(Continued...)

The Sundance Film Festival is about independent cinema in much the same way the quadrennial Republican and Democratic national conventions are about democracy. Which is to say, the Sundance Film Festival is not about independent cinema. It is about status, and money, and self-regard; it's an annual industry junket and trade show. The 400 or so major screenings, mind you, are not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors—many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance disingenuously poses in opposition to—eagerly searching out the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Little Miss Sunshine.

Credentials are the currency of Sundance, and they are governed by an arcane and slightly terrifying bureaucracy of privilege that only a Stalinist could loveThis is not to say that I hold Redford and the festival's organizers personally responsible for the drunk, um, aspiring actress who flashed me and 500 or so other festivalgoers, Mardi Gras-style, from a balcony overlooking Main Street on the festival's third night. Much of what happens in Park City is beyond the control of Sundance. But the festival's arch posturing against commercialization, with Redford inveighing against the swag lounges on Main Street designed to get luxury brands onto the pages of Us Weekly, is too much to take in the face of the omnipresent logos of festival sponsors Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, and AOL. And the dismissive sniffing about "celebrity coverage," which Sundance's chief press handler, Levi Elder, accused me of contemplating when I applied for credentials, becomes petty and egregiously hypocritical when one considers the fact that the fest is programmed deliberately with films featuring stars—Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Mandy Moore, John Cusack—who are trotted out at screenings to stand on fake, tented-off "red carpets" to be photographed in front of backdrops festooned with those aforementioned corporate logos.

The most readily apparent falsehood about Sundance that crashed into reality upon my arrival was the notion that there is anything remotely pleasant about being in Park City. When Robert Redford founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, according to the festival's self-generated lore, he chose the name based not on the character he played in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but on the way the sun dances over the Wasatch Mountains. I was prepared for remote mountain living—quaint lodges, stone hearths, rugged roads—far removed from the poisonous warrens of Los Angeles. But the only thing the sun dances over in Park City is a dismal, ever-creeping sprawl of ugly brown apartment buildings, vinyl-sided tract housing, and parking lots. It is less a resort town than a suburb of Salt Lake City.

Amid all this despoiled nature, with brown-grey snow lingering everywhere, there is little for festivalgoers to do other than obsess about their relative status. In Interview, one of the festival films—which stars Steve Buscemi as a seasoned journalist and Sienna Miller as a troubled Lohan-esque starlet (based on a movie by the murdered Dutch director Theo Van Gogh)—the logic of celebrity is described at one point in binary terms: there are somebodies, and there are nobodies. But of course reality is slightly more complicated. At Sundance, there are in fact 36 lines of demarcation that separate nobodies from somebodies. That's how many varieties of credentials the festival issues, so as to calibrate with the utmost precision the various kinds of access and comforts accorded to attendees and ensure that no one gets any more consideration than they are actually worth.

Credentials are the currency of Sundance, and they are governed by an arcane and slightly terrifying bureaucracy of privilege that no one I encountered truly understood and that only a Stalinist could love. There were four different press passes, for instance, with varying levels of access to which the holders of each are entitled, in a system apparently designed not for efficiency so much as to sew envy and mistrust among the press corps.

The envy is engendered by the fact that almost everything one wishes to do at Sundance—get into a movie, a party, a press conference—involves waiting for some period of time in a crowd of angry people outside in the bitter, relentless cold. Better passes translate, roughly, into less waiting. And for the press, the arbitrary, merciless decisions of publicists—150 credentialed publicists were in attendance—tended to induce a state of what psychological researchers call learned helplessness. Waiting outside for admittance to a press conference one afternoon, among a throng of perhaps 30 other journalists, I was rescued, Schindler's List-style, by a publicist who burst from inside the building, surveyed the crowd (or, to be precise, our badges), and selected three of us who were allowed to come inside. I never learned why, but decided from then on that good things would happen to me if I meekly made sure I was always in eyeshot of a publicist. And when they shined upon you, all the bitterness you previously felt about the better-credentialed prima donnas would melt away, and any sense of solidarity with your freezing, milling brothers and sisters in the cold would dissolve into condescension. See you, suckers!