Cinema as coercion — the authoritarian medium that gets inside your head

echoes

Early text: "Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you." [sec. 11]; the art/commercial taxonomy — "Art film is essentially ideological: it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.”" vs. commercial film that makes "their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it" [sec. 11]; Lynch "strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t" [sec. 11]; "This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head" and "He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there." [sec. 11].
IJ echo: The Entertainment's mechanism described about art film: a medium powerful enough to "vulnerabilize" and "dominate," that strips the viewer's "psychic protections" and gets "inside your head." The samizdat is this run to lethality — the film that removes the viewer's defenses so completely it will not let them leave. Wallace's taxonomy (wake-up vs. comfortable-sleep-for-money) is the entertainment-purpose axis (communication vs. seduction) stated in film terms, and a maker who cares more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he's in there is the anti-entertainment worry (entrance for its own sake, indifferent to what the entrance does) in nonfiction.
Weight: prefiguration