movies as a life form

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the notion of movies as a life form stands as one of the novel's most provocative and sustained speculative ideas. It is not merely a metaphor but a full-blown thesis, argued with the urgency of a scientific discovery: cinema is a malign, self-generating species that arrived on earth roughly a century ago and has gradually come to dominate not only human feelings but human thoughts and intellects. The concept recurs throughout the novel, surfacing in the narrator's meditations, in a monologue delivered on a film set, and in reflections on the history of the medium, and it serves as a lens through which the novel examines the relationship between reality and representation, the fate of literature in a movie-saturated culture, and the very texture of contemporary consciousness.

The Thesis of the Movie Creature

The core of the idea is laid out in a remarkable monologue that the narrator delivers, apparently to a film crew, in which he insists that movies are "incredibly astute, complex creatures who persuade us that they are manifestations of our own culture, with individual identities but participating in genres, just as we are individuals but within ethnic frameworks." The speaker acknowledges how strange this sounds, anticipating the listener's skepticism by invoking the convention of pseudoscientific horror movies, in which a lone scientist perceives a great threat to humanity that no one will credit until it is almost too late. He compares movies to a tapeworm living in the guts of the earth, a single planetary parasite that sucks humanity up into itself, using up the cities, the countryside, the seas, and the mountains. The human agencies who make films are, in this account, subsidiary to the movies themselves, like garden bugs that come into being to pollinate flowers, or birds that live atop the backs of African rhinos and beak away their lice. The movies are in control, preordaining and self-generating, like a species with its own DNA, while the struggles of studio heads, the interference of critics, and the entire booming culture of cinema are all illusion, a scripted reality.

The Flattening of the Self

The most disturbing implication of the thesis is its effect on individual identity. The narrator testifies that his own life has attracted the attention of the movie creatures, and that he feels himself "losing dimension, losing moral substance, complexity," going flat, turning into a shadow. Even his most intimate passionate feelings are, he suspects, words on a page written for him to act out. He can no longer tell whether he is speaking his monologue for the first time or the hundredth, whether he is the real person or the film image, and he wonders whether the director who calls "Cut" is himself nothing more than an image, a shadow, an arrangement of downloaded ones and zeroes. This is the existential horror at the heart of the concept: the movie creature does not merely depict life but replaces it, converting the three-dimensional density of lived experience into the flat, sequential surface of narrative. The narrator's testimony is offered as evidence, and it blurs the line between the speaker and the actor, between the novel and the film it imagines itself to be.

The Sequential World and the End of Simultaneity

The thesis extends to a vision of the entire planet's future. Movies are using up the cities, the countrysides, the seas, and the mountains, and someday every inch of the world will be on film. The planet will flatten into an enormous reel, and the night sky will screen humanity. The film stock will play out and drift and undulate, twisting and spiraling Möbiusly through the galactic universe. Life will no longer be simultaneous but sequential, one story after another, story after story, as if all the DNA of every living thing were extended on one strand, one byte at a time, to infinity. This vision of a world reduced to a single narrative thread stands in stark contrast to the novel's celebration of the city as a place of simultaneous, multidirectional life, where thousands of lives head in all four directions at once, and where the human need to walk among strangers is the secret foundation of urban existence. The movie creature, in its drive to flatten everything into sequence, is the enemy of that urban simultaneity.

The History of the Medium and the Denigration of the Literary

The concept is grounded in a specific account of film history. Movies began in silence, and the early filmmaker learned to convey meaning without language; the title card dropped into a sequence only nailed down the intelligence already given to the audience nonverbally. When sound came in, talkies became more talky, with screenplays derived heavily from theater and books, and films of the thirties and forties were endlessly talkative. Now, however, films work off previous films, they are genre-referential, and the dialogue has become like the old title cards, needed only for the final touch of specificity. This history supports the idea that movies have evolved into a self-referential species that no longer needs the world or literature, only other movies. The novel connects this to what it calls the denigration of the literary, a sacrament of the movie culture most satisfying when performed by literary folks themselves, as when writers at a Waldorf gala extol a film director for the superior artistry with which he wrought movie magic from their humble books and screenplays. The movie creature feeds on literature, and the literary world colludes in its own consumption.

The Concept in the Wider Ecology of the Novel

The idea of movies as a life form belongs to a broader pattern of thinking in City of God about living systems and aggregate consciousness. The novel observes the ants of Central Park, each one a cell of a group brain, an invisible organ of thought beyond the capacity of any one of them to understand, and it imagines the city itself as a kind of over-brain, a primatial over-soul that depends on the masses to delineate the self. It describes the City of Birds at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid where over a hundred thirty species of birds nest in old Big Mac containers and TV cabinets, a great urban aviary sustained by human waste. In this context, the movie creature is another such system, a life form that has evolved to feed on the human, and the novel's narrator, walking the streets of New York and observing the farmers' markets, the community gardens, and the crowds, is engaged in the same kind of ecological attention that reveals the movies as a species. The concept thus functions not as a digression but as a central organizing idea, one that links the novel's urban observations, its reflections on art and religion, and its anxiety about the fate of the self in a world of images.