First published 2022
The narrator emerges from a cinema screen onto a World War I battlefield littered with dying soldiers. A shapeshifting figure appears and warns him that these cinematic images are projections of the mind's empathy, not reality. This mysterious guide leads the narrator through encounters with historical figures including Trotsky, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. They witness cinematic visions from Eisenstein and Chaplin while traveling from Paris to Memphis, descending into Fritz Lang's Metropolis, ascending to a 1940s Hollywood paradise, and climbing the Empire State Building with King Kong. Through dialogues with twelve modernist writers, Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, a cinematic Jesus Christ, and Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, the narrator explores how visual culture represents a nonviolent cultural shift that transcends the violent upheavals of the twentieth century. The journey reveals cinema's power to channel desires for change while demonstrating the necessity of peaceful transformation.
Genres: art, 20th-century, adventure, biography-memoir, comedy, 21st-century, alternate-history, academic
Vibes: dark, emotional, fast-paced, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Empire State Building, Metropolis, Memphis, Paris
Period: 1940s, World War I
186 pages · Paperback · Resource Publications
Content warnings: violence