Thursday, January 05, 2006

Footnotes to Plato: The Movie Theater is the Cave

Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music – and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers – pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.

And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed – even if just a little bit.

David Kupelian


Via Evangelical Outpost via Mark Shea on yet another media atrocity, "You Me And Everyone We Know"

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