Another thing Doug and I talked about was something that I’m always blabbering about, but sometimes make a little too complex.

We were hashing out some ideas about life and stuff, and were making various references to movies to help illustrate our point, and communicate vast swaths of information, experience and emotion in a quick short-hand. Then Doug said something to the effect of “I wonder how we would communicate with each other if we didn’t have movies.”

To which I promptly replied that we’d always be running around quoting the Bible, in order to pull in the same sort of common cultural reference points. But I guess people also had different kinds of folk-stories and stuff too, to help flesh out the story-systems to cover the full-range of human experience.

I wonder what going to Church would be like, if every week, you went to a movie theatre, and somebody really knowledgeable about movies got up and talked about different sorts of life events and ideas, and showed clips from movies, and said stuff like, “You know that part in Star Wars where Luke gets his hand cut off…” and shit like that. Hell, I would totally go to Church all the time, if that’s what it was like.

It would be absolutely fantastic because they would be stories from a lexicon which actually has real meaning and personal resonance, instead of something hundreds and thousands of years old, which nobody fully grasps the entire meaning of all the different layers involved.

Actually, I did go to a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass one time where the priest gave a homily that was sort of like this. It was probably the best one that I’ve ever heard, and its seriously the only one that I remember with any vividness after having gone to Church every week for like 18 years. Basically, the priest took the story of Jesus’ birth and updated it so that it read like a movie. Mary was a young single mother from the wrong side of the tracks, and like her and this guy Joseph were on the run from these hoodlums, and they had to hide out someplace all dank and nasty, and Mary gave birth to her kid, and I don’t know… there were guns and robbers and sex and stuff. Everything you’d want out of a religion, really. It was stellar.