Your real-life 3D movie

You’re the director, the camera operator and play the lead. You’re the scriptwriter, too, and the costume designer, art director, gopher, finance director and critic. Everything about your movie is under your control, except the stuff that isn’t, which actually is quite a lot.

What’s not in your control is other people’s movies, not directly, anyway. Your movie, the plot you imagine and the words you script, might have great influence on others and the content of their movies, however. Thus advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry, and great treasuries are expended in the pursuit of favorable public opinion. Molding public opinion, another specialty of real-life 3D movies, is itself a specialty dealing almost entirely with manipulation of emotions and the generation of “facts.”

But the plot thickens; even though you are the absolute star of your movie, everyone else is also the absolute star of their own movie, in which you may or may not have any role at all, even a silent walk-in.

So, here we are, a planet of 7-billion-plus real-life 3D movies, each with its own scriptwriter enabled to modify each movie’s plot line instantaneously. And real-life 3D movies don’t just come with pictures and soundtracks, but have the added features of sensory capabilities such as touch, smell, taste and emotions. The latter capability, emotion, runs along with the movie, just like a soundtrack. We not only see and hear and speak lines in our movies, but we also feel and are affected by the content of our movies and the effects of the contents of the movies of others.

Considerable effort has been expended to convince billions of people that one particular script is more favorable than another. Some of these scripts rely on the tragic content of many real-life 3D movies with plot lines that generate terrible pain and suffering, all in order to promote the validity and usefulness of a meta-script. A meta-script typically explains why individual real-life 3D movie scripts look and sound the way they do, and offer “facts” to counteract painful scripts. Such meta-scripts often contain references to the afterlife such as heaven and hell. Over time, and to this day, vast armies scour countrysides to enforce meta-scripts at the point of a deadly weapon.

Given that the props and language of our movies have all been provided by others who had movies, one might say each real-life 3D movie is embedded within a nearly infinite number of meta-scripts. Thus, for example, the stainless steel forks we use in our movies were created by others as props in their movies. The whole idea of stainless steel forks is itself something invented in someone’s movie, a movie of the past so old and now unacknowledged that it’s been forgotten.

Perhaps we are Homo Scriptus, psychologically complex, self-conscious beings whose greatest evolutionary success is writing scripts. We call our scripts by many names, but they all begin with “my,” such as “my name, my nationality, my religion, my favorite hamburger,” and so forth. Our internal movie critics quickly compile a list of preferences about all and everything, which alters the trajectory of our running script, and keeps our scriptwriters, as they say, crazy busy.

There’s a lot of competition in the movie business, but don’t worry, you’ve got top billing, baby.