Frankness in popular entertainment about sex and hidden motives is hardly a negative development, so long as free and gifted minds are behind it. But if you are still wondering what happened last November, and you are tired of hearing all the abstract, mind-numbing blather about red states and blue states, consider the consequences of Hollywood's projection of its own narrow experience into the precious leisure time of its audiences. For many Americans, the promise of instant wealth is a lot more plausible (the market may go your way) than the promise of carnal or romantic gratification (you are who you are). So if Hollywood types, who supported the recent Democratic presidential candidate and his blowsy, post-coital-looking wife, are breaking the sexual rules, you might as well go with his more regular-looking rival, who disdains sexual promiscuity but favors dramatic military violence, and also winkingly implies that he is going to let everybody break the economic rules as a kind of moral corrective to all the sexual rules--i.e., the tacit bargain--that are being shattered.

Thomson himself is hardly a moralizer, as you may have noticed, though he is a caustic, jaded moralist. The conversation about the nature of Hollywood movies usually proceeds along the cloudy, banal lines of "moral values." But looking plainly at the sociology of Hollywood, or at elements of filmmaking that don't lend themselves to easy polemical formulations, yields a lot more insight into how we are living. What is the social effect of close-ups edging out shots of people interacting in a definite environment, or of a jumpy camera or digitized effects overwhelming reality as opposed to a steady camera subordinate to the visible world? How has movie music affected our patience with trying, unscored moments in life? (The iPod is our way of scoring our otherwise uneventful days.) What does it mean that films, unlike plays, are shot out of chronological sequence? How does that influence an actor's style, and how do the actors influence us? Or do they?

The subject of acting almost never comes up in any extended way in commentary on the movies. But the art of acting is at the heart of nearly all popular entertainment, and movies and television obviously would not exist without actors. Thomson takes some halfhearted stabs at acting, suggesting--with startling ignorance and ludicrous alarm--that Method acting's emphasis on the actor's own experience is "a nonsense that could yet destroy a society, as well as an approach that drags down art or storytelling or entertainment." You wonder what Thomson is thinking when he watches Pacino, perhaps the Method's purest product, utterly obliterate himself in the role of Michael Corleone. But maybe Thomson falls back on the tough-guy-prophet tone because it's even harder to talk about acting than about music.There's simply no vocabulary for it, and there are no stable criteria for how to evaluate acting, except for the very vague standard of being true to life. Which sounds fine until you realize that it's an aspiration diametrically at odds with the whole idea of "acting."

And so Thomson rushes past aesthetic considerations to what he regards as acting's social consequences. "The new model for humanity," he declares, in that same prophetic tone, "becomes the actor, with his infinite variety." He adds that "many of us become a little more like actors, waiting for a fresh part, a new start." He asks (with cocktail-napkin infelicity): "Is the only way to behave naturally now to act?" The idea that we've all become actors is what currently passes for advanced commentary on the effects of film-acting on American life.

But Americans are very lightly bound by deference to prescribed social forms, and this means that they are less calculating in their self-presentation than the citizens of any other society you can think of. Americans don't play "roles" to the extent that a British, French, Japanese or Saudi Arabian person will play a role in ordinary life. That's why great American actors, unlike great British actors, rarely lose themselves in their characters, and perhaps why they achieve such iconic power abroad. Actors who became stars--Hepburn, Monroe, Brando, Pacino, Nicholson--play some version of what we have come to think of as themselves at the same time as they play a particular part. (Hepburn is almost always a sophisticate; Nicholson usually some kind of outsider; Pacino--since The Godfather--often a towering figure of evil, etc.) Ever since Brando's tics and embellishments sabotaged the Method's naturalism, American actors have found ways to remind us that they're still themselves--still true to life--under the enchantments of art.

In fact, American acting's suspicion of pretense and its stubborn adherence to the lifelike strengthen Americans' mistrust of artistic fictions. Hollywood's true meaning lies not in the fabrication of illusion but in some ultimate contempt for the imagination. For all of film's super-mega-hyper fantasies and fantastic effects, for all its probably subtle influences on behavior, it leaves audiences unable to conceive of any other kind of life than the one they're being officially urged to live. That doesn't mean that portentous Marcuse was more than superficially accurate in his perceptions. But it is conclusive proof that, with regard to Hollywood's capacity to inspire us to reimagine our lot in life, McCarthy was as much in the dark as any moviegoer.

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