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Though Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) ranks as a secondary character in Avatar, the tough combat pilot delivers one of the most memorable lines from the highest grossing movie of all time. The moment comes after Chacon’s aircraft breaks through a bank of clouds to reveal a breathtaking view of the Hallelujah Mountains. As her passengers gasp at the sight of floating peaks, Chacon remarks “You should see your faces.” Resonating with Al Jolson’s “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” Chacon’s words are directed both to characters within the world of the story and to those strangers gathered in dark auditoriums mesmerized by the spectacle of Avatar. Like Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer, and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, James Cameron’s Avatar stands as a benchmark movie—a movie that represents a new way to use motion picture technology to delight and challenge audiences hungry for compelling and involving experiences. Where Méliès pioneered the use of fantasy in film, Warner Brothers ushered in the sound era, and Welles developed deep-focus cinematography and other technical milestones, Cameron masterfully deployed the innovation of digital performance-capture technology to transform the 3-D movie from gimmick to potential art form. Two years later, Martin Scorsese was using 3-D and other digital tricks to tell a story about the early days of filmmaking with Hugo.

The movies, then, have always been a technological spectacle, a grand illusion that—like a magic act—uses smoke, light, and trickery to make marvelous illusions come to life. Since the early twentieth century, when Méliès took delighted audiences to the moon and back, the movies have operated as one of the world’s chief storytellers, excavating the past, commenting on the present, and fantasizing about the future, while visiting people and places both familiar and extraordinary. These movie narratives create community, too. We attend theaters or watch at home with family and friends. Our movie experiences also touch our interactions with other groups and can affect how we discuss topics like war (e.g., The Hurt Locker, 2009), think about people struggling with desperate situations (e.g., Precious, 2009), or even play games (e.g., the Scene It? game brand built around the Harry Potter, James Bond, and Pirates of the Caribbean movie series). Of course, as cultural products, movies are subject to the same economic constraints as other mass media forms. For example, there is a tendency for the major studios to roll out standardized big-budget blockbusters in hopes of finding the next Avatar, while narratives that break the mold can sometimes languish for lack of major studio backing. But in the emerging terrain of digital video and Internet distribution, the ability for moviemakers to find audiences without major studio support is increasing.

GIVEN THE FILM INDUSTRY’S LENGTHY AND COMPLEX ROLE in Americans’ lives, along with its steady transformation in response to new technologies, cultural change, and other developments, it’s vital to take a closer look at this unique mass medium. In particular, we need to ask big questions such as what purposes movies serve for us today, compared to the past; how strong an impact the U.S. film industry has on society and culture in our own country and in others; and where the film industry may be headed in the future.

To these ends, we use this chapter to examine the rich legacy and current role of movies by: