The sacred and cinema

The sacred and cinema is a motif articulated most directly in Charly Cruz’s meditation on the movie theater and its disappearance. For him, cinema once offered a collective, almost religious encounter: the darkened room, the immense screen, and the sense of an abyss before the film began. As theaters are demolished and replaced by multiplexes, that public experience loses its scale and its aura. Video can recover something of the sacred, he argues, but only through solitude and deliberate attention. Oscar Fate hears the argument while confronting a more intimate uncertainty: whether sacredness is grief, beauty, or simply a pang whose meaning he cannot establish.

The Theater as a Sacred Space

Charly Cruz contrasts the old theaters with the multiplexes that displace them. The earlier buildings had high ceilings, red curtains, pillars, worn carpeting, box seats, orchestra seats, and balconies. Their size made the spectator feel alone in a crowd and exposed to an abyss before the film began. Charly treats that mixture of grandeur and vulnerability as essential to the moviegoing experience: the theater was not merely a place to watch a story but a space in which watching could feel like a religious event.

The contrast is also historical and material. The old theaters are demolished, and practical, functional multiplexes take their place; banks, supermarkets, and smaller screens occupy the ground where the cinematic cathedral once stood. Charly links this loss to a broader decline of the sacred, mentioning the church and the family as other places where its authority has receded. Cinema’s change therefore becomes one instance of a larger transformation: the replacement of shared, consequential spaces by structures designed for convenience.

Video and the Private Rite

Charly does not describe the sacred as irretrievably lost. He proposes that watching a video alone can approach it, though only if the viewer makes the occasion deliberate. The windows are closed, the film and refreshments are chosen in advance, the phone and doorbell are ignored, and the remote control is kept close enough to replay a scene. The viewer’s isolation is not incidental; it is the condition of attention. The domestic screen cannot reproduce the theater’s architecture or its crowd, but it can make a private room feel larger by removing ordinary interruptions.

This proposed rite has no guaranteed result. Charly says it depends on both the film and the viewer, and that sometimes it fails. Its sacred character is thus provisional rather than institutional: not secured by a church, a building, or a shared ritual, but potentially encountered through solitude and concentrated looking. The remote control is part of the paradox. A device associated with control and repetition becomes an instrument for returning to an image, while the viewer’s readiness to repeat a scene may open an experience that cannot be commanded.

Fate’s Unsettled Definition

Fate listens to Charly’s theory but cannot simply adopt it. He tests the idea against his own experience: the vague pain at his mother’s death, his recognition that some losses cannot be repaired, and the pang he feels when Rosa Amalfitano looks at him. He wonders whether that feeling is sacredness or merely an attraction to beauty. His comparison with a hypothetical Hollywood actress makes the uncertainty sharper: would a more famous beauty diminish Rosa’s effect, or intensify it? The questions do not yield a stable answer.

Fate’s self-interrogation exposes the gap between Charly’s account and his own habits. He likes movies and videos, and he knows ordinary desire, but he suspects that practical experience is all he registers: hunger to be satisfied, emptiness to fill, and people to talk to so he can finish an article and be paid. Even his judgments about Rosa’s companions and Rosa Mendez’s appearance become objects of doubt. He asks himself what he knows about innocence, pain, or women, and whether he is mistaking his assumptions for insight. The sacred remains a possibility he can describe only through uncertainty, not a conviction he possesses.

Images, Spaces, and the Uncanny

The motif gains force from the book’s recurring scenes in which familiar spaces and images become difficult to read. In Morini’s nightmare, a hotel swimming pool expands into a dark body of water more than two miles long; he sees that Norton is gone, while Pelletier and Espinoza remain absorbed in cards. The scene turns an ordinary leisure setting into an immense, isolating expanse, and places a vanished person beyond the reach of the observers’ attention. Its dream logic makes the familiar hotel world strange rather than offering a clear religious revelation.

Other spaces similarly unsettle the division between inert object and living presence. In Santa Teresa, the damaged toilet in Pelletier’s hotel room exposes red material beneath the porcelain, and its broken, half-moon-shaped section prompts Norton to imagine it as evidence of violence. Guadalupe Roncal describes the prison as seeming alive, like a dismembered woman still living with prisoners inside her. In Fate’s nighttime visit to Charly Cruz’s house, a coffin-shaped wooden box and an unexplained marble fixture briefly seem alive in the mirror-lined bathroom. These images do not establish a doctrine of the sacred; instead, they make perception unstable, forcing ordinary architecture and objects to carry an unnerving excess of meaning.

Significance

The motif holds together two incompatible possibilities: sacredness may survive in an act of attention, yet it has no reliable public home and no agreed definition. Charly’s lost theaters represent a collective scale of experience that has been demolished; his solitary video ritual offers a fragile substitute. Fate, meanwhile, cannot tell whether his strongest feelings arise from mourning, beauty, desire, or some recognition of what cannot be fixed. The novel leaves that question open, making the sacred less a settled answer than a measure of how intensely an image or encounter unsettles the ordinary.