How the Cinema Simplifies Reality to Avoid the Ugly Truth by Derek Copold Movies, the quintessential American art form, have always been an escape. A meta-world where the audience projects its being into figures that dance across the silver screen.
Moviegoers sympathize with the hero and despise the villain.
This is why real life, with its sticky, uncertain moral relativism, can never offer the enticement of Hollywood s visual narcotic. The cinema gives the citizen the romance, action and adventure he uses to escape his drab life. But, like all narcotics, this escape has a price. Modern man s ability to confront the real world is eroding to the point that history must be emended so that no discomfort or offence will arise. Thus the script of the most recent blockbuster, The Patriot, is forced to obscure the painful realities of the nation s birth beneath a fog of contemporary convention.