"It sort of filtered into their subconscious through motion pictures, but it's an historical secret. This - whatever this is - needs to be studied and, in a kind of definitive way, talked about"
About this Quote
Schultz is circling a familiar American phenomenon: we learn history the way we learn catchphrases, by osmosis through the screen. The line about something "filter[ing] into their subconscious through motion pictures" is a quiet indictment of how movies don’t just illustrate the past, they manufacture it. Not with a conspiracy-board vibe, but with the more unsettling truth: mass entertainment can plant durable "memories" in people who never chose to be taught.
Calling it an "historical secret" is doing double work. It hints at suppressed knowledge, sure, but it also names a cultural embarrassment: everyone knows cinema shapes public memory, yet we treat that influence as unmentionable because it complicates the comfort story of "I just like movies". Schultz’s phrasing is deliberately hazy - "This - whatever this is" - because the subject is slippery. He’s talking about a force you can feel but can’t easily cite: a blend of propaganda, genre tropes, casting choices, and editorial simplifications that become a shared national dream.
The insistence that it "needs to be studied" pushes the remark out of celebrity punditry and toward civic urgency. He’s not asking for more opinions; he wants a "definitive" accounting, as if cultural criticism should function like an audit. Subtext: we’re living with the downstream consequences - political myths, recycled stereotypes, a public that confuses cinematic realism with truth - and the cost of not naming the mechanism is that it keeps working, invisibly, on the next generation.
Calling it an "historical secret" is doing double work. It hints at suppressed knowledge, sure, but it also names a cultural embarrassment: everyone knows cinema shapes public memory, yet we treat that influence as unmentionable because it complicates the comfort story of "I just like movies". Schultz’s phrasing is deliberately hazy - "This - whatever this is" - because the subject is slippery. He’s talking about a force you can feel but can’t easily cite: a blend of propaganda, genre tropes, casting choices, and editorial simplifications that become a shared national dream.
The insistence that it "needs to be studied" pushes the remark out of celebrity punditry and toward civic urgency. He’s not asking for more opinions; he wants a "definitive" accounting, as if cultural criticism should function like an audit. Subtext: we’re living with the downstream consequences - political myths, recycled stereotypes, a public that confuses cinematic realism with truth - and the cost of not naming the mechanism is that it keeps working, invisibly, on the next generation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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