These stories, though spanning the first full century of the movies, share two key elements. Because they describe moments of initial disorientation caused by technical innovation, they reveal the process by which audiences learn to “read” movies. As a visual medium based in the mechanical simulation of sound and movement, they require viewers to “learn” the new technical vocabulary. When D. W. Griffith introduced such imminently basic cinematic narrative elements as the close-up and cross-cutting between two scenes, he too faced initial resistance on the part of “illiterate” audiences. Sergei Eisenstein’s radically dissonant experiments in editing – in films like Potemkin and Strike – are still capable of jarring the uninitiated viewer. Jean-Luc Godard’s bold use of jump-cuts in Breathless (1959) – now a staple visual tic in TV advertising, music video, and movies – proved similarly challenging to audiences. Today, many Hollywood action movies are paced and structured to simulate the relentless velocity of video games – a familiar audio-visual language to those who have played them, a confusing, skull-splitting blur to those who haven’t.

Secondly, as far as the technical evolution of the movie experience is concerned, what all these incidents involve are innovations related to the way motion pictures move. If they can be understood as expansions in the expressive narrative vocabulary of film, they are expansions transpiring in the realm of the kinesthetic. They mark leaps forward in the way movies generate pleasure and fascination through the visceral sensation of simulated movement.

In this sense, the video game esthetic is both the logical and ultimate expression of motion pictures’ evolution toward total simulated subjectivity: your eye and the camera are fused into a single, synchronized first-person joyride. This roller coaster principle of popular entertainment is also emphasized by the new theatres we tend to experience these post-video game movies in. With their unobstructed stadium seating, Dolby surround sound systems, and general architectural emphasis on rendering the movie-going experience as something considerably closer to a monumental arcade than an old-fashioned theatre, the megaplex is an environment facilitating pure sensation.