The concept of alter ego was made visual. It turned out that actors sometimes had people who performed stunts for them, unnoticed stand-ins, which meant the audiences identified so strongly with the idea of the object being watched that they accepted its fungibility as long as the substitution was graceful. Which was why the actors were so important—they were the audience’s stand-ins.

He wrote asides onto the backs of envelopes and across the margins and gutters of newspapers. “In every kind of story,” he wrote, on a front page with headlines telling the latest news from the village of Sapigny, “we admire a change in circumstance, particularly one brought about by a character’s most vivid personality traits. But that is not realistic. We are rarely the custodians of our own fate. Once, when there were kings and queens, yes, once, up to three years ago, yes, some small, royal percentage of people had control over destinies. But film, more than any other medium, calls not just for a protagonist but for a hero. Therefore film is unrealistic.” But this was exactly the opposite of how he felt. Why?

The question, unanswered, sent his idea onto an ice floe, which, broken from its pack, drifted into a river, and he was on the bank, sprinting beside, calling out to it.

Perhaps the answer lay in the American industrial model. Americans thought they were more in charge of their destinies than had any society of the last fifty centuries. Americans were people upon whom the in evitability of death was wasted. This attitude might be why Americans made movies, and why those movies had heroes who were the centers of their own universes, who actually prevailed in unlikely circumstances, which caused continental folk such as himself to admire them. Which meant that the actual hero of all American films wasn’t a single person, but an idea.

What if there were a pure moment where diegesis was cast aside, and a step was taken outside the bounds of narrative, and pure critique was expressed instead? To utterly suspend all momentum of story, not as an act of supreme egotism (were filmmakers egotistical? he would have to investigate) but as a celebration of the form—this could be a moment of transgression, but, contrary to instinct, might it not also be a moment of pure communion? He felt gooseflesh—what if it were the sheer unreality of the film that made it feel so vivid and consuming? Perhaps the real hero was not a fictional character, or the actor onscreen, or the creator of the pictograph for unleashing him onto the world, but the audience itself, for feeling uplifted?