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Introduction xv But perhaps foreign judgments on the 42 percent of Americans who do travel abroad are not indicative of the other 58 percent who stay home. Perhaps, too, when Americans leave the confines of the country, they change. As the Burmese journalist in The Ugly American says, “For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious.”2 Maybe travel reveals what was always there, simmering below the surface. But who are we when we are together, at home? We are moviegoers. And it is in and through film we express and learn what it means to be “American.” And films have taught us well. How prescient and ger- mane is the speech on freedom by Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary), in the dystopic film Demolition Man (1993): I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I’m the kind of guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, “Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?” I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking sec- tion. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body read- ing Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to.3 Here uninhibited and unhealthy choices and antisocial behavior demarcate free- dom. And it would seem this is exactly the kind of “freedom” many Americans have in mind when they hear the word. As a text of popular culture, Friendly’s speech also reveals another key value that is perhaps the cornerstone of American culture and that recurs throughout cinema (and is shown in the films in this vol- ume): individualism—or, more bluntly, that the individual is sacred choice is sacred. The “world” out there is simply the arena where my desires are simultane- ously frustrated and enacted. And there need not be a reason “because I suddenly might feel the need to” is sufficient. It is too facile and reductionistic to see moviegoing as an escape from the stress and anxieties of life. Beyond escapism, then, American blockbusters, in particu- lar, are uniquely situated to certify the reality of “America” and source a shared, remembered mythology. In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer (1961), Binx Bol- ling is a stand-in for all Americans seeking existential enlightenment under our Bodhi tree, the silver screen. Percy, thinly veiled in the protagonist, speaks of “certification”: Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not cer- tified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.4 Extending this concept beyond the neighborhood, when any place in America comes on the screen, we all become a person who is somewhere and not any- where we belong. New York is as much ours as Spider-Man’s and Tony Stark’s