And during the mass these stories were combined with the sounds of liturgical music, and the smell of incense, assaulting the senses from every direction with the central stories of the Christian faith. What a powerful medium for communicating these cathedrals were. Today in our secular world, the movie theater functions in much the same way. People come in off the crowded highways and parking lots, to enter the semi-darkness of a theater. And suddenly the brilliant colors and sounds appear in huge dimensions on those towering screens.
Movies are the icons and the stained glass windows of post-modern America.
If an anthropologist some centuries hence were to attempt to understand what makes us tick, he or she could do not better than to scrutinize our movies. Or to put it another way, our films are a window into the heart and soul of the American people. Given the content of many of the most popular movies this may not be very re-assuring. For clearly movies portray a great deal we would rather not acknowledge as part of the American way of life. For one thing there's all that violence.