For years, various Native American cultures were denigrated and mocked for using mind-altering substances and experiences like peyote and sweat lodges.

However, the same people doling out the derision would then pay rather high prices to watch films and read books which inarguably do the very same thing: produce shared hallucinations that are culturally and individually significant.

Just another version of what I do seems normal, what someone else does is bizarre and wrong.

But have you really thought about how odd movies are, especially as a communal event?

Sitting in a room with a dozen or a hundred other people watching flickering light and reacting often as if you’re sharing the experiences of the characters on the screen (particularly if the movie is good)?

Considered from a cultural distance — say from the perspective a culture that had never invented films — that seems really just quite strange.