He became consumed by the idea of diegetic effect, the process by which a work of art ceases to be brushstrokes, or notes of music, or words on the page, or, in this case, a series of changing camera angles, and begins instead to pull the viewer, the reader, the listener into experiencing it as reality, or, more specifically, a mass-audience reflection of their singular and personal perception of reality. Because he had never thought about movies, he did not know the vocabulary and he made up his own. He called close-ups “bust-shots,” and these were, he felt, what set film apart from all other media. For the first time in history, the audience for a drama could break ranks and be brought onstage. This technique forced the viewers into its emotional interchanges, expanding their relationship with art in unexplored ways.

He sought out the few cinematic palaces of Boston, and the tiny rented halls in bad neighborhoods, and the lowest nickel-dumps, where the proprietors nursed babies and accepted eggs or cans of heating oil in lieu of coin, showing films three and five years old, scratched and spliced and projected onto bedsheets, playing to an audience of tramps and criminals and chatting domestic servants and fallen women cradling other nursing babies who wailed against the accompaniment of drunken and inappropriate piano rags.

He somewhat enjoyed the lowbrow comedies and melodramas and westerns. He tolerated the travelogues (the lack of a single protagonist bothered him). The serials engaged him the most. He missed The Perils of Pauline, but managed to see The Exploits of Elaine, The Hazards of Helen, The Purple Mask, The Broken Coin, and The New Exploits of Elaine (except the sixth episode, so he was confused about how she had managed to escape from the exploding cabin after the flaming birch tree fell on it).

Melodrama reminded him of philosophical inquiry in a way he found embarrassing. In his cramped office at the top of the library, where there were no windows on the courtyard but only a transom that faced the stacks, Münsterberg wrote every night at midnight about the pictograph, imagining himself shackled by masked Serbs, tossed in a gunny sack down a staircase, landing in an eight-cylinder automobile he would race at tremendous speed down country lanes while evil Nieuport 17 aircraft fired Vickers machine guns down upon him, and kerchiefed cowboys on horseback thundered behind, shooting Winchesters and Colts, hot lead whiz zing past his motoring goggles and smart leather cap and matching fingerless gloves as he kept pace with the express mail-train, and there was a conductor shooing him away, telling him to slow down, the road was about to cross the train tracks, slow down, but Münsterberg jammed down the accelerator with a flattened stick and prepared to make an impossible leap from automobile to railroad car, for in the caboose, gagged and panicked and surrounded by ill-intentioned, apelike Bolsheviks, lay his idea.

His idea often looked like Annette Kellerman.