Three out of five well-informed people can tell you exactly how it began, if you jog them into remembering by showing them a micro-film recording of what took place during just one of those interrogations sixty or seventy years ago. My memory didn't need to be jogged. I'd examined too many micro-film recordings made even earlier than that--so many years before I was born that the grooves have to be altered if you want to run them off in the projectors that were in common use at the turn of the century, because they ante-date even those old-style machines. As early as 1965 someone had discovered and pointed out that the cinema was no longer just an entertainment medium. Everyone at the time, I suppose, had made that discovery already, in a private sort of way, but an entire society can have a blind spot and go right on clinging to established patterns of thought, if only because people in general are a little reluctant to discuss openly anything that threatens to overturn the apple cart. At any rate, about 1965 someone whose name has not come down to us--quite possibly he was a drama critic, that most curious of breeds--had pointed out that the cinema had become a potentially mind-shattering instrument of torture, which could be used to brain-wash a spectator until he became a hopeless psychotic, incapable of distinguishing reality from illusion. Schizophrenic or manic depressive, take your pick. It was the bigger-than-life illusion that could do that--the strange, often terrifying sense of being caught up in some super-reality that had no real existence in time or space, in the ordinary way that time-and-space manifests itself to us in everyday life. The cinema became potentially that kind of torture medium the instant the first of the twenty-million-dollar spectacles in full color appeared on the screen. We know what that kind of illusion can do today and when we watch a screen spectacle that distorts reality for three or four hours by making everything seem fifty or a hundred times as large as life ... we make sure that we are entering a theater that is Government supervised and not a Big-Image interrogation room presided over by a sadist in police uniform. Everyone knows how it is today, and stays on guard, perpetually alert. But back in the twentieth century the danger wasn't clearly understood, and that lack of understanding was taken advantage of by the brain-washers in uniform to exact confessions at a terrible price. Everyone is familiar with the disorientation I'm talking about. Even the old stage plays and the earlier black-and-white movies and not a few books could bring it about to some extent, when you left the theater or closed the book, and passed from a world of dramatically heightened illusion into the drabness of everyday life.