It is an odd thing that people will pave the ground around a movie theatre or a museum so that they can park their dinosaur-eaters and waltz in to see something that is not real. They will kill trees and grass and smother the very earth itself to stare at a bit of canvas, a statue whacked out of rock that was ripped from the earth without so much as a "by your leave", a bit of paper with some silver on it, or a few hundred feet of thin and a narrow tree by-product or dinosaur remains sliding through a glorified lamp.

Art is propaganda. It is a viewpoint of another, not just as seen through their eyes if you could open up the back of their head, but filtered through the gauze and tint of their mind. If they do it well enough, your mind can become their's.

While books and magazines and carvings of heiroglyphics and cuneiform characters can be influential, their ability to sway and swing the human mind is limited because people are not born knowing how to read. They have to learn it. Any dog or cat or human baby can watch a movie or a television show or stare at a photo or a painting or a drawing. Images have the ability to imbed themselves in our consciousnesses to the point that words, no matter how evocative, cannot even begin to compete.

Photography and filmmaking became ubiquitous in the last century. First, the rotogravure made it possible to see photos of events from half way round the world or just yesterday for the price of a few pence. Then, soon, a nickel or a similar sum could be dropped into the sweaty palm of a barker who had a projector set up in a storefront or in a vacant lot, shining this magic lantern on any pale surface. It has been many years since there were sighted people in the world who had never seen a movie. Projectors, TVs, and then video technology have spread across the planet. Anyone who does not have access to them on a regular basis must be truly isolated (lucky them!) by choice or otherwise.

While cultural mythology, religion and politics have the ability to shape the words and mental images with which one describes one's world, all it takes is one film or photograph to shape an apposite or opposite opinion in such a way that one would never quite seriously take the old ways word for anything again. Conversely, if you have no culture but the image, then you will probably have a bit of trouble understanding why there are people who can look at the sky and tell you the weather instead of tuning in to see what the weatherman will guess. You will also have trouble forming a consensus of one in your view of the world and it's, um, vicissitudes of a variable quality, if you fall for every director and screenwriter or photographer's personal vision. That's like being a marionette yanked about by more than one puppeteer, isn't it? Of course, no one wants to be a stick in the mud... And you should keep an open mind, shouldn't you? Respect other people's opinions, even when you and they know that they are dead wrong and just trying to get on your wick because they like that sort of thing, y'know, but it's kind of funny and artistic at the same time, which is cool, if it's not overdone...

See if you can follow this a bit down the garden path:

A person has an interesting life.
They write their autobiography toward the end of their long and busy life.
They die, greatly regretted, but surely on the way to their reward.
The rights to the autobiography are sold to a movie company.
The book is tossed to a writer to turn into a script.

A script is written.
A movie is made.

Now, if a train travelling at fourteen furlongs per fortnight is carrying a small boy with a bit of chalk in his pocket, how close is the movie going to be to the real life of the person?

Let's scoot through the gravel a bit more, the gate is in sight:

We have The Real Life As Lived By The Liver: 72 years

We have The Story Of My Life as Written By The Liver: 427 pages

All right, already we have a truncation of reality. If the fellow in question (let's say it's a fellow, just for the sake of Margaret) had written or dictated a page a minute (that's the going rate for Television and Film scripts, according to a book I once didn't read) for every waking hour of his life, then that would be 4,380 times 60 for a single year, which gives us 262,800 pages per year, and 189,216,000 pages for life (according to my sloppy calculations with a bit of string and my foot).

So, 427 minutes out of whatever that number is up there isn't much. But, wait, the book's pages are not detailed accounts of minutes, are they?

A book is a collection of blurry images, of impressions, of recollections of half-forgotten events, smells and feelings, isn't it?
So, the funnel has gotten narrower.
To continue:

We have The Story Of My Life as Written By The Liver: 427 pages

then

We have The Story of His Life as Scripted By The Writer: 200 pages

We have The Movie of the Story of His Life as Directed by *blank*: 120 minutes

and

We have The Edited for Content and Time Television Version of the Movie of the Story of His Life as Directed by *blank*: 47 minutes

What do you think is left of the original fellow's experience and/or impressions?

Now, suppose, just for a minute, I won't keep you much longer:

That the fellow dies without writing a single page of his Autobiography and some other fellow writes a Biography many years, even decades later and then some other fellow makes a movie of it, then what do you think the relationship between the truth and the film would be?

Pretty far-fetched, don't you think?

If History is written by the victors and movies are written by who-knows-what, and filmed by a guy with a "vision", then what you see on the screen is pretty much what the director wants you to see, and reality be damned, as well as you, the viewer.

And if you make a living watching films or television and you choose to write your autobiography, then the wheel of Karma truly has a flat, don't it?