"The old studios that mass-produced dreams are gone with the wind, just like the old downtown theaters that were the temples of the dreams"
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Nostalgia is doing two jobs at once here: mourning a vanished Hollywood machine and quietly accusing us of letting it vanish. Fields leans on the soft-focus romance of “mass-produced dreams” only to remind you that the romance was industrial. The phrase is a neat contradiction: dreams are supposed to be intimate and unrepeatable, yet the old studio system stamped them out like consumer goods. That friction is the point. She’s not just elegizing an era; she’s revealing how American fantasy was engineered, distributed, and made communal.
“Gone with the wind” is a sly cultural shorthand. It nods to the canonical artifact of studio-era mythmaking while also suggesting inevitability: history, like a gust, clears the set. But the second clause tightens the argument. The loss isn’t only corporate (studios) but civic (downtown theaters). By calling theaters “temples,” Fields frames moviegoing as ritual, not content consumption. The subtext is about a shift from shared public imagination to privatized, fragmented viewing: the palace becomes the living room, then the phone, and the “dream” gets downsized accordingly.
Contextually, it reads like a lament for the collapse of urban movie palaces and the consolidation/relocation of film culture into multiplexes, streaming platforms, and branded franchises. The intent isn’t to crown the past as purer; it’s to mark what disappears when the infrastructure of collective dreaming disappears with it: a common room where a city could watch itself wanting things.
“Gone with the wind” is a sly cultural shorthand. It nods to the canonical artifact of studio-era mythmaking while also suggesting inevitability: history, like a gust, clears the set. But the second clause tightens the argument. The loss isn’t only corporate (studios) but civic (downtown theaters). By calling theaters “temples,” Fields frames moviegoing as ritual, not content consumption. The subtext is about a shift from shared public imagination to privatized, fragmented viewing: the palace becomes the living room, then the phone, and the “dream” gets downsized accordingly.
Contextually, it reads like a lament for the collapse of urban movie palaces and the consolidation/relocation of film culture into multiplexes, streaming platforms, and branded franchises. The intent isn’t to crown the past as purer; it’s to mark what disappears when the infrastructure of collective dreaming disappears with it: a common room where a city could watch itself wanting things.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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