Beautiful Ruins

“Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life—not so much with the woman, whom he didn’t even know, but with the moment.” 

Pasquale sees Dee smile and develops a love that he harbors for the rest of his life. He becomes infatuated with how her smile and appearance in Porto Vergogna make him feel. This moment—with its romantic, cinematic quality—becomes etched on his brain as a lasting piece of nostalgia, one that strengthens the feeling of regret he endures later in life.

“Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway—its true religion? Wasn’t the theater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons—but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it! That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images—the same Avatar, the same Harry Potter, the same Fast and the Furious, flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that became our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but religion?”

This quote builds on Shane’s discovery that his personal motto is not from the Bible but from a movie and waxes poetic on the concept of film as not just a new religion but a universal one that binds all moviegoers together. While there are multiple different sects within other religions, film provides a singular experience since “the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!” Films like Avatar, Harry Potter, and Fast and the Furious become scripture since they endow moviegoers with a new mythology, life lessons, and other things which determine modern America’s values. This quote is important because it shows how cinema has become more than just a source of entertainment as it was when Dee and Richard Burton performed on camera in 1962. Furthermore, it demonstrates the cinema industry’s control over the American zeitgeist.