The untold ambition of an actor is to become a god. On the screen, the actor is projected as a mythologized being, playing an archetypal figure in a modernized version of some primordial story. Their magnetism brings us to the theater every weekend, which is like a special temple we come to pray and meditate in, anxious for new stories to build our mythology.
It wasn't science that dismantled religion, but theater. Imagination used to be so oppressed that nobody could do anything with it except believe in the only story available. It wasn't until the last century that churches all over America had to yield to the new kid in town, whose new religion stole our hearts by conjuring up new fantasies for us to believe in. It was out with the old, in with the new. Strangers in an even stranger land. And getting stranger as the years go by. Film is the new emperor of belief.
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