That is another way of getting a view of the film medium 
as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major 
aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our 
pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them 
as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment 
by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong 
about this. In fact, the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial 
giant. That it is being amputated by the TV image reflects a 
still greater revolution going on at the centre of American life. It 
is natural that the ancient East should feel the political pull and 
industrial challenge of our movie industry. The movie, as much 
as the alphabet and the printed word, is an aggressive and 
imperial form that explodes outward into other cultures. Its 
explosive force was significantly greater in silent pictures than 
in talkies, for the electromagnetic sound track already forecast 
the substitution of electric implosion for mechanical explosion.