopic of John Nash. In a bar, Nash watches his friends prepare to compete for the attention of one woman and has a flash of insight, which the film presents as the origin of his equilibrium concept: if they all approach her they block each other, so they should each approach one of her friends instead.
What structure it instantiates: Nothing correctly, and that is the reason to use it. The strategy profile the scene proposes is not a Nash equilibrium — each man has an incentive to deviate and approach the woman while the others are occupied elsewhere — and the scene in fact describes a cooperative, collectively optimal outcome, which is the thing Nash equilibrium is famously not. Showing it and asking a room to find the error is a faster route into the definition than defining it, and it inoculates against the most widespread popular misunderstanding of the concept.
The scene: The bar scene, roughly 30 minutes in. About 3 minutes.
Does the clip stand alone? Completely. It is a self-contained set piece with its own explanation built in, which is what makes it such an effective wrong answer.
Could serve: Session 2, Some basic game theory — as the worked error, not as exposition. Nowhere else.
Source: the film. The error is well documented; the clearest short treatment is in the game theory teaching literature rather than in film criticism, and any standard textbook's definition of equilibrium is sufficient to make the point live.

Notes on coverage

Thin areas. Commons collapse as a plot is genuinely rare — fiction prefers a villain, and a commons failure has none. Wolf Totem and An Enemy of the People are the two strong entries and neither is a clean clip. If this is the structure the course most needs footage for, documentary is likely to serve better than drama.

Coordination with no communication is also thin. Spartacus and the Potemkin firing squad are the two clean cases, and both are cascades rather than pure focal-point problems. The best focal-point material in this file is the Contagion birthday lottery, which arrives in a form nobody expects.

Interrogation and plea bargaining is over-supplied by comparison, and the four entries here could be cut to two without loss. Goodfellas and The Dark Knight carry it.

Non-Anglophone and non-Western: Seven Samurai, The Battle of Algiers, Lagaan, Wolf Totem, Things Fall Apart, Battleship Potemkin, Germinal, The Plague, plus the three ancient Greek entries. Roughly half the list.