I have just learned that David Byrne has a blog. After reading a few posts, I learned that his blog is interesting and thoughtfully written.

The difference, I suppose, is that of quantity, not quality. These days, altered images are ubiquitous; the fairytale world threatens to engulf our own. The illusion is more complete, too — with digital technology it’s harder to see the smoothing. Stalin would have drooled at the possibilities. Almost nothing one sees in print or advertisements hasn’t been “improved” in some way, except maybe some journalistic news photos — and even those are suspect. There’s the visual field that consists of us and our friends, and then there’s the print world — certainly more dramatic, and often more physically perfect. We live in a parallel universe, slightly more drab and definitely more pudgy.

One can’t legislate the heavenly world out of existence — people need fairytales, after all — but maybe a more constant reminder to not believe everything we see would help us to retain some tenuous connection with our pathetic reality. The thing is, we can’t help believing what we see. When I look at an impossibly sexy woman on a billboard, I can tell myself that she’s been sculpted and smoothed to death, but I’m riveted and transfixed nonetheless. Instinct triumphs over intellect.

The description of Hollywood as a heavenly world is interesting, because it speaks to a thought I’ve been brooding over in my chicken coop.

Cinema is a universal religious experience. I have trouble expressing this thought. I try to write about it, but it always comes too quickly and too easily. So, in order to get it out and stop the ache, I will not attempt to slow the idea down and just present it in a few paragraphs.

The theater has ritual foods and pews. Watching a movie in a theater demands silence and reverence. In the critical world there are theologians, fundamentalists and casual observers. The monumental size of a human on a movie screen is so godlike, it’s almost laughable. The moviegoer is bombarded with moral and social dilemmas, hypothetical scenarios we may use to guide our daily lives.

If you accept a movie as a type of sermon, it is no wonder social realism reigns in Hollywood. Hollywood films like Milk, Crash (2004), Boys Don’t Cry and Hotel Rwanda share a lot in common with the early films like Imitation of Life or, more controversially, Birth of a Nation. What bothers me about these movies, even when I enjoy them, is the violation of the separation of church and state, or in this case, the separation of art and state.

While both religion and cinema can be used to explore larger questions, they are increasingly used to argue political and social points. In this way, the rise in social realism at the movies is similar to the rise of the Christian Right in American churches.

Perhaps more disturbingly, by exiling heavier philosophical issues, the real political point these films, and these churches, make is that there is no need to consider life beyond political ideology. More disturbingly, when there is no artifice to consider life through, we are left with philosophy as the only means of confronting questions.

Philosophy! No one wants to read that.