The End of the Sacred

The End of the Sacred is Charly Cruz’s name for a cultural loss that he traces through movie theaters, family life, and the solitary act of watching a film. As Oscar Fate remembers the conversation, the speech makes cinema a measure of what modern life has flattened: the old theater offered an experience of scale, solitude, and near-religious attention, while its replacement promises convenience without vertigo. Fate’s inward questions complicate Cruz’s confident diagnosis, leaving the sacred neither securely restored nor wholly extinguished.

The old theater and its disappearance

Cruz begins with the architecture of moviegoing. The theaters he values were enormous: high ceilings, red curtains, pillars, worn carpeting, aisles, boxes, orchestra seats, and balconies. Their scale could make the moment when the lights went out feel like an encounter with an abyss. Cruz calls them more like churches than ordinary entertainment venues—not because moviegoing was solemn or exceptional in daily life, but because a routine visit could still carry a religious charge.

That shared experience, in his account, has been dismantled and replaced by multiplexes. The old theaters are demolished for banks, supermarkets, or smaller cinemas. Cruz measures the loss in space: seven, ten, perhaps fifteen multiplex screens could fit inside one of the former theaters. The new arrangement is practical and comfortable, but it no longer makes the audience feel alone before the film begins. His contrast is not simply between large and small buildings; it is between an experience that exposed the spectator to scale and one that keeps experience manageable.

From public spectacle to private ritual

Cruz describes the end of the sacred as a process with no single agreed point of origin. Perhaps it began in churches when Mass ceased to be celebrated in Latin, he suggests, or in families when fathers left mothers. The demolition of the old movie theaters becomes another stage in this broader decline: cathedrals are felled by wrecking crews, and the VCR follows. A television screen in a living room cannot reproduce the cinema’s vast rows of seats, but Cruz sees home viewing as its nearest surviving counterpart.

His account turns that private viewing into a deliberate procedure. The viewer watches alone, closes the windows, chooses the film, prepares drinks and snacks, decides when to begin, ignores the telephone and doorbell, and keeps the remote control within reach in case a scene needs to be seen again. The list makes solitude something arranged rather than merely suffered. If the film and the viewer meet under the right conditions, Cruz argues, the sense of the sacred can return. But the possibility is conditional: ritual may prepare the encounter, not guarantee it.

Fate’s unsettled response

Fate does not accept Cruz’s account as a ready-made explanation. While listening, he wonders what the sacred could mean to him: the vague pain of his mother’s death, recognition that some things cannot be repaired, or the bodily pang he feels when looking at Rosa Amalfitano. He asks whether he mistakes beauty for transcendence, and whether that response would survive the sudden appearance of a more famous or conventionally beautiful actress. His thought experiment tests the sacred against comparison and consumption: if attention shifts as soon as a more desirable image appears, the feeling may be appetite rather than revelation.

The questions also turn back on Fate’s own habits. He knows the practical pleasures he seeks—videos, movies, sex, conversation that will help him finish an article and get paid—but doubts that these experiences disclose anything sacred. Even his judgments of the people around Rosa Amalfitano come under suspicion: he questions why he considers her companions peculiar and why he assumes that another woman’s beauty would diminish hers. The speech therefore leaves its central idea open to scrutiny. Cruz offers a ritual of attention; Fate’s doubts show how readily attention can become comparison, classification, and hunger.

Sacredness under pressure

The episode’s remembered form preserves that uncertainty. The reader encounters Cruz’s sustained reflection through Fate’s later, imperfect recollection, and the speech is interwoven with Fate’s private questions rather than presented as a detached argument. The result is a tension between Cruz’s account of cultural decline and Fate’s inability to identify, with confidence, what the sacred would look like in his own life.

That tension resonates with the novel’s other charged spaces and images without resolving them into a single key. Morini’s dream enlarges an apparently ordinary hotel pool into a dark expanse where Norton has disappeared; Guadalupe Roncal describes the prison as a living woman hacked to pieces, with prisoners inside her; and Fate, in Charly Cruz’s house, sees a coffin-shaped wooden box and a strange marble fixture as if they might be alive. These scenes make ordinary settings unstable, but they do not simply restore a lost sacred order. Against them, Cruz’s vision of private film-watching offers a fragile practice: attention may reopen an encounter, even where no institution or public ritual can promise that one will occur.