Movies in Lowell Was Right!

Films in the Lowell Was Right! universe are exceedingly important. Films transfer culture, unifying peoples and grouping them around important concepts. A movie made by a culture embodies the core concepts of that culture in a portable package, accepted as intrinsic truths and transferred during the willing suspension of disbelief created by the audience while watching the movie.

This is the core concept of propaganda, but movies made _as propaganda_ are far less effective in transferring culture than those made _as entertainment_, because of the intensity of the state of suspension of disbelief engendered by the entertainment. In these films, the cultural core is deeply embedded in the entertainment matrix, never stated, but informing all of the actions of the actors.

Embracing the cultural core illuminates the entertainment just as embracing the entertainment transfers the cultural core. Each reinforces the other. The  more you see the movies, the more you understand the culture that created them, and the more you understand the culture, the more pleasure the entertainment can create.

In Lowell Was Right!, movies are the primary medium of entertainment. Not only feature films, but newsreels, shorts, and serials as well, are viewed in the communal environment of the theater. All of the cultures of LWR! are entertained communally, whether by performances onstage or on film.

Staged entertainment - plays, opera, music, speeches - is ephemeral, and locally variable.  Each performance is different, and cannot be exactly repeated, whether re-staged in a different performance, or in memory. Films are different, and can be repeatedly performed exactly, without variation. Use of movie magic - models, pyrotechnics, forced perspective, lighting - can vastly emphasize the shared fantasy, and thus the effectiveness, of the movie.

Books can be solitary entertainment, but depend on active imaginative engagement by the reader, and - while effective within a culture - can be difficult to transfer across cultures. Musical recordings are the only solitary entertainment which can compete with movies are portable, transferable entertainment, but the information they transfer is almost entirely emotional. Even so, recorded music is far more portable than film culturally, as basic emotions are universal even without a cultural context.