The remaining theme of importance in City of God is the fusion and confusion of real life and life as depicted in cinema. First, a preliminary consideration. Doctorow's attitudes toward the cinema and movie-making, if taken at face value, pose several serious and hard-to-answer questions for the earnest reader wishing to better understand how the movie-reference sections fit with all the other diverse parts, to make possible a fairly coherent novel. (1) What do all the references to motion pictures and Hollywood, in City of God, really add to the already fragmented story? (2) So much is made throughout this novel of Everett's big writing project, for which he is gathering material from many varied sources, asking for comments on what he has written so far, and adapting whatever he has gathered, for publication or for a movie script (in one reference, Pern's spiritual biography is given as Everett's writing project). Since Everett is not only the stand-in for Doctorow the real author but also a participant in the story itself, on occasion exhibiting for someone's approval what he has written about this very story, and helping to shape that story, how believable—even as a fictional character— can Everett be, after all? (3) Given Doctorow's obvious interest in, and seeming love for various aspects of cinema (script writing, motion picture production, history of motion pictures, etc.), why would he write—in Everett's persona (much less in his own, as the official author of City of God—so negative a commentary as that given on pp. 213-14 of the Random House first edition (2000)? The essence of Doctorow- Everett's critique of cinema in that passage follows.

Movies, which began in silence, became more talky with the advent of sound. Very many screenplays came from the theater and from books, thus in the 1930s and 1940s the various kinds of films were far more talkative than today's films. At present films derive from other films and are less talkative (possible exception: comedies). When a movie set is prepared properly—lighting, camera positioning, placement of actors appropriately costumed and coifed to show socioeconomic and moral status— almost the entire meaning of the scene is given before a single word is spoken. Therefore the idea of "film language" is a contradiction in terms. Unlike a form of literary experience, which turns an impression of something into verbal expression (discourse) and also thinks, film gets rid of thought, in fact shrinks it to the rudiment of simple, wordless comprehension. In movie going, you see the scene and the actors and you understand through inference. Films are illiterate; some of the most imaginative prose coming out today is produced by film critics, no matter how dreary or stupid the reviewed movie may be. The film critic defends verbal culture, extending the nonliterate movie going experience to patterns of grammatically expressed thought. Fiction, which can go anywhere or everywhere, can even show mental action, and is not time-driven. Film is time-driven, never ruminating, showing the outside of life, showing behavior, inclining to moral reasoning of the simplest kind. Hollywood films are linear. Book-inspired films simplify moral-issue narratives depicting realistic consequences of human actions. While anything is possible for a novel to do, no matter how horrible, in the murky interior of human consciousness, what films do are: "close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases, and explosions."

Thus, an interesting dilemma or stalemate is created for the serious reader regarding Doctorow on the subject of films. If, as can be seen in the text of City of God, Doctorow blends life on the movie screen and the real thing, how then can...