I prefer films about monsters. Once, in a glass case in the tiled wedge of vestibule beside the ticket booth, this poster: a leanly muscled man kneels, bare chested, while a woman in a tight blouse writhes, in thrall to a warty, greenish heap like a cross between a cucumber and a haystack. Scary red letters, the print almost throbbing: Every Woman Its Mistress, Every Man Its Slave. In the movies I love, the body’s mutable, untrustworthy. The werewolf’s clothes are ripped apart by the pressure of his own exploding flesh. A teenage boy, shirtless, a potent physical presence, his face obscured by bandages, and when the wrappings on his head are removed he’s become terrible, a Frankenstein. The amazing colossal man is so huge he has no choice but to be nearly naked as he stalks toward Hoover Dam; where did he find that immense loincloth which conceals his shame?

What is it I love in these awkward pageants of transformation and terror?

I am here to satisfy what the Buddhists call my “painted hunger.” The phrase comes from an old parable. An ancient Buddha said, “A painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger.” But Dogen, a commentator on this bit of wisdom, inverts it and makes it wiser, asserting that nothing in the world is any more real than that painted rice cake. “The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky,” he writes, “are nothing but a painting.” For him all of reality is equally illusory, a flimsy pageant of desire and attachment.

“Since this is so,” he continues, “there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you never become a true person.”

Wouldn’t Dogen have loved the movies then, with their false and flickering realms! That’s what I am doing, becoming a person in the dark, in the worn red plush of my seat, lost in the projected hungers on the screen, the misshapen forms. The houselights dim; a uniformed usher with a flashlight comes to shush the kids down the aisle; the music ends, the Lyric’s black vault suddenly pierced by a constantly mutating beam of light, brighter and lesser threads braiding together as this film flares and gathers itself, titles in tall white letters rushing up out of a black field: Beast From the Year 5000.