This kind of thinking might not seem clear to you. But after watching more movies than I have hairs on my body, and that being a lot of movies over the years, I see a pattern.
Short-sighted people can proclaim all they want about this being the "greatest" time in which to live in human history. Those people drive big gas-guzzling suburban vehicles while chatting on cell phones on their way to getting their hair coiffed properly. I speculate.
I don't think you can proclaim any time to be the "greatest" time in which to live. Frankly, I'd think our time would look like a chaotic hell to our past selves. People in the past used to start wars just to escape boredom. So life was pretty docile comparitively. Once the Industrial Age began, war moved beyond territory right into technological superiority. You can thank long-range war rocket capability for getting Mankind as far into space as he's gotten.
At some point, Hollywood became the focal point for an alternate world, in which mundane death, love, and sex had little reality but far more poignancy to the culture. Moving pictures represented a way to experience a new reality. A penetrating crater of far-reaching inclusion, we all could see life's high points without being vaporized by the meteor's impact.
Not only did Hollywood recreate reality unrelentingly, it recreated reality artfully. This enabled culture to bear itself, endure the ooze of time, and withstand the awful certainty of mortality.
Movies have done more than reflect or ponder their time, their era. I have begun to sense their true importance. The act of attending a movie, in a theatre, with other human beings, had a meaning to it once. When I was a kid in the 1970s, you wore your better shirt and clean pants to go to the movies. Older men and women wore evening clothes, or their Sunday-go-to-meetings, with the women in earrings and men in hats. Social responsibility extended into a movie theatre. It wasn't just you and a horde of other people. It was an audience.
The movies showed all kinds of events, square-jawed, or skeletal, but agreed as an honest assessment of time and space. The important aspect of movie-going in the past was more than escape, more than belief. The images toppled across the screen in such a way that the atoms of our bodies responded. In truth, we were shaped by the images as much as the images were shaped by us.
In the last fifteen or twenty years, Hollywood lost the shiny silver star of the authority of Earth. Among a horde of cockroaches and declining vision, Hollywood's producers suffered the alienation of the inbred. Without exposure to the outside world, to us, the regular human being, Hollywood had forgotten the simple atom.
I think people today believe society is going to get all "Star Trek" and find its higher moral/ethical balance, erasing racism, depravity, sexism, and so on. Like, somehow this enlightenment is just going to happen from the core goodness of all humanity. Which isn't going to happen. Not ever.
We need Hollywood to produce the movies it once had, with that understanding of the atom. How we, the audience, need them to show us once again what we are, truly. As ugly, petty, and vile as humans can be, they can be noble, righteous, and brave. Without the movies to remake us, redefine us, how can we hope to be reminded? With all these people thinking themselves better than any, in a time more enlightened and worthwhile, who is going to show us we are wrong?
Who is going to show us ourselves?
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