Spellbound

I SHARED A PODIUM not long ago with David Thomson. It was one of those very general and open-ended discussions about film-roaming over the past and future of Hollywood, what the audience wants, what the industry needs, the erosion of old standards, the conflict between art and commerce-and at one point Thomson threw out the question: "Is it possible that the movies have lost their magic?" It was the sort of question that someone is likely to throw out in such a discussion, and its meaning has everything to do with the relative age of the person asking it. What is magic? Whose magic?

The reference might have been to some lost glamour, the never-to-berecaptured first glimpse of Bogie and Bacall, or the Gold Diggers of 1933, or Dietrich gazing at Anna May Wong or King Kong at Fay Wray, all the way back to the more primal thrills of Tom Mix and Douglas Fairbanks, until you might find yourself among ghosts, with a bunch of unaverted Parisians ducking behind a table in fear to avoid the Lumières' train arriving at La Ciotat station in 1898. Looking out at the mostly very young audience I had to wonder whether for many of them the outer limit of oldtime movie magic might be, say, Star Wars. Or maybe Fight Club.

I'm not sure exactly what Thomson had in mind, because the discussion predictably veered rapidly in another direction, but he may well have been thinking not of the aura of any particular film or era but rather the "magic" evoked in the title of an old British film, The Magic Box, about the invention of cinematography: the primitive sense of awe elicited, in the beginning, in the face of photographs that move. The question then would be whether that awe has given way to habituation and even boredom, to be recalled the way a long-term opium addict thinks back fondly on the by now unattainable freshness and novelty of his first pipe. The myth of the first encounter marks the transition from one world to another, and there is no going back.

One might well wonder whether movies at this point are even clearly distinguishable from the mess of paraphernalia that surrounds them-the personal computers, iPods,...