I love that John Carpenter's They Live reveals not only the exploitative nature of commercial propaganda and media brands, but it deconstructs the very mechanism how cinema works.
When we watch a film, we read each frame for symbolic messages. Only a philistine examines and grades a film on visual arrangement or surface beauty alone or most prominently (Socrates taught that spectacle is the least important aspect of drama).
We read film the way we read words in a book, except instead of turning symbolic text into sounds in our mind to find subtext and imagine time-space, we break down symbolic shapes, colors, motions, progressions, contrasts and compositions into text.
Writing filters through the superego before the ego gives it to the subconscious. It takes work to read unless its subliminally forced in advertisements, etc. Cinema plugs right into the subconscious because the hard part (reading) is so much faster, easier, monosyllabic and natural. We are perceiving a rearranged, idealized version of the physical world. A child or idiot or animals with similar eye sight can watch a film and be hypnotized by its images and programmed with whatever mass idea the filmmaker wants.
That is why only auteurs should be trusted with such a powerful tool. Its mental magic, playing with dreams and effecting the core of beings. You can't do that for profit and simple special effects. It must pass psychoanalysis, politically correctness and brain food. You can do that creatively without becoming a boring puritan, but this is the intrinsic philosophical nature of cinema voyeurism. Its more than just "moving pictures", the insidious industrial label used to denigrate its artistic influence.
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