Movie Quote by David Ansen

David Ansen’s line lands like a sly mantra for the age of mass culture: the boundary between spectator and screen was always porous, but we’ve spent a century pretending it wasn’t. “We are the movies” isn’t just fandom talk. It’s an argument that film doesn’t merely reflect society; it manufactures the templates we use to recognize ourselves - how romance should look, what heroism sounds like, what a “cool” walk down a hallway signifies. The second clause flips it back: “the movies are us.” That reciprocity is the trapdoor. Movies shape us, yes, but they’re also assembled out of our appetites, anxieties, and market-tested fantasies. We build the dream factory, then let it rebuild us.

The line works because it’s circular without being empty. It captures a feedback loop: audiences reward certain narratives, studios refine them into myth, culture absorbs the myth as common sense, and future audiences come pre-trained to want it. The “are” does heavy lifting, collapsing metaphor into identity. It’s not “like” or “influence”; it’s ontology.

Contextually, Ansen wrote as a critic in an era when cinema’s authority was being challenged by TV, then accelerated by celebrity culture and branding. The quote defends movies by upgrading them from entertainment to civic mirror and emotional operating system. It’s affectionate and faintly accusatory: if you don’t like what’s on the screen, you’re also looking at a crowd-source self-portrait.