America Is Every Kind of Movie

 

The term "projection" is probably on the up-slope on Google N-Gram, probably since 2015-2016. In politics, Trump runs the projector, but everybody has a projector and a screen that they carry around, with film reels of all the people they know. You intimately know your own films, your friends might not know them. You don't know theirs. In a group of three or more people, there are many projectors and screens. At that point, no one can see any of the films. Imagine 3-5 films projected on a screen using the Photoshop transfer mode "screen". It's just a low-contrast wash of imagery. But we have to come to a consensus of what the Film is. Fascism seeks to define the Film. 

I'm reminded of the book Empire Cinema by Ruth Ben-Ghiat about films made under Mussolini:

"Film sound can stabilize the viewer, anchoring him or her within the field of constantly changing images. As employed in empire fiction and nonfiction movies, it conveys Fascist intentions to "restructure sense perception, contain spontaneity, and recast cultural difference as incompatible alterity."

Your projector for your film is guiding the attention, but ultimately everyone's film winds up in "overlay" or "screen" mode. 

11/9/2023 

[11/9/2024: Ever since the invention of moving pictures only a century ago, human consciousness has been changed to one of a theater in which our films are projected. Marianne Williamson recently commented that politics is now all theater, but it’s a movie theater, or simply anything on a screen].