Success Quote by Angela Carter

Carter takes the most ordinary 20th-century ritual - buying a ticket, finding a seat, shutting up in the dark - and drapes it in the language of the sacred. The move is sly. By comparing cinema-goers to Ancient Greeks “participating in the mysteries,” she elevates mass entertainment without pretending it’s innocent. Mysteries weren’t just shows; they were controlled experiences, designed to reorder the self through spectacle, secrecy, and shared awe. That’s what the cinema offered at its peak: not community in the sunny, civic sense, but communion under conditions of surrender.

The key word is “strangers.” Carter is mourning a specific kind of public intimacy: people who don’t know each other agreeing, briefly, to be moved by the same images. “Dreaming the same dream in unison” captures film’s soft power - the way it standardizes desire, fear, romance, and heroism across class lines, while feeling intensely private. You sit alone with your feelings, yet those feelings are being synchronized.

Context matters: Carter wrote as television and later home video chipped away at cinema’s status as a collective rite. Her fiction is packed with rewrites of myth and fairy tale, so she’s attuned to how stories operate as social machinery. The subtext isn’t nostalgia for popcorn and velvet seats; it’s a warning and a seduction. When a culture stops gathering to be enchanted together, it doesn’t stop being enchanted. It just gets enchanted separately - easier to market to, easier to isolate, harder to argue with.