He found the alleyway behind the New California Theatre, and sat down on the first steps of the metal staircase that ascended three stories to the projectionist’s booth. Finally, he collapsed, cradling his print of Neptune’s Daughter.

He was to have been the surprise. Management felt that, with the rumors, they would rather he speak without being billed, to prevent the wrong element from causing problems. After several weeks of harassment on the vaudeville circuit, he had felt so grateful to be allowed his lecture that he had sat in the darkened movie house with the obedience of a child.

He had sat through the absurd, ridiculous, wonderful two-reeler, mood actually lifting for the first eighteen minutes or so, as he wondered how McShane could win Monica’s heart when the evidence was so stacked against him. But then! The Lusitania? The enlistment for criminals? The American Expeditionary Force appearing in a logging camp in the lost million acres of British Columbia? The applause felt like a reward for the crushing of the rules of narrative like dried leaves under the foot of an enraged baby.

The newsreel truly confounded him. For the single poetic shot showing the men leaving the trenches, the open sky, the deadly block of land below, was indeed real. But the nurse, finger puppets, the weeping widow—this was from Gaston Leprieur’s 1916 melodrama La Chanson de Nanette, Infirmière d’Armée. The nurse wasn’t a nurse—she was Cécile Guyon and she was kissing not a soldier, but Henri Bosc.

Münsterberg had watched this development with his mouth hanging open. The film stock was different. The light did not match. Even if the patrons had never seen La Chanson de Nanette, Infirmière d’Armée, surely they had to perceive that this drama was entirely manufactured. And yet, instead of holding the manager at knifepoint, the audience had wept. Wept!

When the Four Minute Men took the stage, Münsterberg was at the edge of a cliff, and there was no friendly lieutenant in a canvas-winged RE 8 to swoop by at an opportune moment. Instead, a high wind was blowing, a crop-killing frost was in the air, and no one was coming after him. For four minutes, Münsterberg felt his death approaching. Stand-ins, diegetic effect, a roof collapsing because the piers had never been properly shored. He had made a foolish assumption, a basic one about art being a mirror held up to nature. It turned out film was about ideas, and an idea could be enthralling when it was a lie.