Film is an inferiour medium to literature.
I have no doubt that the chorus of philistines that make this hole their home and routinely imbibe the putrid contents of this garbage bin will rise up against me for this post, but that itself will only lend credence to an obvious consequence of my theory, which is that this medium attracts a lower class of person because it is a lower form of art, if it can be called even that.
Literary communication is learned over the course of many years and perfected through intensive schooling, which are absolutely required to achieve even the lowest form of proficiency (one can learn a language while remaining ignorant of a literary form, as illiterates prove). This is a medium which eliminates noise and delivers its substance through rigorously defined concepts: words describe ideas, which represent objects. The reader processes literature through an intense use of his cognitive abilities.
Visual communication, can be purely sensory, in that it delivers information directly from the senses, without the filter of the conscious mind parsing it for sense and linearity. Cinema, at its beginning, took a more static form, inspired by theatre, which lent it a more structured, ponderous. This did not last, and over the years, it has degenerated into a garbled mess full of shooty-shooty-bang-bang, noise both visual and auditive.
While our visual sense has always required us to filter noise, modern media immerses us in a form of visual communication not found in nature, that is to say for which our visual sense has not evolved: syncopated flashes of images designed to be attention-getting and immediately stimulating. This is hypnotic: the mind demands structure but cannot find it, and shuts down in the face of the constant sensory overstimulation, which is why you don't remember the plot from a movie you watched just last week.
